This paper uses the case of South Africa’s latest land redistribution strategy known as the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy, to explore whether, and how, research can have direct and positive impacts on beneficiaries of land reform. The study is situated within the practice of action research: to explore how it can generate knowledge that can be shared back and forth between stakeholders, as well as how it may ignite changes that the participants desire. The findings are that Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy is not meeting the overall goals land reform.

This report first reviews how inequality in land distribution has reached extreme levels in Colombia. Then  it  analyzes  the  problem  of concentration of land from different perspectives and indicators based on the agricultural census data from 2016, focusing on the major differences between the extremes.

This research report presents an assessment of local awareness in the Amajuba District of government's proposed Agri-Park and Agri-Village programmes. It also considers secondary data on international examples of Agri-Parks and Agri-Villages.

This paper addresses the disjuncture between women’s formal land rights and their attaining these in practice, examining the four agrarian reforms carried out by progressive governments after 2000 in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. It finds that while all four strengthened women’s formal land rights, only the reforms in Bolivia and Brazil resulted in a significant share and number of female beneficiaries.

Secure tenure and registered land rights are widely believed to be necessary for access to credit, well functioning land markets and economic development. As a result Namibia introduced long term leasehold rights over communal and commercial land for resettlement purposes in order to address preindependence imbalances in land holdings. The purpose is to bring the resettled beneficiaries into the mainstream of the economy, but this has not happened.

Land registration and titling in Africa has been seen as a means of legal empowerment of the poor that can protect smallholders’ and pastoralists’ rights of access to land and other landbased resources.

The Kilimanjaro Initiative is a rural women’s mobilisation from across Africa towards an iconic moment at the foot of Mt Kilimanjaro in October 2016. The Kilimanjaro Initiative was conceived by the Rural Women during a meeting of rural women and civil society organisations in 2012, held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. This initiative aims to create space for us as rural women to be able to participate in decision making processes about land and natural resources.

In pastoral societies women face many challenges. Some describe these as a ‘double burden’ – that is, as pastoralists and as women. However, pastoral women may obtain a significant degree of protection from customary law even if customary institutions are male-dominated. In periods of change (economic, social, political), this protection may be lost, and without protection from statutory laws, women are in danger of “falling between two stools” (Adoko and Levine 2009).

The last decade has witnessed a raft of political and legal reforms in Kenya and the efforts have paid dividends. Kenya is experiencing an unprecedented surge in foreign direct investments in varied infrastructure projects. In most cases the projects are situate in rural areas creating a buzz of excitement and igniting opportunities for poverty reduction initiatives directly or indirectly.

This paper questions the novelty of post-2000 development strategies, in particular the US’s Millennium Challenge Corporation and its ethos of ‘poverty reduction through economic growth.’ Using land as a lens, I explore recent eras of development assistance and ask if the Millennium-era has been appreciably different from pre-2000 development. The backdrop of my study is an MCC-sponsored land reform in Lesotho. I use data drawn from fieldwork in Lesotho to argue that the logics and outcomes of the Development industry’s land policies have remained largely the same.

In South Africa, policies of separate development and restrictions placed on capital expenditure imposed on the lands occupied by the indigenous people during the colonial era prevented the state from implementing the cadastre in the communal areas of the country. The status quo persists to this day, which has resulted in a dual system that promoted investment in areas where private property rights were permitted, but relegated the traditional communities into poverty and disinvestment