Mali: Grassroots groups confront climate crisis with strategies rooted in agrarian justice

Mali is often cited in international discussions on “climate security”. Intergovernmental reports tend to describe the West African country as particularly vulnerable to climate change – notably droughts – and mired in war and conflict.  A collaborative action-research project between FIAN International and peasant movements in the Malian Convergence Against Land Grabbing (CMAT) challenges this portrayal and highlights progressive grassroots mobilizations on climate and land rights.

Community participation

From 2018 to 2020 FIAN and CMAT worked on the pilot implementation of village land commissions in the south of Mali. The commissions are based on a new agricultural land law which recognizes customary rights and draws inspiration from the UN Committee on World Food Security’s (CFS) land tenure guidelines.

“The project highlighted the inextricable link between safeguarding community rights and confronting climate change. It showed that social and environmental justice and right to land go hand in hand,” said FIAN International’s Secretary General Sofia Monsalve.

Climate security debates often tend to focus on alleged threats to the national security of richer countries. A week before the Glasgow COP26 summit, US security agencies collectively released a series of reports painting a dire picture of the future and signaling the tendency towards further militarization of climate debates.

One of the research-action findings was that security analysts looking at Mali tend to focus on conflicts between already marginalized groups, rather than the impact of extractive projects led by foreign and national elites such as large-scale gold mining, corporate agribusiness and the privatization of forests. This interest in securitization and “management” of climate change impacts can be used to justify top-down interventions and close space for democratic participation in climate and land policy.

Since 2018 village land commissions in southern Mali have been a positive experiment in grassroots mobilization aimed not only at enabling the recognition and protection of territorial rights, but also fostering new forms of community participation, control over natural resources and political engagement. Social movements and communities have been able to take stock of their natural resources and collectively establish local conventions of resource management.

“Everyone regained awareness of the role of land, of natural resources within the communities. Local agreements tied to the village land commissions are making it possible to establish good, inclusive and equitable governance based on shared principles and values,” wrote Massa Koné, spokesperson of the Malian Convergence Against Land Grabbing (CMAT) in an evaluation of the project.

Land rights key to tackling climate crisis

This approach has allowed the commissions to tackle environmental issues such as loss of animal biodiversity, water pollution from gold mining and contested land management rules, such as restrictions on cutting trees and on sale of charcoal. They have also sought to renegotiate traditional sustainable practices which were previously often based on customary relations between ethnic groups, such as allowing livestock to graze stalks of crops after harvests which also fertilizes soils.

The movements in the Malian Convergence Against Land Grabbing are also interested in applying traditional agricultural techniques in dialogue with new collective lessons on agroecology from international peasant movements which provide healthy and sustainable alternatives outside of corporate high-input (and fossil fuel-based) farming. In conjunction, these efforts are helping to prevent the takeover of land by carbon-heavy projects and to protect local vegetation without sidelining communities, as many environmental preservation projects do. Equally important is the role of land security and community dialogue in allowing adaptation and resilience to environmental change.

The participatory approach of village land commissions recognizes existing village political structures – by including customary authorities and representatives – and also addresses inequalities by including representatives of youth and women, who traditionally participate less in the public sphere. The new land law also establishes that at least 15 percent of land titling by the state or territorial collectivities must be attributed to collectives or associations of women and youth.

The FIAN International/CMAT action-research project has helped to demonstrate that community rights to land, food and the environment are not only threatened by climate change but that safeguarding them is at the heart of any possibility for counteracting the climate crisis and confronting the extractive and growth-led model at its origin.

Strengthening community and indigenous land rights and promoting agroecological food production are part of the missing pathways of climate action. They are key bottom-up solutions given little attention in official climate summits and reports. Mali’s village land commissions are an attempt to enact some of the principles of agrarian climate justice, an alternative framework and political proposal which recognizes the interdependence between ecological regeneration and justice for historically oppressed agrarian groups.