This paper investigates the real financial consequences of investing in land with disputed tenure rights. It demonstrates that companies which ignore the issue of land tenure expose themselves to substantial, and in some cases extreme, risks. Using case study analysis, the paper connects ground-up financial thinking with empirical reality. In so doing, it makes a strong case for the need to integrate tenure-related risks more comprehensively into our financial architecture.

The issue of women’s access to land is often framed in the context of oppression, emancipation, or Vietnamese uniqueness. This study report examines contemporary women’s access to land across ten provinces outside of these traditional narratives. Ten selected research sites reflected a diveristy of rural-urban locations, lineage patterns, and ethnic diversity.

With a view to operationalizing the recently adopted Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Forests and Fisheries, this paper identifies gaps in existing World Bank safeguard policies with respect to tenure.

Despite the tens of millions of dollars in aid and concessional loans being spent in Cambodia with the ostensible aim of securing land tenure and making the management of land and natural resources more equitable and sustainable, the evidence shows that tenure insecurity, forced evictions and large-scale land grabbing are escalating to alarming levels.

INTRODUCTION: Large-scale land acquisitions are a reality in most regions worldwide. Vast areas of land are leased to foreign as well as national investors on a long term basis of 30-99 years. A growing number of reports, referring to this practice as ‘land grabbing’, show that these mostly very intransparent deals tend to go along with corruption, forced evictions and other human rights violations as well as enhanced competition over water.

Through LMAP, and subsequent LASSP, Cambodia has made impressive progress in building a functioning cadastral system over the last ten years. This process has proved complex and challenging, but since commencing, the land registration teams have successfully issued over 1.7 million land titles, a strong legal framework has been developed for the functioning of the land administration bodies and mechanism, institutions have been built and strengthened, and a dispute resolution process has been established for dealing with disputes over unregistered land.

ABSTRACTED FROM THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Following such collection and compilation of relevant information on issues of women’s land rights, this report begins by introducing the centrality of the issue of women’s land rights, the developments in this context, and the remaining challenges with respect to complying on Articles 14, 15 and 16 of the CEDAW on the particular issue of women’s access to land and related resources. This is followed by recommendations for various key actors who are involved in ensuring the related compliance.

OPENING PARAGRAPH OF REPORT: Land is a contested issue in Cambodia. During the Khmer Rouge regime, all cadastral records were destroyed, private property was abolished and large parts of the population were forcibly resettled or forced to flee due to the war. During the 1990s largescale refugee repatriation programmes were implemented. Over the next decades, mainly due to population growth, spontaneous settlements developed on land that was either formally part of the state domain, or of which the legal status was unclear.

This paper uses four years of panel data on 793 households collected during 2001–11 to measure chronic poverty in rural Cambodia and to identify its key determinants. A household wealth index—a proxy for long-term welfare—constructed by polychoric principal component analysis is used as welfare indicator. Both ordered logistic and multinomial logistic regression models are adopted to identify the causes of chronic and transient poverty by focusing particularly on five explanatory variables: agricultural land and livestock, demography, human capital, social capital and natural resources.

This report presents the innovative experience in bamboo forestry management and the process of Communal Land Titling carried out by the community of Huay Hang and Napor, Sangthong District, Lao PDR. The systematization of this experience has been made possible with the cooperation of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Ministry of Planning and Investment of Lao’s People Democratic Republic, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the PROCASUR Corporation. They provided technical and methodological support in the process of documentation of the experience.

In late June and early July 2012, more than 1,000 student volunteers were dispatched to targeted provinces across the country, accompanied by officials from the Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction (MLMUPC), to implement Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Order 01BB. The student volunteers were trained in basic measurement techniques, kitted out with military uniforms bearing the MLMUPC’s logo, transported by army trucks, and directed to measure land and grant land certificates to rural residents.

Land distribution to the poor is discussed in the broader context of the Cambodian land reform which is considered to follow a liberal approach based on the re-introduction of private property rights in land following Cambodia’s socialist period. This approach has produced good results for providing private land titles for existing land use on state private land but has turned out to be quantitatively ineffective in the distribution of state public land for the poor through social land concessions.