local communities related Blog post | Land Portal

local communities

Synonyms: 
community
communities
local community

Local community is a traditional collectivity with a range of powers covering a certain geographical area and an autonomous management structure.

Displaying 85 - 96 of 141
2 May 2021
Authors: 
David Matsinhe
Mozambique

By David Matsinhe for the Daily Maverick. 

Originally posted at: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-04-25-recipe-for-conflict-n...

 

26 April 2021
Authors: 
Ms. Amy Coughenour Betancourt
Global


“Tenure and its governance are crucial factors in the fight against inequality and discrimination, for sustainable use of the environment, social stability and resilience toward the overall achievement of the SDGs.”  FAO, Why Land Rights Matter, 2020


 


5 Lessons for Securing Women’s Collective Land Rights
11 February 2021
Authors: 
Celine Salcedo-La Viña
Cameroon
Mexico
Nepal
Jordan
Global

The ability to own land and access natural resources allows women to secure food for their families, increase their agricultural productivity and livelihoods, and help drive local economies. Land rights empower women to have a say in matters that affect their lives, families and communities — everything from deciding what crops to plant to investing in children’s education and health.

WOLTS Gender Guidelines - Mokoro, PCC and ALAMGAC Land Use Planning Collaboration
30 March 2021
Authors: 
Dr. Elizabeth Daley
J. Batsaikhan
Lkhamdulam Natsagdorj
Mongolia
Global

 

Pilot study supports national roll-out of participatory land use planning

 

Sound, sustainable land management is critical to the long-term viability of Mongolia’s traditional herding way of life. And careful planning at local level, in a participatory and gender-inclusive way, is needed to underpin that.

 

Tribal people walk with their belongings in Tarapur village, about 87 km (54 miles) south from the western Indian city of Ahmedabad July 13, 2007. REUTERS/Amit Dave (INDIA)
8 March 2021
Authors: 
Shipra Deo
India

In Jharkhand, eastern India, women are not entitled to own land and accusations of witchcraft are wielded against them to silence their claims to land

When Talabitti’s husband died in 2016, her claim to the family land seemed to die with him. Though her husband had worked the family land by himself, upon his death his male cousins laid their claim. If Talabitti attempted to make a competing claim, they threatened to drive her away – with violence, if necessary. Sadly, this threat materialized.

A meeting between IED Afrique, the Mbadakhoune municipal team and local representatives (Photo: copyright Ibrahima Dia/IED Afrique)
8 March 2021
Authors: 
Philippine Sutz
Africa
Tanzania
Ghana
Senegal

Across East and West Africa, IIED and partners have been developing and testing approaches to strengthen women’s voices in local land governance. Philippine Sutz reflects on the role and impact of local governance frameworks as these approaches are implemented in different contexts.


Since 2016, IIED has been working with local partners across East and West Africa to strengthen rural women’s voices in local land governance.


The assumption underpinning this work is that when local women actively participate in land governance, related structures are more likely to recognise and defend women’s interests. This leads to fairer land relations and women having greater control over their livelihood options.


 


In each country where the project has been implemented – Tanzania, Ghana and Senegal – local partners have developed, strengthened or scaled up approaches to support local women to enter the political space and participate meaningfully in local decision-making processes on land allocation and use.


While tailored to address local contexts and needs, the approaches developed in each country share similarities: None of them ‘reinvent the wheel’ but build on existing governance arrangements; they are bottom-up and participatory, involving community dialogue and capacity building exercises; and they all seek to ensure that decision-making bodies on land include a minimum number of active women members and promote local dialogue.


But the approach design was different to recognise the opportunities and gaps associated with each country’s land governance framework.


Tanzania and Ghana: local level governance fosters local ownership


In Tanzania, the law establishes local authorities with power to administer land at the lowest administrative level: the village. The village council and village assembly play a key role in local land governance – they have the power to allocate land and make decisions on land use.


In Ghana, land is governed customarily by traditional authorities, and land governance rules vary from one area to another. In the area where our project was implemented – the Nanton Traditional Area – community chiefs are given power to administer land.


In both countries, the local governance systems enabled our partners to embed their approaches directly at the community level and ensure local ownership.


In Tanzania, the Tanzania Women Lawyers Association (TAWLA) worked directly with village authorities to support the adoption of gender-sensitive village by-laws promoting the participation of women in village level decision-making processes. The process received good support from local communities.


In Ghana, NETRIGHT and the Grassroot Sisterhood Foundation (GSF) worked with local community chiefs – the lowest traditional administrative unit – to establish Community Land Development Committees (CLDCs). These committees are designed to support chiefs in making decisions on land and ensure that such committees had women members.


Senegal: challenges at municipal level


In Senegal, meanwhile, public land is managed by the local governments of municipalities – and community land is allocated at the local level through the municipality. A ‘municipality’ includes between around 30 and 60 villages; this is a higher ‘administrative level’ compared with land governance in Tanzania or Ghana.


The authorities administering land are the municipal council through the land commission – a local body supporting the council’s decision-making process.


Our partner IED Afrique worked in Darou Khoudoss to support the inclusion of women in the land commission and the adoption of a local land charter promoting women’s participation in land governance.


Working at the municipal level – rather than directly in villages – has proved more challenging in terms of local ownership. IED Afrique developed additional activities to ensure buy-in at village level. In particular, they collaborated with local women’ groups to make sure that the project was reaching women in villages.


In Tanzania and Senegal, land being governed by national laws makes it easier to replicate and scale up approaches. In Tanzania, TAWLA was able to reach all 64 villages in the Kisarawe District. Replicating the approach across different regions in Ghana would have meant adapting it to each regional context, which would have been cumbersome and resource intensive.


Takeaways for policymakers


Comparing land governance frameworks (PDF) in the three countries shows how their nature – and in particular the existence (or lack) of heavily decentralised power on land – determines, to a degree, the administrative level where the intervention takes place. This impacts how easily participatory and inclusive bottom-up approaches can be implemented.


Local authorities having power over land at the village or community level – as in Tanzania and Ghana – is a real advantage, as it allows approaches to be embedded in the very communities they’re trying to support. When land is governed at a higher administrative level – as in Senegal – additional efforts and resources are often needed to ensure local ownership of the approach.


In wider terms, my sense is that the more decentralised a land governance framework, the better for democratic, participatory processes to take place and ultimately, for how local women’s voices can be reflected in decisions made on land administration. This should be kept in mind by governments undertaking land governance reforms.



This blog was originally posted  on the IIED website and is the fourth blog in a series looking at ways to strengthen women’s access to and control over land in Africa.

Land Corruption
26 January 2021
Authors: 
Helena Vidalic
Africa
Global

Opening up land-related administrative data, combining it with data from other sources  and processing and making this data available as easily accessible information for women and men equally could be a means to counteracting land corruption in land management, land administration and land allocation. But does open data and enhanced data transparency indeed help to counteract land corruption? 

Under cover of COVID, new laws in Asia threaten environmental and social protections
6 January 2021
Authors: 
Kundan Kumar
Asia
Indonesia
Philippines

Hit hard by the pandemic, Asia's indigenous and local communities face fresh government-led efforts to exploit their land and resources


In addition to its devastating toll on public health, COVID-19 has exacerbated global food insecurity and economic crises. These costs have been particularly acute for Indigenous Peoples and local communities on customarily governed territories and lands.


The disaster for Barbudans and their fragile homeland continues
14 December 2020
Authors: 
Line Algoed
John Mussington
Dr. Liz Alden Wily
Antigua and Barbuda


From disaster capitalism to philanthro-capitalism to destruction of the very mangroves and shores which help protect Barbuda from storms and hurricanes


Carla León Celaya
14 September 2020
Authors: 
Dolene Miller
Latin America and the Caribbean
Central America
Nicaragua

I am Dolene Miller, an Afro-descendant from the Caribbean (Atlantic) Coast of Nicaragua and for me it is important and very necessary to support any initiative to protect my community from COVID19. As ethnic minorities, we are facing a health crisis in precarious conditions because the national government itself has not wanted to assume its responsibility to protect the population from infection, has not issued a quarantine and, on the contrary, is promoting massive activities according to its thesis of contagion of the herd.

30 September 2020
Authors: 
Joshua Lichtenstein
Central America
Panama
South America

The  ability of the Embera villages in Panama to shut off the road into their community, and to exclude outsiders, is based in large measure on the government’s official recognition of their indigenous collective land rights.

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Dynamic, agile and effective, the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) is working to secure a world where natural habitats and environments can sustain, and be sustained by, the communities that depend upon them for their basic needs and livelihoods.

From the cotton fields of Uzbekistan to the coastal waters of West Africa, EJF is working in some of the world’s toughest and most remote countries to shine an international spotlight on the environmental and human rights abuses that too often go unnoticed.

 Núcleo Académico para o Desenvolvimento da Comunidade - NADEC logo

NADEC é uma pessoa Colectiva de Direitos privados, Sem fins lucrativos, fundada e registrada em 02 de Outubro de 2006, por um grupo de estudantes universitários nacionais, e lançada publicamente aos 29 de Setembro de 2007. É constituída por 16 membros e tem como o Responsável Sr. Hipólito Lourenço Benfica na qualidade de Presidente da Organização. Visão: Uma Sociedade livre de Injustiça em que as comunidades participam activamente na luta contra a pobreza. Missão: Emponderar as comunidades para que participem consistentemente nos processos de desenvolvimento local.

Vision

An empowered, equitable, socially cohesive and economically prosperous society in Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral.

Mission

To improve the quality of life of local communities through social and economic development efforts.

Objectives

Foster inclusive and competent local institutions of the people that contribute effectively and sustainably to local development

Increase income and employment opportunities for local communities, particularly poor and vulnerable (including youth and women)

Agrisud International logo

Entreprendre contre la pauvreté


 


Nous tous, chez Agrisud, n’acceptons pas l’idée qu’aujourd’hui 1,4 milliards de personnes puissent vivre en situation de pauvreté, avec le plus souvent de grandes difficultés pour se nourrir quotidiennement.


Au Sud comme au Nord, nous savons que cette situation est due très souvent à l’exclusion économique, pour des raisons multiples, qui elle-même entraîne progressivement l’exclusion sociale.


The Amerindian Peoples Association (APA) is a non-governmental Indigenous Peoples organisation in Guyana. It is primarily an advocacy organisation that seeks to promote and defend the rights of the Indigenous Peoples of Guyana. 

Membership of the APA is made up of Units throughout the country, currently amounting to close to eighty such units. The Association is led by an Executive Committee comprising the President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer, Assistant Secretary/Treasurer, thirteen regional representatives, a women’s representative and a youth representative. 

APC Logo

APC is an international network of civil society organisations founded in 1990 dedicated to empowering and supporting people working for peace, human rights, development and protection of the environment, through the strategic use of information and communications technologies (ICTs). 

Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation logo

The Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) is the largest and oldest academic society dedicated to the study and conservation of tropical ecosystems. Our society is international in scope and membership, with almost 900 members from 65 countries, with whom we seek to:


  1. Promote awareness to as broad an audience as possible of the importance of the tropics
  2. Improve communication and cooperation among tropical investigators, educators, environmental managers, and local communities

Belun was established in 2004 to prevent conflict and facilitate community capacity development in Timor-Leste. Belun’s work is grounded in the vision of a society that has the ability, creativity and criticalthinking to strengthen peace for development. Belun has grown to become one of the largest National nongovernment organisations in Timor-Leste and has engaged with over 100 non-government (NGO) and community-based organization (CBO) partners, .

Bertha Logo

Bertha Foundation fights for a more just world. We support activists, storytellers, and lawyers who are working to bring about social and economic justice and human rights for all.

Créée en 1998, Brainforest est une Organisation Non Gouvernementale de droit gabonais qui travaille sur la problématique Forêt – Environnement dans une double perspective d’appui sur le terrain et de suivi des politiques.

Camoes

A política de cooperação para o desenvolvimento portuguesa, que constitui um dos pilares da política externa, tem como objetivo fundamental a erradicação da pobreza extrema e o desenvolvimento sustentável dos países parceiros devendo ser entendida como um investimento e não como uma despesa, como desenvolvimento e não como assistencialismo. Baseia-se num modelo de gestão descentralizado e é enquadrada pelo Conceito Estratégico da Cooperação Portuguesa, 2014-2020.

Caritas Cambodia logo

Caritas Cambodia is an official social development arm of the Catholic Church in Cambodia. It has been built on the values of Love, Concern, Justice, Peace Unity, Sharing and brotherhood. It draws inspiration from the Gospel and aims at integral development of people irrespective of race and creed. Hence the objectives of Caritas Cambodia specifically include the following:

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