The Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure at a Crossroads
The Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (Tenure Guidelines, also referred to as VGGT), adopted by the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in 2012, are a major step towards a human rights based governance of natural resources. The Tenure Guidelines are situated in a context of decades of struggles for peoples’ access to and control over natural resources and territories. Since their adoption social movements, civil society organizations and communities have been using them in many ways to support their struggles to attain food and peoples’ sovereignty. More than three years after the adoption of the Tenure Guidelines land and natural resource grabs in all forms continue unabated around the world, visiting their devastating impacts on local communities, environments with related human rights violations. The implementation and application of the Tenure Guidelines, therefore, remains a matter of extreme urgency.