The recent wave of land deals for agribusiness investments has highlighted the widespread demand for greater accountability in the governance of land and investment. Legal frameworks influence opportunities for accountability, and recourse to law has featured prominently in grassroots responses to the land deals.
Despite progressive provisions on gender equality in Tanzania’s land laws, women have little representation in land allocation decisions, including meetings of village councils and village assemblies. Mainstreaming gender in local regulations can help to address this problem.
An estimated 60 per cent of the world’s 17 million refugees currently reside in cities, where they often lack access to financial assistance and legal protection.(1) In their absence, displaced populations depend on participation in formal and, more frequently, informal markets for livelihood generation.
From the mid-2000s, a commodity boom underpinned a wave of land use investments in low- and middle-income countries. While agribusiness, mining and petroleum concessions often involve promises of jobs and public revenues, they have also prompted concerns about land dispossession, exclusionary investment models and infringements of the rights of vulnerable groups.
This report draws on 10 case studies of recent large-scale land deals and aims to improve understanding of the investment chains that underpin the deals, and to identify ‘pressure points’ for effective public action to ensure that investments respond to local and national development agendas and promote inclusive sustainable development. The findings of this research demonstrate the wide scope for strategies to be targeted at diverse actors, by a wide range of players, to ensure that investments uphold the Voluntary Guidelines (VGGT).
This brief study has been produced by the partners of the CoNGOs consortium to share our different knowledge and experience, and to set out a joint understanding of the current state of play in relation to community forestry in Cameroon.
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