What rural dwellers in the Global South experience as land grabbing, tends to be seen in the Global North as ‘agricultural investment’. The World Bank has been at the forefront of a drive to legitimate these investments, convening to win support for a code of conduct based on Responsible Agricultural Investment (RAI) principles. Many key civil society groups reject the proposal for a code of conduct, objecting to the top-down process by which it was formulated and arguing that it was more likely to legitimate than prevent land grabbing.

Preliminary:
1. Objectives...
2. Nature and scope.....
General matters:
3. Guiding principles of responsible tenure governance...
3A General principles...
3B Principles of implementation...
4. Rights and responsibilities related to tenure...
5. Policy, legal and organizational frameworks related to tenure...
6. Delivery of services.....
Legal recognition and allocation of tenure rights and duties:
7. Safeguards...

This assessment is in response to the 6th draft of the NLUP, released in May
2015, following months of public and expert consultations. It outlines some
of the key positive and negative points of the new draft. The new draft NLUP
has taken on board many of the concerns and recommendations raised by
the public during the consultation process, and includes several key issues
that would greatly improve Myanmar’s land governance arrangements.
However, some serious concerns remain. As in our past responses to the

နိုဝင်ဘာလ ၂၀၁၄
မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ၏ အမျိုးသားမြေအသုံးချမှုမူဝါဒမူကြမ်းနှင့်ပတ်သက်၍ Global Witness ၏
အဆိုပြုလွှာအနှစ်ချုပ်
ဒီမိုကရေစီနိုင်ငံအဖြစ် ပြုပြင်ပြောင်းလဲမှုများပြုလုပ်ရာတွင်မြန်မာနိုင်ငံအစိုးရသည်
အမျိုးသားမြေအသုံးချမှုမူဝါဒမူကြမ်းကို ၂၀၁၄ ခုနှစ် အောက်တိုဘာလတွင်ထုတ်ပြန်ခဲ့ပြီး
ပြည်သူလူထုနှင့် တိုင်ပင်ဆွေးနွေးရန်နောက်ဆက်တွဲမြေယာဥပဒေတစ်ခုအတွက် အစီအစဉ်များကိုလည်းထုတ်ပြန်ခဲ့ပါသည်။

Summary: "As part of its transition to democratic reform, in October 2014, the Government of Myanmar released a draft national land policy and plans for a subsequent Land Law, for public consultation. The importance of this cannot be understated and Global Witness welcomes both the potential for a strong codified framework for land, and the opportunity for public participation. It is crucial, however, that consultation is meaningful and genuinely participatory, and the resulting feedback is incorporated into the policy and Land Law in a process that is fully transparent.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: "In recent years, many governments globally have formally recognized community land and natural resource tenure, either based on existing customary practices or more recently established land governance arrangements.1 These tenure arrangements have been called by a variety of names, such as community, customary, communal, collective, indigenous, ancestral, or native land rights recognition. In essence, they seek to establish the rights of a group to obtain joint tenure security over their community’s land.

Preliminary: 1. Objectives... 2. Nature and scope..... General matters: 3. Guiding principles of responsible tenure governance... 3A General principles... 3B Principles of implementation... 4. Rights and responsibilities related to tenure... 5. Policy, legal and organizational frameworks related to tenure... 6. Delivery of services..... Legal recognition and allocation of tenure rights and duties: 7. Safeguards... 8. Public land, fisheries and forests... 9. Indigenous peoples and other communities with customary tenure systems... 10. Informal tenure.....

The importance of land governance in the socio-economic development of a nation cannot be overemphasized, as the allocation of land across competing uses can determine the type and level of economic activities that can be carried out by individuals, groups, and businesses. The need for a systematic assessment of land governance arises from three factors: policy importance, institutional fragmentation, and technical complexity.

Members of rural communities in Namibia often lack a basic understanding of what their user rights and responsibilities are under the Communal Land Reform Act and are also unaware of their rights to object to a proposed land allocation or to appeal a decision once made. The large-scale acquisition of land for agriculture and conservation projects often displace local communities or reduce their access to control and ownership of key resources due to the gaps between good legislation and inadequate implementation and enforcement.

March 2014 – This article presents a joint FAO and World Bank initiative to integrate the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security principles on gender equality into the Bank financed land administration projects in six Western Balkans countries. Even though the land agencies generate inordinate amounts of data, these are not efficiently used to inform policy makers, because of lack of capacity and manpower to properly process and link them between sub-sectors and over time.

This rapid evidence assessment (REA) investigates how public overseas investments supported by developed country governments respect legitimate land tenure rights, especially in countries without a strong system for protecting existing tenure rights. The REA assesses material from the limited number of studies (20) available about donor-supported investment projects involving land. Most are from African countries, but the evidence also includes cases from Afghanistan, Guatemala and Cambodia.

FAC Policy Brief 55by Blessings Chinsinga and Michael Chasukwa There is often a mismatch between the apparent benevolent intents and the practical manifestations of the large scale land deals. The empirical realities of the large-scale land deals call for critical scrutiny and interrogation of the underlying interests of the stakeholders involved to assess the extent to which they genuinely prioritize win-win scenarios. As the experiences of the Green Belt Initiative (GBI) in Malawi demonstrated, the smallholder farmer is almost always the loser.