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.
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, many low-income countries are looking to their untapped natural resources as a way to deliver a swift economic boost. But there are concerns that the drive for urgent solutions could impinge on vital governance safeguards.
The parallels between Africa and China’s urbanisation trajectories could offer policymakers potential policy design lessons to learn from. For example, some of China’s recent successes in managing urbanisation, if adequately adapted to the unique and diverse African context, could potentially help the continent’s burgeoning city growth become more sustainable and equitable – but only with careful consideration of local circumstances.
Since last year, 35,000 people in Uganda’s Kiryandongo district were forced from their lands to make way for large-scale farming, including at gunpoint and by a sugar firm with international backing.
As the world begins to reckon with the scale of COVID-19’s economic impacts, there is a growing sense that the pandemic will reconfigure the role of state and market for years to come.
I write this blog as our project team embarks on a fifth year of work on women’s land tenure security (WOLTS) with pastoral communities in mining-affected areas of Mongolia and Tanzania. Just before Christmas 2019, we were in Mundarara village in northern Tanzania. Exceptionally heavy rains made getting around much more challenging than usual. Locals travelling on foot had to make wide detours to avoid getting bogged down in waterlogged grazing land, and it took everyone much longer to get to the village primary school for our long-planned training day.
Today we are pleased to mark the official launch of PlaceFund, an independent US nonprofit organization focused on addressing issues of insecure property rights, unsustainable land use, and climate change. Built off a decade as the Property Rights initiative at Omidyar Network, PlaceFund will operate under the leadership of Peter Rabley and Amy Regas, who will be leaving Omidyar Network to run this venture, and they will take our shared commitment to property rights and geospatial technology into the new decade.
Last week the World Cocoa Foundation, a membership organization of more than 100 cocoa companies, held its annual partnership meeting in Berlin, Germany. The aim of the meeting is for governments, cocoa companies and farmers to identify and tackle the sector’s largest sustainability challenges. A 90-minute session was devoted to the topic of land tenure. The prominence of the session, as well as the seniority of the presenters – the Head of Sustainable Sourcing for Hershey’s and the Deputy Director General of Cote d’Ivoire’s Land Agency among them – is a powerful signaling effect.
