Often, approaches to investment-related land rights violations are reactive, rather than proactive and preventative: legal support is usually provided after communities have been negatively impacted, displaced or evicted — and after lives have been lost, property destroyed, local waters and soils polluted, and communities devastated. In such cases, legal support has a limited chance of reversing the damage caused.

To address this challenge, rapid response mechanisms (RRMs) are designed to ensure that community members can reach out for legal and technical help the moment a conflict arises, and/or as soon as their rights are threatened or violated — and for advocates to respond quickly, in order to preventatively resolve a potential conflict before major harm has been done and before it escalates.

This toolkit, based on direct field experience, provides guidance on how advocacy organisations might create rapid response mechanisms in a wide range of contexts.