Producing their own data helped the 5 movements and groups to record, measure, analyze, and make visible their problems. The research strengthened the movements’ struggles for justice in several ways. First of all, by involving people in different communities in identifying the impacts of corporate actors. The research process was a way to exercise their rights to information, consultation, and self-determination, and to contrast lies and disinformation by corporate actors. Between 30 to 900 community members across research locations explored how corporate actors control democratic decision-making processes and the impact this has on their lives. “ESCR-Net’s work on corporate capture motivated us because when we got engaged in the research process, the fact of looking through the lens of corporate capture was very powerful and provided a very good framing. It gave confidence to people in the community because they can name the problem,” said Herman Kumara from NAFSO, Sri Lanka. “We decided to confront corporate capture by extracting the information from the historical archives that allowed us to verify the community's land rights and the illegality of the mining operations. Having the most orderly documentation possible is the only way to break this confusion, fear, and exploitation situation,” affirm Elizabeth Cuenca from Red Chimpu. Secondly, gathering evidence of the destructive impacts of corporate actors on communities and the environment allowed movements to better articulate collective demands for justice. The research exposes how the influence of corporate actors on local decision-making - very often imposed through violence and fear- leads to the loss of livelihood and traditional ways of living, land grabbing, and loss of land, water, and soil pollution, among others. In the case of Indigenous Peoples’ territories, the violation of the right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent is identified as the beginning of a sequence of violations of other rights. Thus, from Guatemala, the Consejo de Pueblos Wuxhtaj’s research found that “hydroelectric companies use different practices of deception, disarticulation of the social fabric, criminalization and violence to impose projects in territories where Mayan peoples ancestrally live and which have been marginalized and excluded from social and economic development policies.” In general, women face disproportionate impacts of human rights violations, and these are usually not reflected in existing data. Through surveys, focus group discussions, and interviews, the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) in Spain found that there is worrying gender inequality in the protection of the right to decent housing and basic supplies and that women, particularly those who are the head of families, older, and migrant, are the most affected by evictions and unable to afford basic supplies. Despite adverse political contexts and security risks caused by local governments and companies during the research process, the project highlighted the capacity of communities and organizations to collect data, analyze, and tell their own stories in an effective, inclusive, objective, and horizontal manner. The collective storytelling has allowed to visibilise movements’ shared memory and identity-related to the defense of territories and natural resources, which is essential for amplifying movements’ struggles. As Advisory Group member Oscar Pineda (PODER, Mexico) put it: "This initiative showed us that social movements can build capacities for gathering data and constructing solid narratives to counterbalance the media power of companies and governments that seek to dispossess them of their natural resources and territories." |
