Across Africa, Asia and Latin America, investors are increasingly approaching rural communities seeking land for logging, mining, and agribusiness ventures. Even in those situations where the investors have followed FPIC guidelines and undertaken a formal “consultation” with the community, these consultations are generally conducted in a context of significant power and information asymmetries. Part of the power imbalance comes from communities’ lack of information about the value of community lands and natural resources.

Property rights are a cornerstone of economic development and social justice. One of the most fundamental ways of understanding the strength of property rights is through citizens’ perceptions of them. Yet perceptions of tenure security have never been collected at a global scale, obscuring a clear understanding of the magnitude and nature of citizens’ experience, and preventing the issue of property rights from receiving the visibility and attention it deserves. The Global Property Rights Index, or PRIndex, seeks to address this gap.

Goal 5 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) "Achieve gender equality and empoer all women and girls" regonizes the fundamental role of women in achieving poverty reduction, food security and nutrition. Target 5.a aims to "undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance and natural resources, in accordance with national laws".

Goal 5 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) "Achieve gender equality and empoer all women and girls" regonizes the fundamental role of women in achieving poverty reduction, food security and nutrition. Target 5.a aims to "undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance and natural resources, in accordance with national laws".

The recognition by the Constitution that all land belongs to the people of Kenya and that such land can be held by the people as communities has sought to correct a historical fallacy that has existed in Kenya since the start of the colonial period. The Colonial Government, introduced laws and policies whose effect was to disregard communal approaches to land ownership and use and instead prefer private land tenure arrangements. The justification for this approach was both juridical and economic.

La Unidad Agroecológica y Política “Machete y Garabato” emerge en el año 2015 como articulación de un grupo de estudiantes –pasantes– de la carrera de Agronomía de la Universidad Técnica de Quevedo (UTQ); y de campesinos y campesinas del Centro Agrícola Cantonal de Quevedo.

During its transition from racial apartheid to democracy in 1994, South Africa’s government announced it would strengthen the tenure rights of the estimated 16 million citizens who lived on communal land. By 2012, however, the government’s own reports concluded that the country had made little progress in the area of communal tenure reform.

This study provides a case study of the mango value chain in Kenya and seeks to better understand key linkages between land rights and project outcomes. It explores (1) whether and how land rights for Kenya’s mango farmers affect project uptake and success; and (2) what (if any) are this project’s unintended consequences on land tenure in implementation areas.

This paper contributes to an emerging literature on free land arrangements in developing countries. We argue that in-depth empirical analysis is crucial to understand the specific terms of land arrangements. Using mixed quantitative and qualitative data collected among rural-urban migrants in Thailand, we categorize land arrangements along four dimensions: self-reported categories by the actors, the nature of the relationship between the parties involved, the nature of the payment made, and how explicit or binding are the contractual terms.

In rural areas agricultural plots are seldom delineated and can be encroached upon by neighbours. Under these circumstances labour supply can be inefficiently distorted to safeguard the plots from encroachment. Using panel data, we study the variation of household labour supply following a land registration programme which has demarcated agricultural landholdings with cornerstones and has issued a documentary evidence of the household land rights.

The ‘war on drugs’ has failed. Despite an increase in law enforcement, production levels of coca – the crop used to make cocaine – have hardly altered in the last decade.A 2017 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that coca cultivation in Colombia had increased by 52 per cent; thus, there is an urgent need to find alternative policies to counter illicit behaviour.

Where rights over natural resources are contested, the effectiveness of conservation may be undermined and it can be difficult to estimate the welfare impacts of conservation restrictions on local people. In particular, researchers face the dilemma of estimating respondents’ Willingness To Pay (WTP) for rights to resources, or their Willingness To Accept (WTA) compensation for foregoing these rights.