Gender Justice

We recognise the diverse cultural and customary norms of the societies we support, while upholding women’s activism and knowledge as crucial to collective land rights movements and the realisation of access to justice for all. We recognise that indigenous peoples and forest peoples are impacted by many different forms of discrimination, including on the basis of gender, sex, status, class, ability, age, and more.

Therefore, in addressing gender justice we apply an intersectional approach to understand how these different forms of discrimination affect indigenous peoples and forest peoples independently and in concert. Recognising the intersectional/multiple forms of discrimination faced by indigenous women and girls and by forest women and girls, we seek to uphold the principle of non-discrimination and their rights to maintain their cultures, identities and traditions and to choose their own path and life plans.

Any discussion on Indigenous peoples’ collective rights necessarily includes Indigenous women’s rights. Women are a fundamental part of indigenous peoples’ struggles and the exercise of self-determination and FPP’s policies, programmes and initiatives respond to and reflect that reality.

Our approach is further detailed in FPP’s Gender Framework and Policy. Our work on gender is also inextricably linked to our commitment to safeguarding, as we recognise the specific conditions of vulnerability that women and other more marginalised groups within communities’ face in any relationship where differences of power and resources exist.

The overall objective of this programme is to amplify indigenous women’s and forest women’s actions and knowledge as integral to collective land governance through supporting grounded, community and partner-led projects and initiatives that build their self-determination within their collective land rights movements.

We treat gender justice as a relational process that involves everyone in a society, with the aim of building healthy relationships between people of all genders, and which is led by indigenous peoples and forest peoples themselves as they determine, revive, and revise their own systems of governance, collectively; women, men, non-gender binary people, elders and youth, autonomously and through self-determination.

• Support indigenous women’s and forest women’s leadership and open political space for their meaningful participation in local, national, regional, and global decision-making spaces on land, biodiversity, natural resources, and climate.
• Amplify indigenous women's and forest women's voices to ensure their aspirations and needs are integral to realising collective land rights; enhance recognition of indigenous and forest women’s agency and knowledge in generating solutions to the climate and biodiversity crisis, and territorial governance.
• Enhance engagement of men and non-binary gender people from diverse age groups in conversations and actions on gender justice and as agents of change.
• Advance legal protections for indigenous and forest women’s rights through partner-led strategic advocacy at the international, regional, and national levels.
• Enhance Staff and partner capacity to support community-led actions towards realising gender justice in land rights and collective governance, through organisational learning.
• Amplify self-representation as self-determination through media and communications that highlight indigenous women’s and forest women’s voices, stories, and contributions to collective land rights.
• Build networks and alliances with indigenous women’s and forest women’s and feminist organisations working at the intersection of gender and collective land rights, with the aim of contributing to broader indigenous women’s and forest women’s movements through networking and knowledge exchange.
• Make space for partners and community members to vision creative actions that centre gender in environmental justice and land rights.

Each of these initiatives support movement towards gender justice within the overall organisational mission of supporting indigenous peoples and forest peoples in securing collective land tenure and practising self-determination.