Bilateral development finance institutions (DFIs) play an increasingly prominent role in the international aid architecture. Because of their position between development and commercial worlds, DFIs can be a key player in efforts to align private sector conduct with international norms and standards. 

March 2014 – This paper critically examines how lease farming can be a viable livelihood option for landless rural poor, especially women in India. In the absence of land ownership and education, the majority of landless and semi-landless rural women are engaged as low wage agricultural labourers and remain trapped in poverty and indebtedness. Lease farming by landless women in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh shows a pathway for reducing their poverty and enabling upward social mobility.

Land cover data is widely used for the design and monitoring of land use policies despite the incapability of this type of data to represent multiple land uses and land management activities within the same landscape. In this study, we operationalized the concept of land systems for the case of the Lao PDR (Laos). Distinct land systems like shifting cultivation and plantations (land concessions) cannot be fully captured by land cover inventories alone, in spite of their relevance for land use policies.

Growing numbers of policies and programmes aim to integrate small-scale rural producers into agricultural value chains. But significant questions remain over how best to: recognise the possibly divergent visions, interests and constraints of various actors; address often substantial power imbalances; and ultimately promote agency among rural producers and their communities – that is, their ability to choose, act and influence realities around them.

Tenure risk – or the risk of dispute between investors and local people over land or natural resource claims – is endemic in emerging markets. There are hundreds of recorded incidents of tenure disputes creating delays, violence, project cancellation and even bankruptcy at a corporate level. These tenure disputes create lose-lose outcomes for investors, local people and national governments while robbing emerging markets of the developmental benefits of responsible land investments.

New research by the Quantifying Tenure Risk (QTR) initiative has revealed that land disputes can cause losses of up to $101 million across a range of agricultural projects in Africa, while at the same time causing significant harm and stress to local communities who have a claim to the land.

In response, the initiative has developed a new publicly available economic modelling tool to accurately determine the potential cost of a dispute in a bid to help companies avoid harmful investments. 

Date: 2018

Source: Foncier & Développement

Cette note de synthèse reprend les présentations et les débats qui ont nourri l’atelier sur les trajectoires de politiques foncières en Afrique de l’Ouest et à Madagascar, organisé du 15 au 19 janvier 2018 à Saint-Louis du Sénégal, à l’initiative du Comité technique « Foncier & développement » de la Coopération française (CTFD).

The central objective of this working paper produced by Jean-Christophe Diepart and Thol Sem, is to examine the recognition and formalisation of peasants’ land rights against the backdrop of Cambodian history and political economy of land and agrarian change.

It aims to understand how colonialism, war, socialism and the regional integration against a neoliberal background have shaped the land rights of smallholder farmers in contemporary Cambodia.