Indigenous & Community Land Rights

This is a regional overview of the main legal and regulatory questions concerning ownership or access to and management of land-based natural resources.

La creación de Areas protegidas (AP) en la década del 70 se dio sobre espacios ocupados por pueblos indígenas. Durante 20 años no existieron demasiados conflictos entre estas áreas y los habitantes ancestrales. Pero con el ascenso del movimiento indígena en los años 90 y sus demandas territoriales, sumada a un marco de crisis general la presión sobre las AP creció.

A photojournalist put aside his camera to comfort a young Karen woman at the birth of her son in a jungle hideout...

"Twenty years ago when RECOFTC was born, community forestry was just emerging onto the global scene as a viable policy option to restore degraded forests and to provide livelihood support for local communities living adjacent to forests.

Die Armee der SPDC Militärdiktatur ist mittlerweile auf eine Truppenstärke von 500.000 Soldaten angewachsen und jetzt selbst nur noch durch ein System der Angst zu kontrollieren. Fast jeder hat einen Vorgesetzten und die Exekution ist nur einen Schuß entfernt. Der militärische Geheimdienst ist überall und selbst die höheren Ränge werden oft ‘Reinigungen’ nach sowietischem Vorbild unterzogen.

A fact-finding mission team was formed as a result of consultative meetings on the land dispute between the village government and pastoralists in Vilima Vitatu village in Babati district.

Historicamente a realidade fundiária brasileira, quer rural quer urbana, foi marcada pela existência de regulação formal, mas não aplicada integralmente, fazendo com que as regras do acesso à terra sejam bastante frágeis e incipientes.

Community forestry has great potential to improve the welfare of the estimated 450 million impoverished people living in and around forests in Asia. But the extent to which this potential is realized depends strongly upon whether communities are able to secure the benefits that community managed forests generate, and whether these actually reach the poorest at the community level.

To celebrate RECOFTC's 20th anniversary, this collection of articles shares the stories of those who have worked to further RECOFTC's mission over the past twenty years.

1. Tribute to the founder

2. Birth of a movement: The later years

3. Why communities manage forests

4. Eyewitness to the first 10 years

5. The

For historical reasons, Kenya inherited a highly skewed system of land ownership at independence in 1963. British colonialism in Kenya was not merely administrative. Rather, it was accompanied by massive and widespread land alienation for the benefit of settler agriculture.

Introduction: "Since its independence in 1975, and most notably in the last decade, Angola has struggled to create a legal framework adequate to address the complex issues relating to the country’s land. In 2004, the country enacted a new land law1 that sought to strengthen perceived areas of weakness in prior legislation.

Institutional framework for land administration and management being a whole set of services that make the land tenure system within Kenya socially, ecologically and economically relevant and operational has generally failed to operationalise the general functional components of land administration i.e. juridical, regulatory, fiscal, cadastral and adjudicative, efficiently.