The Pietermaritzburg High Court handed down a precedent setting judgment on the case against local municipalities for their failure to provide farm dwellers and labour tenants with access to water, adequate sanitation and refuse collection.

Rural women make up a quarter of the world’s population, but many face legal and social barriers that limit their ability to access, use and benefit from the land they tend and depend on for their livelihoods.

This document sums up part of the presentations given during the first part of the LandVoc Community of Experts workshop, held on June 8th, 2020.  This workshop focused on the origins of LandVoc, how LandVoc is being used, future uses of LandVoc and the promotion of LandVoc uptake.  

This is AFRA’s research, which took place from April to September 2017, a survey of 842 farm dweller households consisting of 6,478 men, women and children, living on 81 farms across the seven local municipalities of the UMgungundlovu District. 

Development agencies are increasingly making decisions and evaluating success on the basis of an ever-growing supply of data. Some argue that the proliferation of data improves development outcomes for states and people targeted by agencies' interventions, as well as the accountability of those agencies. Others argue that problems of selection bias, a lack of longitudinal records, and misuse of data can ignore or even exacerbate the problems that development agencies seek to mitigate.

Land resources in montane highlands often represent common property prerequisites for the survival and sustenance of the human in communities that are dependent thereof. The Oku and Mbessa communities on the northern fringe of the Ijim-Kilum citadel have in the course of manning their respective base resources sowed a spectre of edgy perceptions and practices of ownership entitlements that have hatched land resource conflicts.

We examine the emergence of land markets and their effects on forest land appropriation by farm households in Jambi Province, Sumatra, using micro-level data covering land use and land transactions for a period of more than 20 years (1992–2015). Based on a theoretical model of land acquisition by a heterogeneous farming population, different hypotheses are developed and empirically tested. Farm households involved in forest land appropriation differ from those involved in land market purchases in terms of migration status and other socioeconomic characteristics.

One of the main components of Indonesia's Just Economy policy is extensive and rapid land reform, which targets about 12% of the country's land area for redistribution to farmers and communities by 2019. Much of the reform is occurring on forest land. At the same time, the country has pledged a significant reduction of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, two thirds of which is to be achieved from forests. Hence agrarian reform potentially conflicts with emission reduction commitments.

Individuals cannot privately own land in China but may obtain transferrable land-use rights for a number of years for a fee. Currently, the maximum term for urban land-use rights granted for residential purposes is seventy years. In addition, individuals can privately own residential houses and apartments on the land (“home ownership”), although not the land on which the buildings are situated.

Over the past two decades, “illegal” natural resource extraction has become a significant driver of environmental change and social conflict across the Global South. In response, numerous Sub-Saharan African states have engaged in governance reforms that heed calls to securitize – or, establish and consolidate state control over – natural resources. In Ghana, securitization has served to entrench the informal economy as domestic producers, marginalized in the process of reform, continue to utilize non-state institutions to maintain access.

Over the past six years, the Oakland Institute has been at the forefront of exposing the social, economic, and environmental impacts of foreign land grabs in Ethiopia.

Woman and her children in Timor-Leste. In a country where historic conflict has drastically impacted the environment and community dynamics, CI is helping to spark dialogue between local community members and government officials to promote peace through conservation agreements. (© Conservation International/photo by Lynn Tang)

This is the second blog in our series on environmental peacebuilding, which chronicles CI’s growing role in this emerging field of research. Today’s post focuses on our case study in Timor-Leste.