The pastoral areas of Ethiopia are witnessing radical change in terms of both increasingly restricted mobility and access to vital resources. A cause and consequence of such constraints has been a move toward sedentarised forms of livestock and agricultural production. This is occurring in a political and socioeconomic vacuum, in which the customary institutions responsible for resource allocation and access to land are becoming weaker, and where the Ethiopian government has yet to develop a clear policy or strategy for resource distribution and tenure security in pastoral areas.

In August 2013, the Government of Uganda gazetted the National Land Policy (NLP) after having initiated the policy process over three decades ago. The NLP is to provide an over-arching policy framework for land governance and management, consolidating the many other policies and laws that have governed land and natural resources since colonial times.

This paper investigates how Borana pastoralists of southern Ethiopia have adapted resource use and livestock mobility practices amid multiple constraints including rising population, loss of rangeland to other pastoral communities and changing access rights, among others. This study uses an innovative multi-scalar methodology to understand how herders' grazing management decisions are made within a context of communal regulations governing access to resources.

The current solutions to delivering land administration services have very limited global outreach; 75 percent of the world's population do not have access to formal systems to register and safeguard their land rights. The majority of these are the poor and the most vulnerable in society and without any level of security of tenure they constantly live in threat of eviction.

Common approaches to mapping green infrastructure in urbanised landscapes invariably focus on measures of land use or land cover and associated functional or physical traits. However, such one-dimensional perspectives do not accurately capture the character and complexity of the landscapes in which urban inhabitants live. The new approach presented in this paper demonstrates how open-source, high spatial and temporal resolution data with global coverage can be used to measure and represent the landscape qualities of urban environments.

The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) presented the Annual Report 2014/15 for the Communal Property Associations (CPAs). To date, 1 428 CPAs were registered, with 48 being registered in the last financial year. Challenges faced by CPAs included ongoing conflicts amongst CPA members which centred on governance issues, and the fact that some CPAs were insolvent and needed an injection of funds to put them on a sound footing. 29 CPAs were untraceable, 20 CPAs had lost (through sale or loss by attachment) 10 668 hectares of land, and nine CPAs were under administration.

The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DLDLR) provided a progress report on its interventions to address the challenges arising from the actions of the Rama Communal Property Association (CPA). The CPA had initiated some income generating activities on its land, which included a quarry business, and had started a museum and an entertainment centre that featured a cinema. In partnership with the Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality and private investors the CPA was in the process of developing houses on its land.

The Department of Land Affairs introduced the Provision of Land and Assistance Amendment Bill and explained that this Bill was intended as an administrative piece of legislation to supplement the provisions of the principal Act. Currently, in terms of that Act, the Department was authorised to acquire land, but was not authorised to acquire the immovable property essential to the proper use of that land – such as irrigation schemes, plant and equipment, farming implements or livestock. Without having those powers, the Department could not fulfil its functions properly.

The Deputy Minister of Public Works presented the latest version of the Expropriation Bill, with some amendments that had been proposed by the Committee or other commentators at earlier sessions. Members firstly wanted to clarify whether this Bill was not preventing other spheres of government from exercising expropriation powers, and the Deputy Minister clarified that any such processes would have to be in line with legislation and following the precepts of Chapter 3 of the Bill.

To provide for the designation of certain land; to regulate the subdivision of such land and the settlement of persons thereon;_andto provide for matters connected therewith

The Department achieved 56% of Q4 targets and 50% of Annual Performance Report targets in its Administration programme while annual targets on vacancies filled and disciplinary cases were partially achieved. In Geospatial and Cadastral Services, the Department achieved 77% of its Q4 targets and 69% of its APR targets. The Rural Development programme achieved 71% of its Q4 targets and 86% of its APR targets. The annual target for establishment of rural information desks was not achieved and the target of jobs created was partially achieved.

The Committee welcomed the Quarterly Reports as they showed the progress that had been made in dealing with claims. However discomfort was expressed at the pace of restitution. The Committee was very interested in the research aspect of the Commission’s brief.