Our collective impacts
With our members and partners, we work to ensure that frontline communities have the information, power and resources to determine their own development paths, and to use their own voice to hold development banks and international companies accountable for their impacts on people and the planet.
- Connect: We link local communities and Indigenous Peoples with information, skills, tools, resources and allies for peer learning, capacity-building, solidarity, and collective action.
- Protect: We facilitate safety, protection and advocacy support for those facing threats.
- Mobilize: We co-create strategies with local communities, Indigenous Peoples and allies at national, regional, cross-regional and global levels to increase transparency, accountability and participation by public development banks.
- Visibilize: We amplify the stories and perspectives of local communities and Indigenous Peoples, showcase their solutions, and expose the impacts of harmful development activities.
POLICY REFORM
Hundreds of members and partners have come together to successfully push the largest public development banks to introduce zero tolerance policies for reprisals and increase transparency, accountability and participation.
- During the first Finance in Common Summit, 500 public development banks committed to community-led development in their final communique.
- Hundreds of members and partners have come together to successfully push the largest public development banks – including the World Bank, Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) – to introduce zero tolerance policies for reprisals; the ADB also mentions civic space as a contextual risk factor in its new environmental and social framework.
- Several accountability mechanisms have improved their policies and practices to better address reprisals. For example, the Independent Recourse Mechanism of the African Development Bank, took into account our collective recommendations and insights in their new anti-retaliation toolkit.
PROJECT-LEVEL IMPACTS
Scores of local communities – who collaborate with us through the Community Resource Exchange – have led powerful campaigns to successfully mitigate or stop harmful project impacts, prevent future harms, and secure remedy. Check the CRE map and the CRE Evaluation report to read the stories of our collaborators.
Africa
Over the past few years, we have collaborated with Ugandan partners resisting the EACOP pipeline to connect them with allies, organize media and advocacy campaigns, and access security support. Through linking local efforts with global ones, they have successfully built solidarity and pushed several financiers to divest from the project.
Latin America & Caribbean
In Guatemala, local activists successfully mobilized the community of Asunción Mita, who voiced their opposition to the Canadian Cerro Blanco mine: in 2022, in a historic move, 89% of them voted no to mining activities. We collaborated with our partner AMAES to support their campaign, through a small grant, connections, and capacity-building.
Asia
In Sri Lanka, local farmers successfully halted a proposed sugarcane project spearheaded by a Singapore-based company, that was threatening to displace their communities and endangering their livelihoods. Collaborating with the CRE, our local partner Centre for Environmental Justice (CEJ) conducted research, evidence-based advocacy, capacity-building workshops and awareness initiatives, that helped strengthen the community-led struggle.
MOVEMENT-BUILDING
Hundreds of communities, defenders and civil society groups across the world have joined forces to advance human rights based and community led development through increased awareness, coordination and strategic mobilization.
- A growing, stronger Coalition: From a handful of members in 2014, our Coalition now has over 120 members and dozens of partners from around 50 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It’s not just about numbers: our growth has resulted in stronger collective power. Together, we are expanding our advocacy efforts into new spaces, bringing more communities to conversations where they can shape development or seek justice, facilitating exchanges of knowledge and strategies, facilitating connections to help grassroots groups grow their movements, and building a safe space where defenders and local communities can access resources and protection.
- Articulation of collective demands: Over 60 members and partners have come together to articulate their demands around a community-led approach to the just energy transition and economic transformation, developed an aligned narrative, and shared their key messages during regional and global advocacy opportunities (e.g.: Finance in Common Summit, COP30, G20, and public development banks’ Annual Meetings).
- Collective knowledge-production: +100 members and allies have worked together to produce a collective analysis on development finance and are now using the report “Demystifying Public Development Banks” as an advocacy and mobilization tool. For a full list of other collaborative reports, see here.
