This paper questions the novelty of post-2000 development strategies, in particular the US’s Millennium Challenge Corporation and its ethos of ‘poverty reduction through economic growth.’ Using land as a lens, I explore recent eras of development assistance and ask if the Millennium-era has been appreciably different from pre-2000 development. The backdrop of my study is an MCC-sponsored land reform in Lesotho. I use data drawn from fieldwork in Lesotho to argue that the logics and outcomes of the Development industry’s land policies have remained largely the same.

The Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA) partnered with the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), a South African human rights organisation, to launch a class action lawsuit against the Government of South Africa on behalf of a class of farm dwellers known as labour tenants. Under the 1996 Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act, labour tenants were granted rights to apply for ownership of the land they occupied. However, the government has failed to implement this law, and 19,000 labour tenant claims remain pending.

One of the main components of Indonesia's Just Economy policy is extensive and rapid land reform, which targets about 12% of the country's land area for redistribution to farmers and communities by 2019. Much of the reform is occurring on forest land. At the same time, the country has pledged a significant reduction of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, two thirds of which is to be achieved from forests. Hence agrarian reform potentially conflicts with emission reduction commitments.

We estimate how a shift towards a more extractive resource policy, brought about by a regulatory reform of the mining sector, affected civil conflict in the Philippines. Our empirical strategy uses a difference-in-differences approach that compares provinces with and without mineral deposits before and after the reform. We find that the reform led to a large increase in conflict violence, most likely due to increased competition over control of resource-rich areas.

China is a socialist country and all land in China belongs to Chinese citizens as a whole. Article 10 of the 1982 Constitution upholds the Chinese land policy that reflects the traditional view of socialism - land of the country must be owned by the country (State) or its agricultural Collectives. State-owned enterprises or other organizations, which cannot own land themselves, may use land with permission from the State.

Every day since Pres Ramaphosa was elected into office we have searched out South African land-related news which is curated on our website knowledgebase.land. This publication provides a brief summary of land news across a range of categories for March 2020

The various legal, political, economic and social perspectives that have influenced the land reform discourse in Kenya are examined. The historical perspectives of the land question in Kenya are outlined, and the factors that shaped the content of Kenya's land law and attendant institutional and constitutional regimes are addressed. The operationalization of the legal regimes and policy frameworks emergent from the colonial legacy is also extensively dealt with, focusing on the way the state has sought to balance private and public interests in land through the instruments of law.

Globally, increased investor interest in land is confronting various types of political mobilisations from communities at the grassroots level. This paper examines the case study of a land occupation movement called Chengara struggle in the largest corporate plantation in southern India. The movement is led by the historically dispossessed scheduled caste and scheduled tribe communities. The objective of the study is to understand the type of institutional transformation of property rights that the movement is calibrating.