This analytical paper explores how political economy analysis can help practitioners make sense of the issues, and distils insights from practical experience on how legal empowerment initiatives can rise to the challenge.

It is aimed at legal empowerment practioners and analysts.

Over the past decade, Laos has experienced a land rush by foreign investors seeking to gain large tracts of land for hydropower, mining, and plantation projects. The rapid pace of the phenomenon has prompted signif icant concern by international observers, Lao civil society, and certain sections of the government, regarding the impacts upon farmers that are dispossessed of their land and communal resources. However, both investors and peasant communities alike have differing experiences with the investment process.

On 18 October 2014 the Myanmar government released a much-awaited draft national land use policy. Land and how it is governed is of fundamental importance for Myanmar society. The current laws mainly benefit private companies and not small-holder farmers in the country, who represent more then 75% of the population. The current laws also do not respect traditional and customary practices of the country's ethnic minority groups. This new TNI briefing examines the draft national land policy and assesses whether it is pro-business or pro-poor.

This report is the fruit of collaboration between ILC, IFAD and FAO. It provides information on the historical background of the Convention and its Optional Protocol, the working methods of the Committee, as well as a summary of information provided in reports of selected countries. NOTE: See also the 2010 update of this document.

Political reactions ‘from below’ to global land grabbing have been vastly more varied and complex than is usually assumed. This essay introduces a collection of ground- breaking studies that discuss responses that range from various types of organized and everyday resistance to demands for incorporation or for better terms of incorporation into land deals. Initiatives ‘from below’ in response to land deals have involved local and transnational alliances and the use of legal and extra-legal methods, and have brought victories and defeats.

Across the developing world, rural women suffer widespread gender-based discrimination in laws, customs and practices cause severe inequalities in their ability to access, control, own and use land and limit their participation in decision-making at all levels of land governance.

Indigenous, mobile, and local communities all over the world have for millennia played a critical role in conserving the earth’s patrimony. They have protected forests, wetlands, rangelands, watersheds, hunting grounds, rivers and streams and other water catchment systems that are to day the basis of prosperity for all nations. “Community” husbandry of these resources has been done for a wide range of reasons ranging from economic, cultural, spiritual, aesthetic to many others.

In view of the lack of human resources with specific competencies in customary land rights, within the past two decades FAO and various non-governmental organizations have developed materials and methodologies for the dissemination of the Land Law and the participatory delimitation of rural communities. Materials and methodologies were developed based on practical experience of several land projects implemented over a period of approximately 20 years.

Landjepik, diefstal van land, gebeurt vaak in Nederland. Een huiseigenaar trekt bewust maar onopgemerkt een strook gemeentegrond bij zijn tuin of verplaatst het hek op het land van zijn buurman. Een boer vergroot bewust zijn akker door een deel van de grond van zijn buurman bij zijn land te ploegen.

A community paralegal, also known as a grassroots legal advocate or a barefoot lawyer, is a community resource person and mobiliser, trained in basic law and legal procedures and in skills like mediation, negotiation, education, and advocacy.

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.