People's Law: Ideas for Resource Rights Campaigners

This tool, based on experience in the forestry sector in Ghana, aims to empower people to challenge the assumption that legal change is beyond their means. It describes ways in which natural resource campaigners can better understand and use the legal system to build confidence in their cause.

The tool supports resource rights campaigners working in community mobilisation to better manage media and legal strategies. It contains ideas about what legal systems are and are not, and how they actually work. It also explores ways of using communication to empower campaigners and contains guides on how to integrate legal strategies into resource rights campaigns without giving away control of the process to legal professionals whom campaigners employ.

This resource proposes three steps in setting up a positive cycle of understanding, discourse and practice -

1. demystify the legal system: by seeing it as a human construct that, although hierarchical, is not a crude instrument of power;
2. understand the laws that affect natural resources: how to increase this knowledge and make legal advisors more accountable in developing it; and
3. integrate law-focused action into campaign strategies: ways to complement overall campaigning strategies with a sound legal basis.

This tool reflects, in part, the experiences of organisations who joined hands to campaign for forestry governance reforms in Ghana as “Forest Watch Ghana” in 2004.