Social Safeguarding Process for Landscape and Jurisdictional Initiatives (LJIs)

This guidance is a resource for planners and implementers of landscape initiatives and suggests practical approaches to ensuring globally applicable minimum safeguarding process: laying out the key steps that all initiatives should follow. 

Respect for human rights is a key element of any landscape initiative but acting on human rights issues should be differentiated from preventing human rights abuse to occur due to an intervention in a landscape (social safeguards). 

What is social safeguarding and what are safeguards?

Social safeguarding is a process for protecting people from being harmed by interventions – such as those put in place by a Landscape Initiative - intended to do good. It includes understanding how people might be at risk, what could be done to mitigate that, and how to check that this is happening in practice.
Safeguards are protective measures put in place as part of this process by the organisation(s) that manage the intervention(s) as part of the LJI. All LJIs should have a minimum set of social safeguards in place to ensure negative impacts on human rights and on people involved directly or indirectly are avoided, or at least to minimise the risk.

This resource helps project implementers to work with stakeholders to anticipate any unintended negative impacts of the project – and to take action to mitigate such risks. In practice this will help ensure that the project is looking after local communities, employees, Indigenous Peoples, and embedding a gender equality approach into their work. 

The guidance was produced by Proforest with significant input from partners Landesa.