In many parts of Africa, legal services organisations have developed innovative ways for using legal processes to help disadvantaged groups have more secure land rights. Their approaches, tools and methods vary widely – from legal literacy training to paralegals programmes, from participatory methodologies to help local groups register their lands or negotiate with government or the private sector through to legal representation and strategic use of public interest litigation.

Land Policy Reform, Customary Rule of Law and the Peace Process in Sierra Leone
Jon Unruh. African Journal of Legal Studies (2008) 2: 94-117

Toward sustainable livelihoods after war:
Reconstituting rural land tenure systems. Jon Unruh 2008. 32 103-115

In most areas within the livestock wildlife environment interface, nomadism by pastoralists is gradually being replaced by sedentarism and migration corridors are closed by settlements from the ever-increasing human population. Faced by a reducing pasture resource and yet slow to adopt de-stocking, pastoralists have now embraced the practical and novel ‘Conservancy’ concept in order to earn from tourism and subsidise income from livestock. However, sustaining wildlife on pasture land is a challenge that has now found a solution in the form of conservancy zonation schemes.

Over 943,069 hectares of land in rural Cambodia have been granted to private companies as economic land concessions, for the development of agro-industrial plantations. Thirty-six of these 59 concessions have been granted in favour of foreign business interests or prominent political and business figures. These statistics exclude smaller economic land concessions granted at the provincial level, for which information on numbers and ownership has not been disclosed.

This ADI study in collaboration with the Land Information Centre seeks to understand the relationship between land titling and poverty reduction in two sangkat of Prey Nup District, Sihanoukville Municipality.

Land conflicts occur in Lao PDR in both the urban and rural environment. Recent research work points to an increase of land conflicts in a range of areas however it has been difficult to monitor how conflict resolution activities are actually working because detailed information on the types and nature of land conflicts, their occurrence rates and resolution mechanisms applied was not available.

This paper examines recent conflicts over freshwater fisheries in Cambodia using the notion of accumulation through dispossession as a conceptual starting point. Despite a recent material turn, theoretical literature on the political economy of the environment has only partially incorporated an ecologically nuanced view of nature into analyses of its transformation under processes of capital accumulation.

Lands Commission Act CHAPTER 57:07 LANDS COMMISSION ACT CAP. 57:07 An Act to provide for the establishment of the Lands Commission to miti­ gate the problems of land allocation and improve land administration in The Gambia, and for connected matters. 

This report draws lessons from experience of using legal processes to secure local resource rights within the context of foreign investment projects in Africa. Security of local resource rights is a major challenge in many parts of Africa. The analysis of relevant law reveals that resource rights associated with more powerful interests (foreign investment) tend to enjoy greater legal protection compared to those held by local resource users.

As with natural resource management reform processes elsewhere in East Africa, Tanzanian CWM has become highly contested terrain, both physically and conceptually. The linear, centrally-led, devolutionary reform processes that were conceptualised by donor and NGO supporters of CWM in the mid-1990s have not materialised. Rather, multi-faceted political and institutional conflicts over the control of valuable land and wildlife resources characterise CWM in Tanzania today.

Conservation enterprises are commercial activities designed to create benefit flows that support a conservation objective. The Koija ‘Starbeds’ Ecolodge was created jointly by a community group, a private sector partner and the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) to help protect a critical wildlife corridor and habitat along the Ewaso Nyiro River in the Samburu Heartland (www.awf.org). Many conservation enterprises claim success mainly based on their noble intentions,