The World Bank is pleased to announce the 17th Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty from March 14 to 18, 2016 at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington D.C. The conference theme will be: Scaling up Responsible Land Governance.

What Works and New Frontiers

Recording of rights for all is increasingly within reach, with services becoming more affordable and appropriate, making tenure more secure. Technology innovations make geospatial data increasingly accessible, along with the growth in capacity to automate processes and manage information, consumer feedback, and electronic payments. Experience with managing systematic registration at-scale and fit-for purpose approaches, participatory mapping, and other forms of crowd sourcing are expanding. The question is no longer whether it can be done but to guarantee inclusiveness, sustainability, reliability, keeping systems current, building capacity and to ensure that better land information and more tenure security contribute to wider societal goals.  Achieving change requires policy space, leadership, courage and sustained effort over time. In particular, land needs to be fully integrated in country strategies, supported by the Finance and Development Ministries in order to transcend policy cycles.  This edition of the conference will pay special attention to working at scale, mainstreaming innovations, and sustaining investments for greater impact.

Conference structure

The opening session of the conference takes place on Monday March 14 at 5pm and the conference will conclude with a closing session and reception on Thursday March 17th 2016.  Preceding the opening session on March 14, a pre-conference workshop on ‘innovations in land governance research and monitoring’ will take place.  An innovation fair featuring how innovations in technology and open data can help improve land governance at scale will be held on March 17 and a post-conference learning day with MasterClasses is held on March 18 will offer hands-on classes to familiarize participants with cutting edge tools and techniques developed to help policy makers.

The core of the conference consists of sessions with accepted papers organized in thematic tracks and posters from Tuesday, March 15 to Thursday, March 17. Policy sessions and roundtables on the core conference themes and cutting-edge issues will run concurrently from March 15–17.

The 17th edition of the conference will be organized in parallel with the annual meetings of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).