Bottom-up accountability initiatives and large scale land acquisition in sub-saharan Africa : final technical report

Understanding and interpretation of the CFS/FAO Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (Tenure Guidelines or TGs) is a key factor in communities’ capabilities for collective action, especially through the organization of land pressure groups. TGs help people to engage critically with existing legal frameworks. In this study, community knowledge was enhanced regarding customary as well as statutory laws which protect rights, while enabling people to identify shortcomings/gaps/bias in the existing laws working against them. It also emerged that issues of land grabs similarly engender the grabbing of other resources like water, forests and pasture.