The formalisation of local or customary land rights is often seen as a means of tackling insecurity of land tenure and encouraging investment. Several tools, such as the Rural Land Plans (PFRs) used in Benin, seem to resolve the tension between the logic of registering rights in order to increase productivity and the logic of securing complex local rights and reducing conflict. But while PFRs are potentially a good tool for dealing with complexity, current policy debate in Benin tends to focus on them as a tool for privatisation.

As part of the Millennium Challenge Corporation Compact Agreement, the Government of Lesotho has implemented an institutional strengthening and land regularization project in the urban and peri-urban areas of the capital city Maseru. The main objective of this project is to strengthen the rights of the legitimate occupiers of the land by a process of formalizing those rights. This formalization process of the rights to land is expected to promote private sector development and stimulate economic growth.

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.

Increasing women’s access to land is crucial to fight hunger and poverty. However, gender disparities in land access remain significant in most countries, regardless of their level of development. A new FAO database helps to understand the factors that prevent women from accessing land; and to design better policies to effectively address this situation. rural development, hunger, food security, economic crisis, prices, agriculture

Cornell International Law Journal: Vol. 50 : No. 1 , Article 2 Kazakhstan ranks consistently low on measures of property rights protection and the rule of law more generally.1 Echoing these evaluations, existing literature emphasizes the degree to which informal institutions shape property relations in personalist, authoritarian regimes, like Kazakhstan. The expectation is that formal institutions like law and courts fail to restrain or otherwise influence state agents’ rent-seeking behavior. In effect, they serve primarily as ornamentation.

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 is the report of a webinar which took place on 25th February 2021 organized by the Land Portal Foundation.

From 2013 to 2016, Oxfam's Behind the Brands campaign called on the world’s 10 biggest food and beverage companies to adopt stronger social and environmental sourcing policies and spurred significant commitments on women’s empowerment, land rights and climate change. Now, as the coronavirus pandemic worsens inequality and food insecurity around the world, we assess whether the companies have taken meaningful steps to implement the commitments they made in response to the campaign.

Land is considered a vital resource for any nation. It serves as the platform for carrying out

social, cultural and economic activities. Access to land is an important means for promoting

growth and equity and achieving social justice in many countries. The process by which

decisions are made regarding access to and use of land, the manner in which those decisions are

implemented and the way that conflicting interests in land are reconciled are crucial in

determining whether the country has what it takes to derive the desired benefits from this

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