Our blogs on Land

In a world grappling with numerous challenges related to climate change, socio-economic issues, and migration, the significance of land cannot be overstated. Land is not just a concern for the land community but for all communities, as it holds the potential to address critical global issues. Recognizing the need for a comprehensive approach to land governance, a global land agenda is being proposed. This blog explores the origins, objectives, and actions required to pave the way for effective land governance on a global scale.

In the context of the joint IOS-Fair Transitions-LANDac International Conference, the parallel session on Justice at the heart of land governance: Envisioning the intersections of informal justice with land conflict, climate vulnerability, and food insecurity took place on June 30th, 2023.  

Despite being a part of national government planning, large-scale agricultural investments in Ethiopia have not been meeting expectations. Focusing on Gambella region in southwestern Ethiopia, this policy brief examines the reasons why, and proposes three policy actions to improve the situation.

In the past decade, the land rights movement, particularly the women's land rights movement, has significantly made progress in strengthening the recognition of land rights in national, regional and international instruments. Despite the progress, translating these recommendations into legislative provisions and practices in countries has been slow or minimal

An in-depth global review of land resource resource grabbing is both timely and essential reading. The great thing about this Routledge Handbook is that it is not locked away behind a prohibitively expensive paywall.   This open access handbook edited by  Andreas Neef, Chanrith Ngin, Tsegaye Moreda and Sharlene Mollett provides a cutting-edge and comprehensive analysis of the many forces driving global land and resource grabbing.

The Routledge Handbook of Global Land and Resource Grabbing provides fresh methodological, theoretical and empirical insights. It presents and discusses resource grabbing research in a holistic manner by addressing how the rush for land and other natural resources, including water, forests and minerals, is intertwined with agriculture, mining, tourism, energy, biodiversity conservation, climate change, carbon markets and conflict.

The handbook is truly global and interdisciplinary, with case studies from the Global South and Global North, and chapter contributions from practitioners, activists and academics, with emerging and Indigenous authors featuring strongly across the chapters.

The handbook will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in land and resource grabbing, agrarian studies, development studies, critical human geography, global studies and natural resource governance.

Under the umbrella of the Land Dialogues series, the second webinar of this year’s series “Indigenous Land Rights and the Biodiversity COP15: Six Months On” took place on May 25th, 2023. The webinar drew in a little over 350 participants and featured panelists from Indigenous women leaders to programme officers. The series is organized by a consortium of organizations, including the Land Portal Foundation, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Tenure Facility.