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The Land, Livelihoods and Housing Programme aims at deepening and expanding the focus on these three key issues in Namibia. This thematic approach seeks to reflect the wide-ranging skills exiting at the FNRSS, and was developed to guide ILMI’s activities during the 2014-18 period. The programme is organised in four aspects: institutional, environmental, fiscal and spatial processes.
Ancestral land refers to ‘land of ancestors’. That is the land occupied by ones’ forebearers for generations and left something behind of value for current and future generations. There are usually contestations as to which ancestors the land
belongs because of the history of internal migration and of displacements by stronger nations (tribes).
Secure tenure and registered land rights are widely believed to be necessary for access to credit, well functioning land markets and economic development. As a result Namibia introduced long term leasehold rights over communal and commercial land for resettlement purposes in order to address preindependence imbalances in land holdings. The purpose is to bring the resettled beneficiaries into the mainstream of the economy, but this has not happened.
Land tenure in Namibia is regulated by a variety of Acts, some of which date back to as far as 1937, and some of which are
yet to be approved by Cabinet. This variety of Acts makes it difficult to evaluate the performance of land administration as a
whole, and the appropriateness of coercive instruments with regards to urban land tenure in particular. In this article we
evaluate how urban land tenure regularization practices are conducted in Namibia, and to compare new formal procedures,
Namibia is moving towards an urbanised country. This is illustrated by the fact that at independence Namibia was only 28% urbanized by 2011 urbanization has already grown to 42% and current projections are that by 2020 urbanization would by 66% and more than 70% by 2030. As the urban population is growing the need for serviced land and housing is also growing. As Namibia has failed to respond through appropriate strategies to facilitate this change in the human geography of the country it resulted in the growth of poorly serviced informal settlements.
There has been rapid growth in urban populations in Namibia (Pendleton et al, 2014). This growth is amongst predominantly amongst less educated, poorer migrants from rural areas in search of opportunities in urban areas. From the data available the estimated shortfall of either titled land or houses appears to be above 150 000 and increasing at about 11 000 per year (Weber, 2017). This trend of urbanisation is occurring not only in Namibia but across the world, particularly now in developing countries.
This Working Paper, the first in the series to be published by ILMI, will briefly review progress in both land reform sectors and raise a few issues that continue to pose challenges to the programme.
ILMI is delighted to publish this bibliography in its Working Paper Series. It sees this as a small
contribution to encourage and facilitate research on land reform in Namibia. Perhaps more
ambitiously, this bibliography may serve as a starting point to collect the titles listed in order to
strengthen the resource centre on land administration and land reform.
This document outlines some pertinent questions regarding urbanization in Namibia, provides central policy recommendations and identifies relevant research gaps to guide the policy debate on urban land reform as part of the 2nd National Land Conference scheduled for 1-5 October 2018.
Het hoofddoel van China’s landbouw- en plattelandsbeleid is behoud van voedselzekerheid in eigen land en bijdragen aan de voedselzekerheid in de wereld door duurzaam gebruik van natuurlijke hulpbronnen en verbetering van de landbouwproductiecapaciteit voor de lange termijn. In veel gebieden in China gaat de landbouwproductiecapaciteit op lange termijn echter achteruit door intensieve landbouw en de daarmee gepaard gaande degradatie van de hulpbronnen land en water.