Guidance on Social Safeguarding and Human Rights Grievances in Landscape and Jurisdictional Initiatives

Why a guidance on social safeguarding and human rights grievances in Landscape and Jurisdictional initiatives (LJIs)?

Respect for human rights is a key element of any LJI. LJIs, as complex multi-stakeholder processes can create significant benefits, but they can also pose risks to people if rights and interests are not adequately respected during an LJI’s interventions.

A social safeguarding and human rights grievance guidance for LJIs helps ensure that landscape-level sustainability efforts do not create or worsen negative impact on people, while providing clear processes to protect rights, address complaints, strengthen stakeholder trust, and improve the effectiveness and credibility of the initiative.

What is social safeguarding and what are safeguards?

Social safeguarding is the process of identifying, preventing, and addressing potential harm that may arise from interventions intended to create positive outcomes, such as those implemented through a Landscape Jurisdictional Initiative. It involves assessing risks to people arising from LJI implementation, putting measures in place to mitigate those risks, and monitoring whether these measures are effective in practice.

Safeguards are the specific policies, procedures, and actions used to protect people and uphold human rights. As a minimum, all LJIs should have a core set of safeguards in place to help prevent negative impacts on individuals and communities, and to ensure that risks are identified and managed appropriately.

The guidance on minimum social safeguards

This guidance is an updated version of the 2024 publication and reflects the experience and lessons learned from landscape initiative implementing organisations working across different regions.

It is a resource for planners and implementers of landscape initiatives, setting out practical approaches to globally applicable minimum safeguarding processes and outlining the key steps that all initiatives should follow. 

Drawing on real-world implementation experience, it highlights commonly accepted minimum expectations as well as emerging good practices in landscape-level safeguarding.

This new guidance provides 

• New contributions from implementers, ensuring alignment with real-world application and operational realities
• Expanded case studies, offering practical examples to illustrate how the guidance can be applied in different settings
• Additional resources and tools, designed to further support users in translating guidance into effective action

Guidance on HR Grievance mechanism in LJIs

Even with strong safeguards, grievances may still occur. When an initiative causes or contributes to a grievance, it is responsible for addressing the issue and providing remedy. Grievances are claims of harm experienced by individuals or groups, making clear and accessible resolution mechanisms essential. While grievances can relate to both human rights and environmental impacts, this guidance focuses on human rights issues.

Establishing a grievance mechanism is considered good practice and is increasingly expected under social safeguard requirements. This is reflected in the Core Criteria for Mature Landscape Initiatives, endorsed by more than 20 landscape organisations, and is increasingly required by funders, including members of the Consumer Goods Forum’s Forest Positive Coalition, as part of landscape engagement and due diligence expectations.

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These two guidance documents were developed by Proforest taking learnings and experience from our work on the ground and inputs from a number of organisations also leading landscape initiatives.

As with all of Proforest's work, we are guided by our mission to deliver positive outcomes for people, nature and climate. This guidance on Social safeguarding in LJIs provides landscape implementers with a practical pathway to meet minimum standards and strengthen social performance over time. Together with the complementary guidance on HR grievances management in LJIs, it reflects our commitment to continuous improvement and contributes to broader industry efforts to advance good practice in Landscape and Jurisdictional Initiatives. We recognise that mature landscape initiatives are developed progressively through the implementation, refinement and strengthening of processes as well as constant stakeholders’ engagement across LJIs over time.