After decades of being the elephant in the room of global development, only now are we seeing increased recognition of land rights

Fred Nelson is executive director of Maliasili and Michael Taylor is director of International Land Coalition 

Land rights have finally been invited to the party - sitting at the intersection of some of the world’s most urgent development, environmental, and human rights priorities.

Large scale land grabs are often sites of immediate and sometimes violent mobility, as people are evicted and obliged to move elsewhere. The term “grab” signals abruptness.

Yet processes that change peoples’ access to land, and the diverse processes of human mobility that land transformations generate, often take decades to unfold.  Research on Indonesia's large scale oil palm plantations shows the importance of attending to these long term processes.

Access to justice is a key governance concern in developed and developing countries alike. Community legal workers aim to help poor or comparatively powerless people defend themselves against land grabs, obtain public services, and challenge corruption. Can this bottom-up approach counter powerful interests seeking to entrench their control? Can legal empowerment help respond to rising authoritarianism and repression of civil society?

First global benchmark for measuring and reporting land information aims to improve tenure security and enable fair compensation

The potential for conflicts related to large-scale land acquisitions could be cut down significantly if seven key pieces of information are included in every property transaction, land professionals say.

Over the last 10 years, a clear consensus has emerged: investments in land should be done responsibly. However, understanding tenure-related risk in the context of land-based agricultural investments in emerging markets can be complex.

For individual women and men within communities, these complexities can have severe and negative effects on their land and livelihoods. This is especially true for more vulnerable members of the community: widowed or divorced women, youth, and ethnic minorities.

Government should address informal settlement housing backlog in the country. Addressing challenges posed by informal settlements will help government to meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goals such as providing access to basic water and sanitation. Underlying socio-economic causes of informal settlements should be tackled. When addressing challenges posed by informal settlements, government should provide the urban poor with cost effective access to urban environments.

By Sonkita Conteh, Director, Sierra Leone Program, Namati

Three years ago I wrote about how communities in Sierra Leone were getting the short end of the stick in large-scale land transactions. Many did not understand the provisions of the complex lease agreements they were signing. Not only are these leases legally complicated, they are sometimes signed under pressure and are not always translated into a community’s local language. 

By Jinmei Liu, Affiliated Researcher, Faculty of Social Science, Chiang Mai University; Consultant, EarthRights International

I wouldn’t say Chinese investors are not trying to take social responsibility seriously, but they must understand that the meaning of responsible investment is much more than a few corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs.

This blog was written as a contribution to the Mekong Regional Land Forum that took place from June 21-23 in Hanoi, Vietnam. Duncan Pruett was a keynote speaker at this event.

By Duncan Pruett, Program Policy Advisor for Oxfam in Myanmar

By Kaitlin Y. Cordes and Sam Szoke-Burke

How should governments address the concerns of their citizens tied to land investments? And do their legal obligations constrain their options for doing so?