This study explores the impact of changes in land tenure institutions on women's land rights and the efficiency of tree resource management in Western Ghana. We find that customary land tenure institutions have evolved toward individualized systems to provide incentives to invest in tree planting. However, contrary to the common belief that individualization of land tenure weakens women's land rights, these have been strengthened through inter vivos gifts and the practice of the Intestate Succession Law.

While most studies looking at the consequences of tenurial insecurity on land markets in developing countries focus on the effects of tenurial insecurity on the investment behavior of landowners, this paper studies the hitherto unexplored relationship between tenurial insecurity and contract choice in land tenancy.

Informal settlements represent a challenging operational context for local government service providers due to precarious contextual conditions. Location choice and land procurement for public infrastructure raise the complicated question: who has the right to occupy, control, and use a piece of land in informal settlements? There is currently a dearth of intelligence on how to identify well-located land for public infrastructure, spatially and with careful consideration for safeguarding the claimed rights and preventing conflicts.

Issues relating to land are specifically referred to in five of the United Nations’ (UN) 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and UN-Habitat’s Global Land Tools Network views access to land and tenure security as key to achieving sustainable, inclusive and efficient cities. The African continent is growing in importance, with climate change and population pressure on land. This review explores an interdisciplinary approach, and identifies recent advances in geo-spatial technology relevant to land governance in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

This discussion paper on the “VGGT and National Policies on the Governance of Tenure”3

 has

been commissioned by the Asian NGO Coalition (ANGOC) as a member of the Philippine

Development Forum – Working Group on Sustainable Rural Development (PDF-SRD).4 This

paper examines national policies as embodied in the 1987 Philippine Constitution and the

major land and natural resource laws passed by the Philippine legislature. This research is

This paper was prepared for presentation at the “2015 World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty” in Washington DC last March 23-27, 2015 by Violeta P. Corral of the National Confederation of Small Farmers and Fishers Organizations (PAKISAMA), Philippines.

The Gender Evaluation Criteria (GEC) project was jointly implemented by PAKISAMA and Asian Farmers Association (AFA), support by the International Land Coalition (ILC).

New research by CCSI and the Centre pour l’Environnement et le Développement (CED) on transparency of land-based investment in Cameroon. 

In the report, CCSI and CED find that:

• Communities continue to be excluded from decision-making around investments.
• The government pursues a top-down approach to concession allocation and remains reluctant to recognize all legitimate tenure rights.

ABSTRACTED FROM OVERVIEW:

The Lands Act 1964 was the first comprehensive piece of legislation which came into existence to pave the way for land reform. Key objectives of the Act were a) enhancing the standard of living of people dependent on land including through ensuring “equitable distribution of agricultural land”; and b) securing rapid economic development and wellbeing of the general population through attaining optimum agricultural growth.

For more than five years, the Women’s Land Tenure Security (WOLTS) Project has been investigating the intersection of gender and land relations in mining-affected pastoralist communities in Mongolia and Tanzania. The aim has been to develop a methodology for long-term community engagement and capacity building to protect and support the land rights of all vulnerable people – thus to fully mainstream attention to gender equity in land tenure governance within a framework that would facilitate improvements in community land rights across the board.

For the past few decades, efforts to strengthen women’s land rights in many sub-Saharan African countries have primarily focused on a single approach: systematic registration through individual/joint certification or titling. While registration — individually or with a spouse — may support tenure security in specific contexts, the sheer complexity of land governance practices and tenure arrangements across the continent (both formal and customary) often render an emphasis on systematic titling inadequate.