Anne Marie Coriolan
Movement Building
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Snippet - COP30 - 6th International Rights of Nature Tribunal - EN
6th International Rights of Nature Tribunal: A New Pledge for Mother Nature
Where frontline organizers lead and corporations are held accountable.
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Tuesday, November 11, 2025
đ Online and at the Universidade Federal do ParĂĄ, BelĂ©m
Snippet - COP30 - Partner intro - EN
This campaign is held by 8 partner organizations across continents, building feminist alternatives to the climate crisis, ecocides and genocides.
Protection of the Family
The Issue
Over the past few years, a troubling new trend at the international human rights level is being observed, where discourses on âprotecting the familyâ are being employed to defend violations committed against family members, to bolster and justify impunity, and to restrict equal rights within and to family life.
The campaign to "Protect the Family" is driven by ultra-conservative efforts to impose "traditional" and patriarchal interpretations of the family, and to move rights out of the hands of family members and into the institution of âthe familyâ.
âProtection of the Familyâ efforts stem from:
- rising traditionalism,
- rising cultural, social and religious conservatism and
- sentiment hostile to womenâs human rights, sexual rights, child rights and the rights of persons with non-normative gender identities and sexual orientations.
Since 2014, a group of states have been operating as a bloc in human rights spaces under the name âGroup of Friends of the Familyâ, and resolutions on âProtection of the Familyâ have been successfully passed every year since 2014.
This agenda has spread beyond the Human Rights Council. We have seen regressive language on âthe familyâ being introduced at the Commission on the Status of Women, and attempts made to introduce it in negotiations on the Sustainable Development Goals.
Our Approach
AWID works with partners and allies to jointly resist âProtection of the Familyâ and other regressive agendas, and to uphold the universality of human rights.
In response to the increased influence of regressive actors in human rights spaces, AWID joined allies to form the Observatory on the Universality of Rights (OURs).  OURs is a collaborative project that monitors, analyzes, and shares information on anti-rights initiatives like  âProtection of the Familyâ.
Rights at Risk, the first OURs report, charts a map of the actors making up the global anti-rights lobby, identifies their key discourses and strategies, and the effect they are having on our human rights. Â Â
The report outlines âProtection of the Familyâ as an agenda that has fostered collaboration across a broad range of regressive actors at the UN. Â It describes it as: âa strategic framework that houses âmultiple patriarchal and anti-rights positions, where the framework, in turn, aims to justify and institutionalize these positions.â
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Regina MartĂnez
2. Frame your research
A framework for your research will guide throughout your research process, and the framing document you develop can also serve as a concept note to advisors and partners, and a funding proposal to potential donors.
Before conducting any research:
- Set the goals of your research
- List the key questions you want your research to answer
- Write out the type of data you will need to obtain and review to answer your key questions
- Define the final products you will produce with your research
Your research framing may evolve over time as you refine your questions and gather new information. However, building an initial research framing will allow you to work from a solid foundation.
Goals
To create a strong foundation for your WITM research, it is important to clarify what you hope to accomplish.
For example, one goal of AWIDâs WITM global research was to provide rigorous data to prove what we already knew anecdotally: that womenâs rights organizations are discrepantly underfunded. With this data, we felt we would be better positioned to influence funders in their decision-making.
Your goals could be to:
- Generate hard data on funding realities and trends to prove or disprove existing myths.
- Gain deeper insight into differences between the perspectives of donors and womenâs rights organizations.
- Influence donors in grant-making.
- Add crucial input to key funding debates.
- Explore collaboration between donors and womenâs rights organizations on issues that emerge from the research.
Key questions
Frame your research process with key questions that only your research can answer and limit those questions to a specific time frame (e.g. past five years, past year, etc.).
Consider the following points:
- What exactly do you want to learn more about and what is the hypothesis you would like to test? Writing this out will assist you in your thought process.
- Is there existing research on this? If research already exists, it may not make sense to conduct new WITM research unless you feel like the existing research is not extensive or specific enough. Â
- What time frame do you want to cover in your analysis? For example, will your research analyze only the past year, or several previous years, such as the past five years?
- Are you planning to repeat your survey to collect data in the future?
Choosing a specific timeframe for your research can result in more precise findings than working with an open-ended timeframe. Also, deciding whether you will repeat this research at regular intervals will allow you to set up data collection benchmarks for easy replication and comparison over time.
These were the key questions that guided AWIDâs WITM research process:
- What is the current state of womenâs organizationsâ financial sustainability across the world?
- What external and internal trends are impacting donorsâ funding decisions to support womenâs organizations and movements?
Type of data
Now that you determined your key questions, you can determine what kind of data will help you answer your key questions. This will allow you to plan the rest of your schedule for your WITM research.
For example, will you conduct a survey that covers an extensive portion of your priority population? Will you analyze the applications that funders are receiving from a certain region? Will you also conduct interviews (recommended)? By determining the types of data you need, you can reach out to external parties who will provide this data early on, and plot out your full schedule accordingly. Some suggested sources of data could be:
- Surveys you create for womenâs rights organizations and donors
- Application and grantmaking data from donors funding cycles
- Interviews of prominent activists, organizations, and donors
- Donor data from membership organizations and networks, such as  the Foundation Center, regional or national donor affinity groups.
Diverse data sets are a great way to create robust and rich analysis.
The data from AWIDâs 2011 Global Survey formed the backbone of our analysis in Watering the Leaves, Starving the Roots report. However, we also collected data from interviews and interactions with several actors in the field, ranging from donors to activists and womenâs rights organizations.
Final products
In addition to allowing you to set your schedule, creating an initial plan of what products you will develop will also allow you to work out what resources you need.
For example, will you only produce a long research report or will you also create infographics, brochures and presentations? Depending on your products, you may need to hire a design firm, plan events and so on.
These products will also be the tools you use to achieve your goals, so it is important to keep those goals in mind. For example, is your WITM research exclusively intended as an advocacy tool to influence funders? In that case, your products should allow you to engage with funders at a deep level.
 Some sample products:
- Long report for dissemination with key funders and organizations.
Historically, AWID WITM research has centered on a long report, from which AWID distilled other smaller products - see rest of list. - Infographic for viral distribution online
- Short animation demonstrating key findings
- Short brochure(s) distilling your findings and messages
- Articles and blog posts on key findings to draw interest to your larger report
- Seminars or webinars presenting key findings.
Conclusion: Framing your research will give you the big picture
Framing your research to cover goals, key questions, types of data, and final products will allow you to create a well-planned schedule, prepare your resources in advance, and plan a realistic budget.
This will make interactions with external partners easier and allow you to be nimble when unexpected setbacks occur.
Previous step
Next step
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Estimated time:
âą 1 month
People needed:
âą 1 or more Research person(s)
Resources available:
⹠AWID Research Framing: sample 1
⹠AWID Research Framing: sample 2
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Hamida Barmakani
Agroecology and Food Sovereignty
Context
The search for alternative means of food production based on environmental sustainability is gaining ground across regions. This worldwide search comes with a common characteristic: the need to involve rural people and particularly women, building on their local priorities and knowledge by employing the principle of agroecology.
Definition
Agroecology is a way of practicing agriculture or using technologies that do not harm the environment. It proposes breaking with the hegemonic rural development model based on large landed estates and single-crop plantations that benefit mostly agricultural businesses and entrenches social exclusion. Â Â
In family farming, agroecology manifests as a resistance to the current development model and its social, cultural, environmental, and economic problems. It opposes the lack of the farmerâs financial capital autonomy; and it symbolizes a resistance to the current agribusiness model.
Feminist perspective
Efforts based solely on agroecology may not be sufficient to solve all problems of womenâs marginalization and invisibility. A feminist perspective is then crucial to analyze the norms associated with the idea of family as currently constituted as the perfect institution, as well as with the condition of womenâs subordination.
In simpler terms, it is important to include in this debate a reflection on socially constructed gender roles to advance the emancipatory potential of agroecology.
Learn more about this proposition
- Agroecology: Exploring opportunities for womenâs empowerment based on experiences from Brazil (2011) by AWID and ActionAid
- Sowers of struggles and hope for feminism and food sovereignty by La Via Campesina captures the exchanges of the 4th Womenâs Assembly that discussed the capitalism crisis and the challenges in constructing a peasant and working class feminism.
Part of our series of
  Feminist Propositions for a Just Economy