This article explores strategies for engaging geographically fragmented urban communities as active participants in conceptually re-mapping their former localities. It looks in detail at the ongoing Retracing Salford project in Salford, UK, which employs the use of everyday objects and oral histories to engage and enable former residents to reconnect with their recently demolished neighbourhoods and each other. The project also seeks to document an urban working class history largely overlooked by the large-scale institutions.

This article explores the ways in which (a) Indigenous youth involved in an HIV intervention took up and reclaimed their cultures as a project of defining ‘self’, and (b) how Indigenous ‘culture’ can be used as a tool for resistance, HIV prevention and health promotion. Data were drawn from the Taking Action Project: Using arts-based approaches to develop Aboriginal youth leadership in HIV prevention.

Tanzania and Mozambique — countries of vast mountain ranges and open stretches of plateaus — now face a growing land problem. As soil degradation, climate change and population growth place enormous strains on the natural resources that sustain millions of people, multinational companies are also gunning for large swaths of land across both countries. Caught between these pressures, many poor, rural communities get displaced or decide to sell their collectively held land.

Much of the international commons literature reveals a decreased functioning of local traditional institutions that regulate natural resource harvesting. In South Africa, it is believed that the creation of new democratic structures at the end of Apartheid has contributed significantly to the deterioration in traditional resource regulation and this in turn has led to the extensive resource degradation seen in parts of the country. Many of these assertions, though, remain anecdotal in nature.

This study assessed forest cover change from 1985 to 2016, analyzed community perception on forest cover change and its drivers, and suggested possible solutions in northern Ethiopia. Landsat images of 1985, 2000 and 2016, household interviews and focus group discussions were used. While dense forests and open forests increased by 8.2% and 32.3% respectively between 1985 and 2000, they decreased by 10.4% and 9.8% respectively from 2000 to 2016. Grasslands and cultivated land decreased in the first period by 37.3% and 5.5% but increased in the second period by 89.5% and 28.5% respectively.

The concept of landscape has been increasingly used, in the last decades, in policy and land use planning, both in regard to so-called “special” and to “ordinary” or “everyday” landscapes. This has raised the importance of local and public participation in all issues that refer to landscapes and the definition of the groups that “have a stake” in the landscape.

Kenya is the most recent African state to acknowledge customary tenure as producing lawful property rights, not merely rights of occupation and use on government or public lands. This paper researches this new legal environment. This promises land security for 6 to 10 million Kenyans, most of who are members of pastoral or other poorer rural communities. Analysis is prefaced with substantial background on legal trends continentally, but the focus is on Kenya’s Community Land Act, 2016, as the framework through which customary holdings are to be identified and registered.

Peru has formalized property rights for 1,200 indigenous communities in the Amazon. These titled indigenous lands cover over 11 million hectares and represent approximately 17% of the national forest area. Progress has been possible due to multiple reforms that recognized indigenous rights to collective lands, a process characterized by complex and protracted conflicts among competing interests, shifting government priorities and continued resistance by indigenous people to contest efforts that undercut their interests.

Recognition and respect for tenure rights has long been recognized as an important concern for development, conservation, and natural resource governance. This paper discusses why secure tenure rights for local communities, indigenous peoples and women are central to good natural resource governance and important for livelihoods and human rights, as recognized in multiple international conventions. The paper reviews both challenges and opportunities for securing rights in practice and highlights successful cases of tenure reform.

This report is based on information submitted to KHRG in September 2012 by a community member from Yangon Region trained by KHRG to monitor human rights conditions. It describes events occurring in Pyay City, Bago Division, on August 3rd 2012 when City Development Committee staff and policemen carried out a nighttime city-sweep to remove homeless families. The authorities used a public rubbish truck to forcibly detain the families and then to transport them to Okshittpin Forest, which is halfway between Pyay City and the border with Rakhine State.

This report contains the full transcript of an interview conducted by a KHRG researcher in May 2011 with a villager from Ler Doh Township, Nyaunglebin District. The researcher interviewed Naw Ka---, a 50-year-old villager who described the situation prior to and after her community was forcibly relocated by the Tatmadaw in 2007. Naw Ka--- cited the following human rights abuses in her testimony: forced labour, including sentry duty and portering; arrest and detention, including physical violence against detained villagers; forced relocation; and movement restrictions.