A wide range of issues are captured and reiterated in the 12 briefs contained in this collection. These include: the prevalence and importance of customary tenure; the prevalence and importance of common property arrangements; constraints to women’s access under both customary and statutory tenure; the need to secure common property and other forms of tenure; and the importance of broad based participation to secure broad consensus among multiple actors in order to enhance the efficiency, equity and sustainability objectives of land tenure reforms.

Vietnamese land-tenure policy reforms were embedded into general economic reforms (Doi Moi), enabling the country’s transition toward a market economy. Since 1998, they were implemented incrementally together with complementary instruments such as agricultural market liberalization and new economic incentives. Major steps included disentangling socialist producer cooperatives and assigning land-use rights to its former members, developing and adapting a national legal framework (Land Law), and enhancing tenure security through gender-balanced inheritable land-use certificates.

Efforts to distribute land titles to low-income rural Afro-Brazilian communities, known as quilombos, have been disappointing despite the provision of ample government resources. Until now, research on the implications of Brazil s land reform policies has not considered quilombo communities in an economic context. The unique case of the quilombo communities provides an interesting context to advance the understanding of the role of land titles in rural income generation.

This paper investigates the impacts of a social forestry program in Indonesia, Hutan Kamasyarakatan (HKm), based on analysis of a survey of 640 HKm and comparable non-HKm plots in the Sumberjaya watershed of southern Sumatra, and of the households operating those plots. The HKm program provides groups of farmers with secure-tenure permits to continue farming on state Protection Forest land and in exchange for protecting remaining natural forestland, planting multistrata agroforests, and using recommended soil and water conservation (SWC) measures on their coffee plantations.

Population growth, globalisation and climate change have all increased pressures on land. Combined with a growing demand for land for investment in developing countries, this poses a risk to land tenure security, particularly in areas where formal property rights are in short supply.

This rapid evidence assessment seeks to address the question of which policies and interventions or approaches have been successful in fostering compliance with legitimate land tenure rights and what impact these strategies have had on development outcomes.

The Land Tenure Journal is a peer-reviewed, open-access flagship journal of the Climate, Energy and Tenure Division (NRC) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The Land Tenure Journal, launched in early 2010, is a successor to the Land Reform, Land Settlement and Cooperatives, which was published between 1964 and 2009. The Land Tenure Journal is a medium for the dissemination of quality information and diversified views on land and natural resources tenure. It aims to be a leading publication in the areas of land tenure, land policy and land reform.

Evidence is growing that tenure-secure community forests are associated with avoided deforestation and other ecosystem-service benefits. There are also economic and social benefits connected to communal management. But securing community forest tenure also involves costs, including costs to establish supportive legislation, to demarcate and register the lands, to monitor and protect the lands as well as opportunity costs.

In 2013, a group of 20 expert advocates from across Africa gathered for a three-day symposium to share experiences and practical strategies for effectively supporting communities to protect their lands and natural resources. The symposium illuminated many similarities between the types of threats to communities’ land and natural resource claims, as well as underlying factors that drive and exacerbate the threats.

In this synthesis report, the issue of tenure security is addressed and assessed in several countries where government, civil society, the private sector and development cooperation initiatives have been implemented for decades.

This report summarizes a case study of the Mexican ejidocommunity tenure system. Mexico was selected for this case study because of the rich history and extensive scale of the country’s community land tenure and registration systems. This community system covers 52% of the area of Mexico, roughly equivalent to the size of Egypt, and comprises over 30 000 communities. The ejido system emanated from the Mexican revolution (1910-1917) and represents a case where the customary system of land has been largely integrated into the statutory system.

This training course from the Global Land Tool Network is part of the Network’s activities on Islamic dimensions of land. In most Muslim countries, Islamic law, principles and practices make an important contribution to shaping access to land. GLTN therefore has as one of its objectives the identification and development of Islamic land tools and case studies through a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and global process, owned by Muslims, but also including other civil society and development partners.

This study aims to assess the applicability of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forest in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT) in urban and peri-urban areas. The study also aims to facilitate decision-making on the next steps needed to ensure the application of the VGGT in urban and peri-urban areas, including informing the implementers on how they can anchor the VGGT in their activities, i.e. to apply or use the VGGT in their work in urban and peri-urban areas.