International standards can help businesses fill gaps in national law but addressing issues at scale requires systematic governance reform. Law is part of the problem as often are governments. In many countries features of the law facilitate dispossession. It is often not technical capacity that is missing but the political power to confront vested interests. The challenges are steep but need to be confronted.
The Decision on Land Tenure (Decision 26/ COP.14) by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) recognises the importance of responsible land governance for sustainable land management and restoration, as well as for combatting desertification, land degradation and drought.
This study set out to estimate the effects of large-scale agricultural investments (LSAIs) on household food security in one community each in Kenya, Madagascar and Mozambique. An endogenous switching regression model was adopted to control for a possible selection bias due to unobserved factors. It was found that households with members employed by large-scale agricultural investment companies were more likely larger households headed by younger migrant males holding smaller plots and fewer livestock than non-engaged households.
Land distribution is highly skewed in Africa, where women’s ownership of land is a small percentage of that owned by men. Women frequently lack the resources to acquire land in their own right and are further disadvantaged by discriminatory inheritance laws, customary practices and market structures. This report summarizes presentations at the symposium on women’s rights and access to land.
The research aims to develop a legal and policy framework that will facilitate integration of environmental protection with socio-economic activities during land use decision-making, as a mechanism to achieve sustainability. A statutory duty of care, with respect to land use, would make it clear that land owners or occupiers have definite responsibilities to protect and enhance the sustainability of the land that they use or manage; it would aim to reverse existing land degradation, or include a duty to inform other land owners or the state about some kinds of foreseeable degradation.
The paper examines the pace of land acquisitions in terms of creating legislative and policy options to safeguard local communities that are directly affected, including compensation for land that is taken, and protecting community interests in the socio-economic and environmental continuum of investment projects, from design to implementation. The absence or weakness of formal landholding and land registration systems was evident in most research sites in Isiolo and Lamu.
The complexity of tenure claims in the informal settlements has been difficult to incorporate into the formal systems owing to their dynamic and continuously changing nature. Innovative tools are therefore required to capture these claims. This requires the development of a cadastral data model specifically for informal settlements that would document such claims to make it easier to manage the current situation as well as prepare for future formalization processes such as regularization or relocation.
The accelerated exploration of sub-surface mineral resources across much of Africa has created the need for proper administration of sub-surface land rights. The trend world-wide is a separate cadastre for mining.
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