Everyone has a relationship to land. It is an asset that, with its associated resources, allows its owner access to loans, to build their houses and to set up small businesses in cities. In rural areas, land is essential for livelihoods, subsistence and food security. However, land is a scarce resource governed by a wide range of rights and responsibilities. And not everyone’s right to land is secure. Mounting pressure and competition mean that improving land governance - the rules, processes and organizations through which decisions are made about land - is more urgent than ever.

The Social Tenure Domain Model offers practical solutions and opportunities for land professionals, researchers, grassroots organisations and government authorities. These opportunities include the empowerment of the grassroots communities to develop and manage their own information systems (and their own data), with all the benefits of the advanced technologies can offer, with less investment in resources and with less reliance on highly paid experts. Land professionals can also make their services available to all and offer people-centred and affordable solutions.

This publication on Secure Land Rights for All demonstrates how secure land rights are particularly important in helping to reverse three types of phenomena: gender discrimination; social exclusion of vulnerable groups; and wider social and economic inequalities linked to inequitable and insecure rights to land. It argues that policymakers should adopt and implement the continuum of land rights because, no single form of tenure can meet the different needs of all social groups.

In order to build on the momentum and to be able to move from individuals action to change towards a youth responsive land sector at scale, there is a need to strengthen the knowledge base and to broaden the understanding of how youth’s land rights and needs are intricately linked to sustainable development in rural and urban areas.

The Feasibility Study is designed to provide a business case with respect to the feasibility of data collection for global land indicators. It gives a concrete analysis of the possibility of having land indicators in the post-2015 framework that are relevant, disaggregated by gender and include outcome indicators going beyond the legal framework. This report demonstrates that it is feasible to collect the data required using available methodologies and data sources, and that countries are able to produce these data regularly and at a reasonable cost.

The following recommendations are made in this report:
1. The continuum of land rights is a metaphor, not a theory. A metaphor can be applied in a number of theoretical contexts, whereas a theory has an ideological perspective.

This publication is the summary of the proceedings of the Regional Learning Workshop on 'Land and Natural Resources Tenure Security' held in Nairobi, Kenya from 29-31 May 2012 as jointly organized by UN-Habitat/Global Land Tool Network and International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). The aim of the workshop was to deepen the understanding of land and natural resources tenure security issues and to identify opportunities to strengthen land tenure security and land access of the rural poor and marginalized groups in sub-Saharan Africa.

Over the past 15 years, tens of millions of hectares of land have been acquired by large investors in developing countries. The Land Matrix documented 1,037 transnational land deals covering 37,842,371 hectares during this period, while many more deals remain undocumented.1 This global land rush is causing widespread forced evictions and denial of access to key land and natural resources for millions of women, small- scale food producers, pastoralists, gatherers, forest dwellers, fisherfolk, and tribal and indigenous peoples.

In 2008, three sugar companies were awarded nearly 20,000 hectares of Economic Land Concessions (ELCs) in Oddar Meanchey province.

The new research finds that associated land grabbing totaling more than 17,000 hectares has affected more than 2,000 families. Of these, 214 families were forcibly evicted.

Meanwhile, at least 3,000 hectares of the misappropriated land has been used for logging rather than sugar plantations, according to the report, ‘Cambodia: The Bitter Taste of Sugar’, commissioned by ActionAid and Oxfam GB.

This report is a summary of the 2013 CSO Land Reform Monitoring papers in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, and the  Philippines. It focuses on land conflicts including killings, harassments, land-related detainments, and evictions experienced in the seven countries. It also includes interventions and principles which ANGOC and LWA call for the government and institutions to adhere to in addressing such issues.

Political dynamics of the global land grab are exemplified in Cambodia, where at least 27 forced evictions took place in 2009, affecting 23,000 people. Evictions of the rural poor are legitimized by the assumption that non-private land is idle, marginal, or degraded and available for capitalist exploitation. This paper: (1) questions the assumption that land is idle; (2) explores whether land grabs can be regulated through a ‘code of conduct’; and (3) examines peasant resistance to land grabs.

The paper aims to identify the rationality of peasant communities and their contribution to rural development in Kampong Thom province. To do so; an interdisciplinary analytical framework addresses the dynamics of land use and land tenure; the strategies of labor force allocation as well as the determinants of land and labor agricultural productivities amongst peasant communities. It rests on details field surveys in two communes located in very distinct agro-ecological settings of Kampong Thom province.