A new land law went into effect in January 1998 in Mozambique. The impetus behind these actions was the belief that a new legal and regulatory framework was necessary to reduce the frequency of land conflicts between largeholders and smallholders while simultaneously promoting much-needed investment in the agricultural sector.With empirical evidence presented in this report, based on smallholder survey data collected from 1994 to 1996, the authors challenge widely held beliefs about land tenure and access in the smallholder sector in Mozambique.

Land tenure, or access and rights to land, is essential to sustain people’s livelihoods. This paper looks at how farm households perceive land tenure (in)security in relation to food (in)security, and how these perceptions evolve throughout different policy periods in Laos. The paper highlights the centrality of farmers’ strategies in configuring the dynamic relationships between tenure (in)security and food (in)security, by demonstrating how farmers’ perceived and de facto land tenure insecurity shapes their decisions to diversify livelihood options to ensure food security.

This paper is the culmination of over five years of work to develop and apply the methodology for measuring tenure security for land and property around the globe—Prindex. We now have the first ever comparable assessment of perceived tenure security that is truly global, with data from more than 140 countries, representing 96% of the world’s adult (18+) population, equivalent to 5.2 billion citizens. This latest round of data collection therefore presents the clearest, most definitive picture of how secure people around the world feel about their homes and property.

In the six months since the coronavirus began its global spread, more than 15 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and more than 600,000 have perished, causing governments around the world to institute lockdowns and shut down businesses while entire industries have been devastated.

The rapid progress in digital information and communication technologies  (ICTs) comes with both fresh opportunities and new challenges for different sectors and actors adopting the new solutions that become available over time. Since the mid-2000s, the global land governance community has piloted a series of open data and transparency initiatives largely based on such digital innovations, aiming at increasing accountability and counteracting corruption in the land sector, both at the local and global level.

The Malagasy land reform, ongoing since 2005, belongs to the new generation of land reforms. It promotes the legal recognition of existing landholders’ rights (through certification) and the decentralization of land management. Despite the change of paradigm underlying this new wave of reforms, premises and expectations remain unchanged: a) rights legalization is justified by large tenure insecurity and b) rights formalization is a prerequisite to reduce conflicts over land rights, improve access to credit, boost productive investments and stimulate land markets.

Benin introduced new instruments to register customary land rights in the 2013 Land and Domain Law, which was updated in 2017. The BMZ supported “Promotion d’une Politique Foncière Responsable (ProPFR)” project is testing these instruments together with scalable implementation modalities in the Borgou department (Benin). This work is complemented with a rigorous impact evaluation to assess changes in tenure security, agricultural investments and food security. The baseline survey was completed in 2018 and includes 2,968 households in 53 villages in the Borgou.

Improvement of Land Governance in Uganda (ILGU) is a project implemented by the German International Cooperation (GIZ), seeking to increase productivity of small-scale farmers on private Mailo land in Central Uganda, co-financed by the European Union and German Government through the German Federal Ministry for
Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

This scoping study on ways to improve tenure security in Burundi is commissioned by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO). RVO is responsible for the implementation of the LAND-at-scale program, which is a program launched by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs to contribute to improved land governance around the world.

Arable land in Bhutan is under serious threats of land degradation. Proper land management approach is needed to control soil erosion problems. This study is an attempt to characterize and document the conventional and the community-based land management approaches, applied in Chukha and Dagana districts, respectively. The study tried to make a comparative assessment of their social, economic and environmental impacts on the participating farmers.

For the estimated 70% of the world population that lives on property without a formal land title, life can be precarious. The absence of ownership documentation raises families’ vulnerability to forced eviction and conflict; it precludes the use of the property to access financial services and other economic benefits; and it diminishes the value of property by restricting its transfer to an informal, opaque market. And yet, in many parts of the world, the process of obtaining a land title is not only expensive but also complicated and sometimes nearly impossible.

The Open Up Guide on Land Governance is a resource  aimed to be used by governments from developing countries to collect and release land-related data to improve data quality, availability, accessibility and use for improved citizen engagement, decision making and innovation. It sets out:

1. Key datasets for land management accountability, and how they should be collected, stored, shared and published for improving land governance and transparency;