Much of the world’s rural landscapes are technically managed by national governments with limited recognition of, or support for, the rights and management responsibilities of the rural poor who live in these areas. In an era of large-scale land acquisitions for global commodity production, this has led, in some cases, to governments allocating vast tracts of land and resources to companies with limited or no consultation of the people affected.

For hundreds of years, pastoralists in Ethiopia’s lowlands have relied on strong customary land tenure systems to survive. Historically, legislation has failed to clearly define communal rights to rangelands, and the specific roles and responsibilities for both communities and local government to administer and manage these resources. This legislative deficiency prevented pastoral communities from fully exercising their constitutional rights to land (Ethiopia’s Constitution broadly recognizes pastoral communities’ right to access land and prevents their involuntary displacement).

Land is connected to many of our most pressing global issues. For example, a significant body of empirical evidence supports the view that strengthening indigenous and local communities’ legal rights to their land is a crucial strategy for avoiding deforestation and mitigating climate change.

2018 could be transformative for the indigenous and community land rights movement, with unprecedented opportunities for scaling up rights recognition around the world.

By Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Chairman of the Advisory Board of CCSI, University Professor at Columbia University, and Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network

When more than 1,200 land rights experts converge on the World Bank’s Washington, DC headquarters today for the 18th Annual Land and Poverty Conference, participants from government, civil society groups, private sector and donor agencies will focus on how they can use data and other evidence to reform land policies, identify strategies for expansion and find ways to monitor progress.

By Nicholas Tagliarino, Land Portal Foundation

By Andy White, Coordinator of the Rights and Resources Initiative

By Liz Alden Wily and Fabrice Dubertret, Members of the LandMark Operations Team.

Do community-held lands thrive today in Europe? If so, what can communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America learn from their long experiences? This was the topic of a Practitioner Lab hosted by LandMark : the Global Platform of Indigenous and Community Lands at the XVI biennial conference of the International Association for Study of the Commons held in Utrecht on the 10^th of July. A panel of four experts from Europe (Monica Vasile, Romania; Evelyn Dietsche, Germany; Rita Serra, Portugal; and Pedro Medrano, Spain) helped participants understand the realities of commons in their countries today. Pedro Medrano represented the Soria Forest Association of Spain, winner of the Elinor Ostrom Practitioner Award 2017.

By Yuta Masuda and Brian E. Robinson

I’m sitting in a Mongolian yurt, listening to and trying to emulate Bataa’s* songs about love for the grasslands and the wide, treeless plains of the Mongolian Plateau. Our host sings with consuming passion. I might have brushed his enthusiasm off as a show two weeks ago. But after living and working in these grasslands, the feeling of freedom that comes from unobstructed, far-off distant horizon is infectious.

By  Lewis Evans, Survival International

For Earth Day (April 22), Survival International reveals some of the amazing ways in which tribal peoples are the best conservationists and guardians of the natural world:

1. The Baka “Pygmies” have over 15 words for elephant

The Baka people know so much about elephants, they have different words for them according to their sex, age and even temperament.

Autora: Tatiana Mendonça