Namati, Inc.

The global environmental crisis is intertwined with the crisis of inequality. From coal plants to palm oil plantations, economic activities that threaten the planet are concentrated in communities with less power and wealth. 

To counter the inequality that has made the destruction possible, and protect nature, we need deep changes in our systems for governing the economy and the environment. But the people facing environmental harm are rarely equipped or positioned to contribute to either the creation or the functioning of those systems. Environmental advocacy, meanwhile, is often an elite domain  focused on highly technical channels like litigation. 

My organization, Namati, has a bold plan to build power among people facing environmental harm. In 5 focus countries, we’ll support 10,000 justice seekers -- community leaders who partner with Namati-trained grassroots advocates -- to organize within their communities, protect their lands, and, ultimately, transform our systems for environmental governance. Drawing on that deep work, we will train and resource leaders of exceptional environmental justice efforts in 20 additional countries.

By putting the power of the law in the hands of ordinary people whose health, livelihoods, and dignity are at stake, we will build an unignorable global movement to protect the planet.

I went to law school 20+ years ago because I thought the law was supposed to protect everyone. Law is supposed to be the difference between a society ruled by the most powerful and one that honors the dignity of everyone, strong or weak. 

But that’s not the world we live in. 

If we're going to make justice a reality for everyone, we need to turn law from an abstraction or a threat into something that every single person can understand, use and shape. Lawyers are crucial in that fight, but we can't leave it to lawyers alone. 

Grassroots legal advocates can be a bridge. These advocates, known as community paralegals, are from the communities they serve. They demystify law, break it down into simple terms, and then they help people look for a solution. We call this legal empowerment. 

So, in 2012, I started Namati to grow a robust, evidence-based, global field around community paralegals, legal empowerment, and primary justice services. Namati is the first and only international group dedicated to this approach.

Building a global movement of people who know, use, and shape the law is my purpose and goal. 

The World Justice Project estimates that worldwide, over five billion people live without basic access to justice. They face grave threats to their safety, their livelihoods, their dignity. 

Among the many ways injustice shapes our world, one of the most devastating is the uneven distribution of environmental harm. Most countries have laws meant to protect people from those harms. But many laws are unenforced, or worse, further concentrate harm, because the people facing harm have almost no role in the design, implementation or enforcement of those laws. 

Namati and our partners have proven a powerful method for making the law work for people. We support community paralegals: organizers who demystify law and help people navigate complex systems to achieve concrete remedies. Community paralegals do not work alone; they are part of a network that includes lawyers, movement organizations, and journalists.

By combining law and organizing in this way, we have won concrete remedies in hundreds of environmental justice struggles, despite steep power imbalances and regulatory regimes that are corrupt, dysfunctional, or both. Those remedies have directly improved the livelihoods and wellbeing of hundreds of thousands of people.

Historically, environmental advocacy has been dominated by elites and focused on highly technical channels like litigation. Environmental advocates have often left out or, worse, exploited the people most affected by environmental harm. 

We reverse those dynamics. Community paralegals focus on the problems and goals their communities identify, rather than environmental or other agendas conceived of elsewhere. 

We have found that there’s great promise in engaging administrative institutions in particular, such as pollution control boards, coastal regulation authorities, and land administration agencies. These institutions have substantial enforcement power, and you don’t need a lawyer to go before them. But they can be opaque and sometimes corrupt. When community paralegals help justice seekers approach administrative institutions in an empowered way - invoking specific rules and marshalling concrete evidence - they can often get the institutions to move.

 Community paralegals and community leaders not only tackle the specific environmental threats their communities face, they identify patterns of systemic failure. The experience of coming together across communities and developing a strategy to address their shared challenges builds a critical mass of empowered citizens who can demand, achieve, and sustain reforms. 

Since Namati’s founding in 2012, we and our partners have demonstrated how community paralegals can help people achieve concrete remedies to environmental harm: compel a cement plant to comply with air pollution regulations, for example, or stop a mine from dumping toxic tailings into a river. Namati-trained paralegals and the communities with whom they work have achieved remedies to thousands of violations of basic rights in Asia and Africa. Those remedies have directly improved the lives and livelihoods of over 1.3 million people. 

For example: for years, the improper handling of coal and cement at Ambuja Cement’s jetty polluted the air near the Muldwakarka Port in Gujarat, India. Villagers worried that the dust posed health risks and farmers complained that it damaged their crops and fields. By working with a paralegal, the community learned how to collect and present evidence for their case.The Pollution Control Board ordered Ambuja Cement to comply with existing environmental guidelines. Soon, the air was clearer than it had been in years. 

In the next five years, we will support over 10,000 justice seekers. Together, we will aim for remedies that directly improve the health and livelihoods of 1.4 million people.