This guide is for organisations and individuals working to support communities whose land rights, lives and livelihoods have been negatively impacted by agricultural investments. It provides guidance on strategies for holding the actors involved in agricultural investments accountable for human rights violations and all sorts of malpractices, such as:

● Mapping investment chains

● Formal accountability mechanisms

● Complementary advocacy strategies

Training volunteers to help their communities defend their land rights has proved an effective approach for promoting land justice in Tanzania. Report documents how Hakiardhi, a Dar-es-Salaam based research institute working on land governance issues, has established and trained a 600-strong network of male and female ‘Land Rights Monitors’ (LRMs) operating in 300 villages on various aspects of the land law, so they can help people and local governments to exercise and ensure respect for their legal rights in land disputes, particularly in relation to large-scale agricultural investments.

Provides a backdrop of relevant policies and practice; a gender analysis of the policy framework governing land and investments; and recommendations on how to work towards land rights securing and better inclusion in land governance processes for women in Tanzania. Concludes that implementation of laws, including key gender equality principles, has been weak, and gender inequality in land access persists largely due to the continued dominance of (patrilineal) customary land laws and practice.

The complaints procedure of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is one of the options available to communities threatened by the negative impacts of the palm oil industry. Drawing on direct experiences of supporting communities to use it in Indonesia and Liberia, the report summarises how communities can get the most out of this procedure. Realistic outcomes include a temporary freeze on plantation development while longer term solutions are negotiated. Advises that several advocacy strategies be pursued simultaneously to maximise chances of success.

Section I provides an overview of large-scale land deals. It assesses the trend at a global level and examines structural obstacles faced by efforts to regulate such deals. Section II focuses on corruption as a major obstacle to improving the protection of local communities and indigenous peoples whose livelihood, identities, and traditional ways of life depend on the use of local lands and natural resources. This phenomenon is largely understudied because corruption, by its very nature, is hidden and therefore poorly documented.

The process to develop a new Land Code in Chad is a positive step forward but the draft reflects a highly centralised system of land ownership, management and administration which risks excluding most people from the means to document and protect their land rights while also fostering widespread tenure insecurity. It considers customary rights as ‘temporary’ and gives full legal protection to a land title, which converts customary rights into land ownership, which is likely to be inaccessible for the vast majority of the population.

Conflict began in August 2011 when 3 village communities in eastern-central Côte d’Ivoire learned that the Belgian corporation SIAT was about to move onto their land. Report details the increasing conflicts and legal battles that followed.

Emphasises the need for donors, NGOs and governments to take a more comprehensive approach to women’s land rights that addresses underlying gender dynamics to bring about transformative gender change rather than token gains for women. To be effective, work to secure women’s rights to land must focus on tackling social relations to transform gender dynamics and needs to start at household level.

Issa Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Executive Director of the Land Rights Research and Resources Institute (LARRRI) or Hakiardhi (in Swahili). He is an acknowledged authority on land law in Africa and chaired the 1991-2 Presidential Commission of Enquiry into Land Matters. Here he examines the new Land Acts, including fundamental principles, land administration and allocation, village titling, land grabbing, dispute settlements, gender, youth and children, and concludes with the ’virtues’ of the Acts.

Argues that the debate over land reform in Africa is embedded in evolutionary models, in which it is assumed that landholding systems are evolving into individualised systems of ownership with greater market integration. This process is seen to be occurring even without state protection of private land rights through titling. Gender as an analytical category is excluded in evolutionary models. Women are accommodated only in their dependent position as the wives of landholders in idealised ’households’.

Research findings include: land rights in marriage and during cohabitation; daughters and inheritance rights; land disputes; land administration and registration; education and monitoring implementation of the Land Law.

Contains chapters on formalisation of land rights; women’s land rights – a human rights-based approach; a market-based approach to land rights, followed by country studies on Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya.