Land is a fundamental natural resource for living, an economic asset for production, legal entity with multiple rights over it and above all, a societal factor for self-actualization. So, ownership of land has multi-faceted understanding around the world. For the developing country like Nepal having diverse societal arrangements, land tenure system plays important role in economic, social and political structure.

This Report presents the findings of this research effort. A comprehensive consideration of the many aspects of land ownership in Nepal, including the related issues of agricultural development, the impact of nonstate actors in newly-formed special economic zones, and the claims of landlords returning to land seized during the Maoist conflict is beyond the scope of this project. The Report and study focused on documenting the impact that inadequate access to land has on the human rights of landless people, including rights to housing, food, water, work, and access to justice.

This paper examines the impact of land reform on agricultural productivity in Tajikistan. Recent legislation allows farmers to obtain access to heritable land shares for private use, but reform has been geographically uneven. The break-up of state farms has occurred in some areas where agriculture has little to offer but, where high value crops are grown, land reform has hardly begun. In cases where collectivized farming persists and land has not been distributed, productivity remains low and individual households benefit little from farming.

Given its seemingly beneficial aspects to socioeconomic development and environmental well-being, the legislative reforms initiated under the Land Act of Bhutan, 2007 have raised so much consternation as well as hope in the minds of the Bhutanese people who either depend on livestock husbandry or leasing out such rights to others with livestock and compensated with payment in cash or kind in the form of livestock products.

In a new paper, written with a colleague from the Danish Institute for Human Rights, TMG researchers Anna Kramer and Frederike Klümper, and TMG Managing Director Alexander Müller, make a case for adopting human rights-based monitoring approaches that strengthen the implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests (VGGT), and ultimately support responsible land governance.

Land laws provide a legal basis for addressing a country’s land-related strategies and are the central land policy instruments through which governments realise land policy objectives. Considering their vital role, it is imperative that land laws be evaluated to ensure that policy objectives are followed and that the laws are not ineffective or counterproductive. The extant literature, however, provides only a fragmentary basis for evaluation.

This article discusses the inherent limitations of law in transitional justice processes regarding land grievances. Through analysis of the case of Timor-Leste (East Timor), a country marked by post-colonialism, post-authoritarianism, and post-conflict. The article shows how complex transitional justice regarding land grievances can be, and argues that a legalist perspective gives a limited view of these grievances, both for studying and finding solutions to them. The article employs the concept of ‘wicked problems’ to overcome the limitations of law.

With the end of the civil war in Burundi, the government began a transitional justice process to consolidate peace and deal with the legacies of past violations. Part of the transitional justice work in the country has been restitution of land and other property – a process that has provoked further violence and, to some extent, threatened national unity. Political elites have hijacked the land restitution process in a way that has shaped land conflicts on the ground and affected national politics.