People around the world live in areas that are being altered for industrial, infrastructure or mining projects. Their lives and occupations are being negatively impacted by problems of access, encroachment or pollution.
Though governments in many countries have regulatory procedures for implementing environmental and social safeguards to minimize or mitigate such problems, compliance of these safeguards is often absent or low. Further, what is stated in law, regulatory approvals or license agreements often does not correlate with the actual adversities that affected people are forced to deal with. As such, compliance with these laws and processes is little more than a bureaucratic exercise. This phenomenon is not peculiar only to developing countries, it also presents challenges for already industrialized economies in Europe and the United States.
Groundtruthing is a method of gathering information that can connect official regulatory requirements with the actual impacts development has on people in a particular location. The outputs from a ground-truthing exercise can be used as effective evidence to demonstrate levels of compliance by projects to the relevant authorities. In the long run, citizen’s engagement with compliance issues will help to make the overall regulatory system more proactive and responsive to their concerns about development.
This free webinar will give an overview of how the groundtruthing method can be used by public-spirited individuals, community representatives or legal empowerment/paralegal programs. The webinar will present Namati’s experience of using this method within its legal-empowerment-based Environmental Justice program in India.
Kanchi Kohli is the Legal Research Director at CPR-Namati Environmental Justice Program in New Delhi
To register for the webinar, click here.
For more information about the project, visit us at: https://namati.org/