Will impact investors welcome the arrival of mechanisms to redress community grievances?

A conservation project in the Tanintharyi region in southeast Myanmar aimed to protect the area from unsustainable palm oil and rubber plantations and overfishing. Indigenous Karen and other communities, however, objected that the top-down project cut them off from their livelihoods, jeopardized ceasefires that had ended a civil war and prevented the return of people forced from their land by the conflict. Investors paused the project after communities used the United Nations Development Program’s grievance redress mechanism; the Karen have proposed an alternative “Landscape of Life” project design. Read the full article here.