Over the last 14 years, substantial progress has been made in carrying forward the civil law reforms and the programs of ownership transfer in Albania. Almost all families and some juridical persons have received documentation giving ownership rights in land and housing units, and most families and enterprises now occupy and use their land premises. Major problems remain. First, there are unresolved conflicting claims to land and properties made by former owners (pre-1945) and current occupants in some villages and urban neighborhoods.

The main argument of this paper is that insecurity of land tenure is a socio-political condition that can be made and unmade. This discussion paper focuses on customary land rights, particularly in the African context. The paper reveals that:

This collection of briefing papers summarises select papers presented at the workshop: "Land Rights for African Development: From Knowledge to Action" held in November 2005.

Land tenure reform remains a key policy issue in Africa, given the large proportion of people relying on land and natural resources for their livelihoods. This paper addresses the exclusionary nature of many processes around land, which can lead to social divisions.

Indigenous land tenure arrangements in South Africa have generally consisted of communal ownership. In this system, who benefited from the land depended on their status as family or clan head. The colonial regime dispossessed Africans of land in favour of European arrivals, or defined family property as ancestral property in which the senior males of the head family were taken as the owners with the rights to inherit. The post-apartheid government conceptualised acess to land for the previously disadvantaged as a human right.

Malawi is facing increasing land scarcity and food insecurity for its large rural population and is in the midst of an on-going land policy reform process. This report asks how these reforms may affect women's land rights in a situation of increasing scarcity and competition for land. Reforms include the formalisation of customary land rights as private land rights as a way to ensure tenure security and equitable access to land. It warns that through this approach, women's rights may become increasingly marginalised.

This study aims to identify how women's capacity to become more involved in decision-making at the local level can be strengthened, particularly in terms of access to natural resources. It also aims to identify the structures through which women secure their systems of production. It focuses on the situation in Niger, where women are increasingly excluded from dominant systems of production: in agricultural areas, they are increasingly excluded from agricultural production and in pastoralist areas, they have lost their herds and had to resort to agriculture.

Summary:
"Wrong-headed agricultural and development policies, counter-insurgency activities, as well
as corruption and cronyism by the Burmese military regime, have all caused a dramatic
decrease in rice production and food security in southern Shan State over the past ten years.
The township of Mong Nai provides a good example of how food security, commonly defined
as the physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food at all times, has

Forest resource access is often conceptualized as a `bundle of rights` held by different social groups at different times.

The study explores the relationship between decentralization and conflict, comparing two case studies in Cambodia and the Philippines. It addresses to what degree and in what ways decentralization influences conflicts that are related to natural resources management (NRM), especially where local institutions are often unrepresentative of, and unaccountable to local communities. In developing countries, the research indicates that sufficient time is an essential component for bringing about genuine and effective local governance, as well as being a means for averting conflict.

This issue of Land Reform, Land Settlement and Cooperatives offers the reader a series of articles and information related to the discussions that will take place in March 2006 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (7–10 March). Needs have changed and there are new dimensions to previous concerns. Gender issues have been integrated into FAO activities, and Land Reform, Land Settlement and Cooperatives has published articles on how the rights of rural women have or have not been taken into account in agrarian reform programmes.