This manual of guidelines is distributed by the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement to guide Communal Area residents and land authorities about group land rights. This guidance is official. This means that advice should be followed – as relevant to the case in point. Although formal provision for group land rights is new, the idea of holding rights collectively is well known in Communal Areas. Under customary norms, many residents already hold rights to a particular area not as individuals but as members of families and communities (or ‘groups’).

Pastoralists are one of the most poverty stricken and underdeveloped existing human groups in the world. Until now, having remained practically invisible in the eyes of international law, it is desirable to open a debate concerning the recognition of their rights. The ideal situation would be to create a specific category of rights dedicated expressly to these pastoralist peoples. Therefore, one can surmise that there are two laws that constitute its essential content: the law protecting their way of life and their access rights to the land

Landjepik, diefstal van land, gebeurt vaak in Nederland. Een huiseigenaar trekt bewust maar onopgemerkt een strook gemeentegrond bij zijn tuin of verplaatst het hek op het land van zijn buurman. Een boer vergroot bewust zijn akker door een deel van de grond van zijn buurman bij zijn land te ploegen.

Soms bewust en soms onopgemerkt trekt iemand een stuk (gemeente)grond bij zijn tuin, onderhoudt dit jarenlang en behandelt het alsof het van hem is. Landjepik. Na twintig jaar verliest de originele eigenaar zijn eigendom en wordt de ‘dief ’ beloond voor zijn actie. Maar deze wijziging wordt nergens vastgelegd. De notaris kan dit dus niet zien als hij een woning overdraagt. Björn Hoops, promovendus en docent aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, brengt nu in kaart hoe groot dit probleem is.

A policy brief reviewing the important contribution of muncipal commonage to the livelihoods of poor househoods and proposing approaches to better utilise this resoource

Baseline Research Report 

Parkia biglobosa, a NTFP tree species commonly known as "néré" is particularly important in the diet of rural and urban populations in the Sudano-Sahelian zone. The seeds are processed into a highly nutritious sauce, called "soumbala", combined with cereal dishes. While néré is very popular, its occurrence is declining because of various threats hindering its regeneration. In a condition of increasing scarcity of néré and increasing demand, changes in use and access rights, depending on the social status of harvesters, are taking place. Harvesting is an activity carried out by women.

This paper first presents a clustering of women based on the characterization of their distinct access rights to néré. Secondly, the types of access rights are characterized also in spatial terms, based on the type of land use where the women harvesting is exercised.

The brief review in the repor concludes of various disturbing aspects of the socio-economic context that prevails in large parts of India today, and that may (and can) contribute to politics such as that of the Naxalite movement or erupt as other forms of violence. It should be recognized that there are different kinds of movements, and that calling and treating them generally as unrest, a disruption of law and order, is little more than a rationale for suppressing them by force.

RCDC assigned a task of compiling a report on the functioning of PESA in the state of Odisha based both on secondary analysis and primary survey at field level, to a local consultant organization National Institute for Development Innovation(NIDI) in late 2010. Agreeing with our observation that the report submitted under the same required further improvements and enrichments the consultant made fresh efforts in 2011 and submitted an improved version of the same without any extra charges.

The protection given to the land rights of women, orphans and any other vulnerable groups in Northern and Eastern Uganda is probably as good as can be found anywhere in the world. Customary land law is based on three main principles. First, everyone is entitled to land, and no-one can ever be denied land rights. A second principle is that all inherited land is family land, never individual property.

In the developed countries less than 20 per cent of the population is engaged in agriculture. The rest is employed in the industrial sector. In the underdeveloped countries less than 10 per cent of the population is employed in the industrial sector and the rest is engaged in agriculture. At once this dictates that, for some time to come, the route to development in the latter countries will depend on agriculture, which also mainly depends on land policy and tenure. The land question is a contradiction in land rights and consequential social, economic and political abuses replicated on it.