Global Finance

Through this work stream, FPP accompanies indigenous peoples and forest peoples in their efforts to identify and challenge public and private financial actors enabling activities that harm their lands, territories and resources.

Context

Industrial agriculture, extractive industries and infrastructure developments imposed on indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ lands, territories and resources without their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) are often backed and bankrolled by public or private finance, provided as loans or grants by development finance institutions, bilateral aid agencies and private banks. Private investors (e.g. asset owners and managers) are also often linked to such developments through their ownership of shares in companies that indirectly or directly drive resource extraction and commodity production.

Aims

An overall goal of the work on global finance is to move towards a reality where the societal role of finance is to contribute to the realisation of internationally protected human rights. This does not only entail that finance should do no harm, and that if it does, the institutions and individuals behind it must be held to account and contribute to remedying those harms. It also means that the deployment of finance should have the fulfilment of human rights as its aim from the start.

Our Work

To contribute to this reality, we work with our partners with the aim of:

• identifying the links between negative impacts that they are facing in their territories and the financial actors enabling this and to explore options for positive impacts that finance can have for them if channelled directly towards the implementation of their own priorities;
• we work together with indigenous peoples and forest peoples to push for, and influence the content of, social and environmental safeguard policies or performance standards of public and private financial institutions and advocate for financial institutions to be covered by national level corporate due diligence and accountability laws.