The year 2016 marks 15 years since the new wave land reforms became operational in Tanzania. Despite its ambitious goals – encouraging land registration and titling, and empowering women and other vulnerable groups – the results are disillusioning. A brief overview of 15 years of implementation, using the Village Land Act as a case study.
Uttaran began work on the Sustainable Access to Land Equality (SALE) project to ensure transparency and accountability in land governance in December 2012. The project engaged communities in three pilot upazilas - to raise the awareness of vulnerable landowners about land administration, and to effect transparent processes for selecting landless people and for state land settlement.
Las mujeres en la región de Ayacucho, Perú, especialmente afectadas por décadas de discriminación y violencia, incluida la violencia política, así como relegadas al trabajo doméstico, obtuvieron en este nuevo siglo el acceso a la tierra como propietarias individuales. Para lograrlo, las mujeres tuvieron que organizarse para demandar el derecho a poseer tierra ante su comunidad y ante el Estado.
Se trata de un caso de resistencia a la ofensiva gubernamental ante los proyectos de infraestructura. La defensa del territorio indígena actualiza el derecho colectivo a la tierra y por ende fortalece las estructuras organizativas de la población.
Utaran began work on the Sustainable Access to Land Equality (SALE) project to ensure transparency and accountability in land governance in December 2012. The project engaged communiies in three pilot upazilas - Amtali Upazila of Barguna District, Mohanpur of Rajshahi, and Sadar of Jamalpur - to raise the awareness of vulnerable landowners about land administraion, and to effect transparent processes for a) selecing landless people and b) khasland setlement.
Public land is a resource that should be effectively managed in the public’s best interest in line with provisions of the Constitutions of Kenya and the Land Act. The management framework governing land use and development decisions on public land should ensure protection and sustainable management of the land. Despite these provisions in law, recent media reports point toresurgenceof public land grab. The Land Development and Governance Institute commissioned this research study to establish the status of the public land management in Kenya.
ABSTRACTED FROM THE INTRODUCTION: This working paper is an examination of current land formalization processes against the backdrop of Cambodian history and the political economy of land and agrarian change. I... critique the land property right formalisation processes at play under the current land reforms. I present their rationales, mechanisms and influences on Cambodian peasants. I then detail the dynamics of land differentiation in the central rice plain and reveal how it has initiated a large migration to the peripheral uplands.
To date, REDD+ projects in Laos have made relatively conservative choices on driver engagement, focusing on smallholder-related drivers like shifting cultivation and small-scale agricultural expansion, to the exclusion of drivers like agro-industrial concessions, mining concessions and energy and transportation infrastructure. While these choices have been based on calculated decisions made in the context of project areas, they have created a pair of challenges that REDD+ practitioners must currently confront. The first is lost opportunity.
ABSTRACTED FROM EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Half a decade into the global land rush, land-intensive investment throughout Southeast Asia continues to confront social and environmental issues such as land conflict and improperly regulated forest conversion. This study uses publicly available financial and spatial data to examine the geography of land-intensive investment in Southeast Asia, and to identify the limits imposed by problems with data availability.
This paper explores the effect of land titling on agricultural productivity in Vietnam and the productivity effects of single versus joint titling for husband and wife. Using a plot-fixed-effects approach our results show that obtaining a land title is associated with higher yields, for both individually and jointly held titles. We conclude that there is no trade-off between joint titling and productivity, and so joint titles are potentially an effective way to improve women’s bargaining power within the household with no associated efficiency losses.
In a widely read paper, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, World Bank and others propose systematic property rights formalization as a key step in addressing the problems of irresponsible agricultural investment. This paper examines the case of Cambodia, one of a number of countries where systematic land titling and large-scale land concessions have proceeded in parallel in recent years.
ABSTRACTED FROM THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Myanmar’s agricultural sector has for long suffered due to multiplicity of laws and regulations, deficient and degraded infrastructure, poor policies and planning, a chronic lack of credit, and an absence of tenure security for cultivators. These woes negate Myanmar’s bountiful natural endowments and immense agricultural potential, pushing its rural populace towards dire poverty. This review hopes to contribute to the ongoing debate on land issues in Myanmar.