Shortly after the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was founded in 1945, the organization had started to support member countries addressing structural problems in agriculture with land fragmentation and small holding and farm sizes through the development of land consolidation instruments (Binns, 1950). During the 1950s and 1960s, FAO provided technical assistance to the development of land consolidation in member countries in Europe such as Turkey, Greece, Spain and Cyprus, but also in the Near East and Asia (Meliczek, 1973).

The Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT), was developed under the Committee on World Food Security as a result of collaboration among different groups of stakeholders – governments, civil society, private sector, academia. The VGGT is intended to provide a framework for responsible tenure governance that supports food security, poverty alleviation, sustainable resource use and environmental protection.

In the five years since the Voluntary Guidelines on the responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT) was endorsed, the Guidelines have inspired policy and legal reforms in countries, from Gabon to Guatemala, making a real difference to people's lives.

ILMI Brown bag meeting on Thursday 29th October 2015, 12h30-14h00.

A lot of aspects are commonly subsumed under the concept land reform. These range from redistribution to tenure and agrarian reform. What do these different concepts mean? Agrarian reform: this is the broadest term and refers to attempts to change the agrarian structure of a country. It typically includes land reform, tenure, the reform of agricultural support systems and the reform of the credit system.

Communal land is one of the land tenure systems in Namibia, the other being freehold land tenure system. At independence in 1990,Namibia resolved to retain communal land on the basis that majority of the population derived their livelihoods from communal land.Notwithstanding the increasing urban population in the country since independence, the majority of the Namibian population still lives in the communal areas, and many of the urban-based population continue to have close relations in rural areas.

The Land, Livelihoods and Housing Programme aims at deepening and expanding the focus on these three key issues in Namibia. This thematic approach seeks to reflect the wide-ranging skills exiting at the FNRSS, and was developed to guide ILMI’s activities during the 2014-18 period. The programme is organised in four aspects: institutional, environmental, fiscal and spatial processes.

Namibia is compelled to observe and to undertake efforts to realise the right to adequate housing, since it has ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1994.

Ancestral land refers to ‘land of ancestors’. That is the land occupied by ones’ forebearers for generations and left something behind of value for current and future generations. There are usually contestations as to which ancestors the land

belongs because of the history of internal migration and of displacements by stronger nations (tribes).

Secure tenure and registered land rights are widely believed to be necessary for access to credit, well functioning land markets and economic development. As a result Namibia introduced long term leasehold rights over communal and commercial land for resettlement purposes in order to address preindependence imbalances in land holdings. The purpose is to bring the resettled beneficiaries into the mainstream of the economy, but this has not happened.

Land tenure in Namibia is regulated by a variety of Acts, some of which date back to as far as 1937, and some of which are

yet to be approved by Cabinet. This variety of Acts makes it difficult to evaluate the performance of land administration as a

whole, and the appropriateness of coercive instruments with regards to urban land tenure in particular. In this article we

evaluate how urban land tenure regularization practices are conducted in Namibia, and to compare new formal procedures,

Namibia is moving towards an urbanised country. This is illustrated by the fact that at independence Namibia was only 28% urbanized by 2011 urbanization has already grown to 42% and current projections are that by 2020 urbanization would by 66% and more than 70% by 2030. As the urban population is growing the need for serviced land and housing is also growing. As Namibia has failed to respond through appropriate strategies to facilitate this change in the human geography of the country it resulted in the growth of poorly serviced informal settlements.