Tools & Guides
In this page, using the filters on your left, you can find toolkits, handbooks and guides on the following topics:
- community-led development and community mobilization/organizing
- legal and accountability mechanisms
- Indigenous Peoples and free, prior and informed consent
- monitoring and impact assessment
- extractive industries; forests and dams; forced displacement
- gender and development finance
- human rights defenders
- advocacy guides on specific DFIs, such as ADB, AfDB, IFC, World Bank, EBRD, EIB, Chinese finance
- communications and campaigns strategies
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Citizens’ guides to international financial institutions (2011)
CEE Bankwatch – This series of papers and toolkits, designed for NGOs and citizens, provide in-depth information and manuals for action to engage with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the European Investment Bank (EIB), European complaint mechanisms and the Espoo Convention. These guides explain which information is available to the public and how it can be accessed, which processes project follow (from application for funding to implementation), who is responsible for making decisions, how citizens can raise complaints, etc.
Check also: “Toolkit on the Project Complaint Mechanism of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development” (available in English and Arabic)
Community Action Guide to the Asian Development Bank (2013)
International Accountability Project – Designed with and for community organizers, this 200-page guide is filled with training exercises to help mobilize communities, engage with the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and use ADB Safeguards Policies to protect human rights. While filled with case studies from throughout Asia-Pacific, community organizers anywhere can use and adapt the lessons and exercises.
Community Guide to the International Finance Corporation (2017)
Inclusive Development International – This guide is an action resource for communities affected by projects funded by the International Finance Corporation (IFC( of the World Bank Group. It is designed to help communities understand their rights and entitlements vis-a-vis IFC projects and to decide whether they want to file a complaint with the IFC’s independent grievance mechanism, the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO), as a part of their advocacy strategy. The Facilitators’ Manual contains activities and discussions on each topic to help communities use the information that they learn to develop an advocacy strategy to defend their rights.
Community Organizing Training Manual (2012)
Indigenous Learning Institute for Community Empowerment (ILI), Pacos Trust, Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact – This Manual provides training modules for indigenous communities on community organizing, indigenous peoples’ economies, and natural resource management.
Indigenous women’s rights in the African system (2015)
Forest Peoples Programme – The toolkit has been created in order to introduce indigenous women, and the organisations which represent them, to the African system of human and peoples’ rights. It highlights the different routes available to ensuring that the rights of indigenous women are valued and taken into account by the African Commission.
Guide on public participation in the Environmental Impact Assessment study process in Kenya (2022)
Natural Justice – This guide has been developed to provide an understanding of the requirements for public participation in environmental impact assessments in Kenya. It aims to provide a brief description of the legal framework, to explain the triggers for an environmental assessment and requirements, to provide an outline of the EIA process, to explain the importance of public participation in EIA processes, and to prepare the public to engage with the process.
We mean business: protecting women’s rights in global supply chains (2020)
Action Aid – Identifying, addressing and holding companies to account for the adverse gendered impacts of their activities on women needs to be embedded in this emerging due diligence legislation and wider business and human rights policies and strategies. This paper explains why such an approach is needed, and how states and companies can integrate gender- responsive human rights due diligence into existing and emerging efforts in the area of business and human rights.
Rising to the populist challenge: a new playbook for human rights actors (2018)
Dejusticia – This book collects and analyzes a repertoire of responses by human rights organizations to the crackdown against civil society in the populist context.
Written by scholars and advocates in challenging political settings from around the world, it offers ideas and inspiration to their peers in the human rights community who are grappling with and resisting the erosion of democracy and rights.
A human rights defender toolkit for promoting business respect for human rights (2015)
International Service for Human Rights – This handbook aims to provide human rights defenders (HRDs) with an overview of the existing legal and policy framework and emerging global norms adopted by both governments and businesses to protect human rights in the context of business operations. It also seeks to give defenders tools for strategic engagement with stakeholders, at each stage of project development and in a range of sectors.
Security in a Box
Front Line Defenders and Tactical Tech – The Tactics Guides in this toolkit cover basic principles such as how to create strong passphrases and avoid malware. The Tool Guides offer step-by-step instructions to help you install, configure and use essential digital-security software and services. Other digital security guides can be found here.
Project Heard
Project Heard – The Hub for Environmental Activists and Rights Defenders (HEARD) is a resource-mobilization platform supporting threatened land and environmental rights defenders (collective or individual) facing intimidation, harassment and violence from extractive industry development.
Project Heard promotes existing solutions-oriented resources such as research, guides, technology and tools from NGOs, CSOs, think tanks, communities and technologists – ranging from collective protection methods and grievance mechanisms to community-led research and monitoring.
Workbook on Security: Practical Steps for Human Rights Defenders at Risk (2011)
Front Line Defenders – The Workbook takes you through the steps to producing a security plan – for yourself and for your organisation (for those HRDs who are working in organisations). It follows a systematic approach for assessing your security situation and developing risk and vulnerability reduction strategies and tactics.
Transforming Power: a gender guide for organizations campaigning on dams and for rivers (2020)
International River – This guide was designed as a practical guide for non-gender experts as a means to assess and improve our work. Asking: How can we better include gender into our work? And how can this contribute to advancing women’s interests and rights, alongside those of men, in the context of dam development?
Following the money: An advocate’s guide to securing accountability in agricultural investments (2015)
This guide is dedicated to local advocates working to support communities whose land rights and livelihoods have been negatively impacted by agricultural investments.
Community Guide to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (2020)
Inclusive Development International – The Community Guide to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank equips communities and the activists who support them with information that can help them protect their rights when their lands, homes, livelihoods and environment are threatened by high-risk projects funded by the AIIB.