The Coalition Guide

Mr. Alain Diouf is currently a consultant leading the project for a faster implementation of the land reform for the Emerging Senegal Plan “Plan Senegal Emergent.” Recently, he was a senior consultant for the land reform process in Senegal. He has worked for decades on sustainable development, tenure and land reform issues, and in the fields of agroindustry and management of water resources. More specifically, he has worked on land tenure issues for the Senegalese government, the Millennium Challenge Corporation in Senegal, the US company ARD Inc., USAID, and for various private law firms. Additionally, he provided advice on land rights and tenure issues in Burkina Faso, Benin, Ivory Coast, and Mozambique. Diouf was also an invited professor at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop, the International University HECI, and the University Bourguiba (all located in Dakar, Senegal), as well as at the International Catholic University for West Africa in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Diouf received his BA and MA from the University of Cheikh Anta Diop (in 1990 and 1992, respectively) and his diploma of third cycle (PhD) from the same university in 1995. He has been an RRI Fellow since 2016.

Don Roberts has over 30 years’ experience as a financial services executive, investment banker and equity professional, and over 35 years of experience in the resource sector, including advising CEOs and Ministers in Canada and internationally, on financing and strategic growth in the resource sectors. He is recognized as a global thought leader in both the Forest Industry and emerging Renewable Energy Sectors. Don is the President & CEO of Nawitka Capital Advisors Ltd. Prior to starting Nawitka in 2013, Don was a Vice-Chair of Wholesale Banking, and Managing Director in Investment Banking with CIBC World Markets Inc. In this position, he founded and led the Bank’s cross-functional Renewable Energy & Clean Technology Team. He also provided senior coverage for companies in the global forest products industry. Don has a B.Sc. Agricultural Economics (Honors), University of British Columbia; M.Sc. Forestry Economics, University of California at Berkeley; MBA (Honors) and Doctoral Studies, International Finance & Economics, University of Chicago, and ICD.D designation from the Institute of Corporate Directors, Rotman School of Management. Don is also an Adjunct Professor in Forest Management at the University of British Columbia, Visiting Scholar of Clean Energy in the China Center for Energy & Development at Peking University, Mentor with the Pierre Trudeau Foundation, and sits on several profit and non-profit Boards of Directors/Advisors.

Dr. Doris Capistrano is Senior Advisor of the ASEAN-Swiss Partnership on Social Forestry and Climate Change (ASFCC) and a Senior Fellow of the Southeast Asia Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA). She was Director of Forests and Governance at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and a Visiting Professor in Forest and Conservation Policy of Wageningen University. She served as Ford Foundation Deputy Representative for India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, and was Program Officer for Rural Poverty, Resources and Environment in Bangladesh. She was a Post-doctoral Fellow in Tropical Conservation and Development at the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies, and was Instructor in Economics at the University of the Philippines at Los Banos. She has a PhD in Food and Resource Economics from the University of Florida, USA. Dr. Capistrano has been involved in a number of international initiatives. She was Co-Chair of the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) Working Group on Sub-Global Assessments and member of the MA Technical Panel. She has served on international advisory bodies and committees, including the Science Committee of DIVERSITAS and the Steering Committee of the FAO National Forest Programme Facility. She was Chair of the Founding Board of Directors of the Rights and Resources Initiative, was a Council member of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) and a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of the Commons. She served as member of the Advisory Committee of the 2015 World Forestry Congress and is a member of the Executive Committee of the FAO Asia Pacific Forestry Commission. She is Chair of the Board of Trustees of RECOFTC, the Center for People and Forests. Dr. Capistrano has published articles, book chapters and technical papers and has co-edited several books, including “The Politics of Decentralization”, “Lessons from Forest Decentralization” and “Bridging Scales and Knowledge Systems.”

Edmund Barrow grew up on one of Ireland’s first formal organic farms and was planting trees at the age of 6. This early practical experience has stayed with him and helped him focus on community level knowledge, institutions, rights, responsibilities and governance and learning from and with the rural people he has worked with. These areas have been an underlying aspect of all the work Edmund has been involved with. Edmund studied Natural Sciences in Trinity College Dublin, and has a Master’s degree in drylands development from Antioch University. He has worked in 20+ countries in Africa and globally for over 40 years. Edmund is currently a consultant in community based natural resource management and governance. Prior to this, he was Director of IUCN’s Global Ecosystem Management Programme with responsibility for IUCN’s global work on Ecosystem based Approaches to Adaptation & Disaster Risk Reduction, IUCN’s Red List of Ecosystems, and Drylands. Edmund has extensive working experience with sustainable development in different ecosystems (drylands, forests, agriculture, pastoralism), with a lot of practical field experience – especially at the local community and village levels. He has been very involved in ecosystem (especially forest) restoration, participatory approaches to conservation (planning, implementation and learning), and governance (with respect to issues such as institutional choice, representation, action learning, power).

Etelle Higonnet, attorney and environmental activist, has worked at Mighty Earth, National Wildlife Federation, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, as well as two war crimes courts. She was knighted as a Chevalier de l'Ordre du merite for her pioneering efforts to curb deforestation in high-risk commodities with an emphasis on cocoa, palm oil, rubber, cattle, and soy industries. She has worked in over 30 countries, is widely published, speaks 9 languages, and is a graduate of Yale Law School.

Frank Matose is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Environmental Humanities South Centre at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His research interests are in the political economy of conservation and commons in Africa. His recent books include an edited volume The Violence of Conservation in Africa (https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781800885608/9781800885608.xml) with Maano Ramutsindela and Tafadzwa Mushonga (2022), a forthcoming monograph titled Politics of Chronic Liminality: Forests and the power of the marginalised in Southern Africa. He is a previous governing board member of the International Council for the Study of the Commons (IASC) and is an active member of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN). He is a member of the editorial boards of International Journal of the Commons, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

Ing. Humberto Campodonico Sanchez is an industrial engineer and has a Master in Economic Development at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University. He is currently working as a professor at the Faculty of Economics at the National University of San Marcos. He has been linked to the Center for Studies and Promotion of Development (DESCO) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), as a researcher since 1984 and as a consultant in 2001 and 2002 respectively. Since 2002 he is chief columnist for the newspaper La República. In 2010 he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Economics of the University San Marcos. Between July 2011 and December 2012 he served as chairman of Petroperu. Humberto has been working with RRI since 2013 in supporting the coalition in Peru, Latin America and globally. He has written books and scholar articles about privatization, the public sector, hydrocarbons, and state reforms. He is a Fellow of the Rights and Resources since 2016.

Jenny Springer is a human rights and conservation advocate and advisor. She has an extensive background on human rights and environment linkages, rights-based approaches to conservation and climate, securing community land and resource rights, and rights-based social standards and safeguards. Types of work include thematic and policy analysis; evaluations, reviews and lesson learning; design and implementation of programs, projects and influencing strategies; and building and facilitating results-oriented collaborations.

Jintao Xu is professor of economics and director, China Center for Energy and Development (CCED), National School of Development at Peking University since September 2013. Before that he served as department head and professor at the Department of Environmental Management, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University during 2006 and 2012. His research ranges from forest tenure and regulatory reform, forest carbon and water resource allocation, transportation, to assessment of industrial performance under environmental regulation. His academic papers appeared in AJAE, World Development, Land Economics, Ecological Economics, Forest Policy and Economics, and Environment and Development Economics. Currently he serves as associate editor of AJAE, senior editor for “Regional Environmental Changes” and on the policy board for “Environment and Development Economics”. Jintao Xu also heads the Environmental Economics Program in China (EEPC) based at Peking University, one of the six world centers sponsored by SIDA. With EEPC he is building capacity to conduct rigorous economic analysis into China’s environmental and natural resource policies. Jintao Xu has frequently been involved with policy consultations with national government and international organizations. During 2000-2004, he was coordinator of the forestry and grassland taskforce under China Council for International Cooperation for Environment and Development (CCICED), and helped formulate advice to Chinese government on polices to improve implementation of China’s ecological restoration programs. Recently, he served as senior expert to China’s forest carbon management program. He is a member of the Asia-Pacific Forest Policy Think Tank under FAO, member of the Council of Scientific Advisors, Global Adaptation Institute, as well as member of Blue Ribbon Panel for Global Partnership on Ocean. He also participated in the biannual Sino-US Economic Dialogue (Track II) organized by the National Council of US-China Relations and Peking University. Jintao Xu received his master of economics degree in 1996 and Ph.D. in forestry (natural resource economics) in 1999, both at Virginia Tech. In 1988 he was conferred master of agricultural sciences in forest economics at Beijing Forestry University. In 1984 he graduated with bachelor of engineering degree at Jilin University of Technology.

Liz Alden Wily is a political economist with 40 years practice as a tenure specialist in 20 agrarian economies, in mainly Africa. She works as an independent facilitator and researcher, from community to cabinet office levels, and is an acknowledged expert on Indigenous/customary ownership regimes. She has been a prominent advocate of legal recognition of customary rights as registrable property rights for 30 years, devising accessible constructs for collective ownership by communities within which family rights are nested. She has been a leader in piloting community-based land, forest and pastoral governance regimes, and in challenging needless retention of protected areas as government or public property where unacknowledged customary possession offers a more effective and fairer path to conservation. Liz’s commitment to community property began early when she worked with San hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari in Botswana and learned first-hand the perils of absent legal recognition of land rights and the consequences of weak empowerment, as stronger societies encroached San territories. This led her to establish one of the earliest minority land rights programs (1974-78), and eventually, after also working in Indonesia and Zambia, to return to school to study the political economy of property for a PhD. Liz focused in the 1990s on forest tenure, including piloting the first community-owned and managed forest reserves in Africa (Tanzania, 1994-2002). Liz has also developed innovative reforms in several post-conflict states (Liberia, Nepal, Afghanistan, Sudan/South Sudan). She continues to contribute informally to constitutional and land law reforms and supports community-led litigation challenging dispossession with technical briefs. She continues to work directly with communities, now mainly in Kenya where she lives, mentors a number of INGO, NGO and CBO programs elsewhere, and contributes to several regional and international initiatives in the now well-established community land rights sector, of which she has been part from the outset. Liz has been an active supporter of RRI since its establishment, its first nominated Fellow, and after a break from 2017, is now pleased to rejoin its ranks as a new Fellow.

Margarita Florez is a lawyer with expertise in environmental law, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), forest policy, as well as Afro-descendant and Indigenous collective tenure. She is currently the Director of the Environment and Society Association (AAS), a nongovernmental organization dedicated to the promotion and defense of human and environmental rights, and has been a Collaborator of RRI at the Latin America regional level since 2010. Margarita has over 30 years of experience across the Latin American region promoting innovative and critical reforms in public environmental, forest, and tenure policies. She has led review and monitoring processes for the implementation of international environmental and human rights agreements which have benefited the participation of civil society and community based organizations in decision-making on environmental and collective tenure rights. She has served as a member of the Board of Directors of Third World Network (Malaysia) and the Third World Institute (Uruguay). She is the author and co-author of several books and countless articles on the environment.

Paul De Wit is an expert in land tenure reform with over 30 years of experience and working on land policy analysis and reform processes in 20 countries in Africa, Latin America, and Europe. He received formal training from University of Ghent in Belgium with a BSc in Agronomy and MSc in Tropical Soil Science. He has worked with a range of organizations, including the FAO, EU, DFID, USAID, MCC, World Bank, UN-Habitat, UNDP and the Right and Resources Initiative, amongst others. His work has provided pro-community/pro-poor rights advocacy campaigns with essential tools and his analyses have contributed to important legal and policy reforms in several countries. More specifically, Paul has worked with RRI on several projects. He conducted an assessment of the implementation of the Communal Lands Registry and Cadastre in Guatemala, conducted a scoping mission assessing forest and land tenure policy landscapes in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Currently, Paul is leading a research cluster for RRI’s Tenure Baseline Study in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Paul’s practical, hands-on approach and consistently high quality field work, coupled with influential positions advising UN and World Bank programs, provides new intelligence, operational savvy, and greater influence for RRI’s work at multiple levels.

Peter Riggs specializes in developing organization, advocacy campaigns and funding opportunities that work to solve big energy and food system problems, as well as trade and economic development challenges. He's led the international advocacy network Climate Land Ambition and Rights Alliance (CLARA). Launched (with TMP) the Mission Climate Project, focusing on socio-economic impacts of climate change in the 2020s. Developed global strategy on bioenergy in collaboration with the Environmental Paper Network. Founded and developed a nonprofit organization to assist U.S. and Latin American state/provincial and local governments on trade policy and economic development issues through legal research, fiscal policy analysis, public presentations, and networking support. He's also developed grantmaking programs pertaining to environmental justice in Asia, including coastal management/fisheries, sustainable agriculture, Mekong River development, plus extensive work in the Russian Far East.

Phil René Oyono is a rural and natural resource sociologist, with longtime experience in policy analysis and social theory in Central Africa. His research focuses on issues such as natural resource governance, conflict, institutional change, collective action, collaborative management, and other social aspects of forest and environmental management, with the purpose of disseminating knowledge to improve natural resource policy and problem-solving strategies. In addition to his contributions to RRI, René has conducted research and analysis for leading institutions such as CIFOR, WRI and USAID. He is currently leading a research program in Central Africa on the effects of REDD implementation on local democracy with the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and the University of Illinois.

Sally Collins served as the first Director of the USDA Office of Environmental Markets. She retired in August 2010. OEM continues to play an instrumental role in advancing markets for ecosystem services provided by farms, forests, and ranches across the country. As Director, Collins supported the USDA Secretary in developing uniform, science-based guidelines and the infrastructure necessary to create markets for carbon, biodiversity, and water. Collins has spent more than 25 years in natural resource management, working at the “field level” as a forest manager for 20 years prior to coming to Washington, D.C. Her last field assignment was Forest Supervisor of the 1.6 Million acre Deschutes National Forest. She served most recently as Associate Chief for the U.S. Forest Service, sharing responsibilities with the Chief for management of all of the 155 National Forests and Grasslands, providing support to tribal, state and private lands, and overseeing the International Program Office. She supervised an organization of over 40,000 employees and a budget of more than $5 billion. Under her administration, the Office of International Programs doubled in size due to an expanded partnership with USAID, a partnership that recognized the nexus between forest protection and human well-being. As leader of this work, Collins traveled to a number of countries to establish long-term partnerships. She worked with Gabon on the establishment of protected areas, and participated in the establishment of the Congo Basin Partnership. She worked on log tracking and enforcement in Madagascar, restoration in Vietnam, and tenure and governance in China (a country that recently completed some major tenure reforms of the forest sector). Collins currently works with Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) to help the largest forested countries of the world establish secure tenure arrangements and laws for their forested estates. For six years, she has served (and continues to serve) as Co-Chair of MegaFlorestais, an organization established to informally connect the top forest leaders in the world. The group has collectively shared and advanced issues around climate change, deforestation, illegal logging, REDD and associated markets (including the Amazon Fund) and tenure/governance issues fundamental to forest protection and poverty alleviation. In October 2010, she co-hosted Mexican and Brazilian Forest leaders in Montana on “Re-Thinking Forest Regulations Internationally.” Additionally, she works with RRI more generally to support their efforts in tenure and governance reform associated with REDD+ and with the establishment of protected areas around the world. Collins has received a number of awards and recognition for her work, including the designation as the Starker Lecture Recipient in May of this year from Oregon State University, and the 2010 Stan Adams Partnership Award from the National Association of State Foresters. She served on an advisory committee for Yale’s International Forestry Program, and has spoken extensively both nationally and internationally on climate change, REDD, and forest management, and carbon and other ecosystem service markets. She is most proud of her recognition by the communities in which she has worked as a person who effectively involves people in decision-making and her ability to establish creative partnerships to accomplish work. She received her BS from the University of Colorado and her Master’s from the University of Wyoming in Natural Resources Management and Political Science.

Silvel Elías is Indigenous Maya K'iche' from Guatemala. He is an agronomist engineer and has master's and doctoral studies in social geography. He is currently a professor in the Faculty of Agronomy at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (USAC), where he coordinates the Master's Program in Rural Development and the Rural and Territorial Studies Program. For more than 30 years he has promoted capacity building, debate and advocacy for the recognition of collective tenure rights and governance of communal lands and indigenous territories, accompanying the organizations of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (PICL) and helping to form working spaces such as the Communal Lands Roundtable, the Communal Lands Promotion Group and the Indigenous Climate Change Roundtable. He coordinated the Central American Regional Academic Program on Community Forestry at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) and collaborated with FAO in the implementation of the voluntary guidelines for responsible governance of land tenure, forests and fisheries. He has participated as a researcher in the International Forest Institutions Research Program (IFRI); the Consortium on Indigenous and Community Conserved Territories (TICCA); the Association on Governance of Land and Natural Resources (AGTER) and the PRISMA Foundation. He contributed to the elaboration of the Map of Indigenous Peoples and Natural Ecosystems of Central America, published by IUCN in 2015, which reaffirms the important contribution of these peoples in the conservation of biodiversity and the fight against climate change, as well as the need for greater governmental commitment to the recognition of their collective rights. He has several publications on tenure rights, territorial dynamics, indigenous and community governance of natural resources, traditional knowledge and ancestral practices for adapting to climate change. Since 2005, he has written the chapter on Guatemala for The Indigenous World published by the Working Group on Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), a report submitted annually to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

Sumudu Atapattu, LLM, PhD (Cambridge), Attorney-at-law (Sri Lanka) is Teaching Professor and Director of the Global Legal Studies Center at University of Wisconsin Law School. She is affiliated with UW-Madison's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, Global Health Institute, the Center for South Asia, and the 4W Initiative, and is the Executive Director of the Human Rights Program. She is also the Lead Counsel for Human Rights at the Center for International Sustainable Development Law; and affiliated faculty at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights, Sweden. Her books include Emerging Principles of International Environmental Law (Transnational, 2006), Human Rights Approaches to Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities (Routledge, 2016), International Environmental Law and the Global South (co-editor, CUP, 2015); Human Rights and Environment: Key Issues (co-author, Routledge, 2019), The Cambridge Handbook on Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development (co-editor, CUP, f2022) and UN Human Rights Institutions and the Environment: Synergies, Challenges, Trajectories (Routledge, 2023). Before moving to the USA, she was an associate professor at Faculty of Law, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and a consultant to the Law & Society Trust, Colombo.

Thin Lei Win is an award-winning Italy-based multimedia investigative journalist specialising in food and climate issues for various international news media and also through her own newsletter Thin Ink. She is also Lead Reporter for the Food Systems Newsroom of Lighthouse Reports, a collaborative journalism outlet focusing on public interest investigations and hosts The Index, a podcast based on the Global Organized Crime Index. Her extensive global experience includes nearly 13 years working as an international correspondent for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the non-profit arm of the Thomson Reuters media company, covering topics ranging from governance, resilience and climate to food insecurity and refugees and displacement.

Born and raised in Myanmar, Thin has lived and worked in Singapore, the UK, Vietnam, Thailand, and most recently, Italy, and has reported from many parts of Asia, Africa and Europe. She is the founder of Myanmar Now, an award-winning bilingual news agency, and co-founder of The Kite Tales, a unique preservation project that chronicles the lives and histories of ordinary people across Myanmar.

William Sunderlin is a Senior Associate with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Indonesia and an Adjunct Professor at the State University of New York – College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF) in Syracuse, New York, USA. He got his masters and PhD degrees in development sociology at Cornell University (1984-1993). In the period 1994-2006, he conducted research at CIFOR with a primary focus on the underlying causes of tropical deforestation, and on the well-being of people in forested areas. He then moved to RRI in Washington DC where he provided analytic support for documentation of global forest tenure (2006-2009). In the period 2009-2016 he returned to CIFOR to lead the subnational component of its Global Comparative Study on REDD+. In that capacity, he produced several publications on tenure and REDD+. In recent years he has been working with the Land Tenure Security Working Group to conduct analysis on tenure, human well-being, and conservation.