Displacement Solutions was approached and commissioned by DFID to carry out research on the housing, land and property rights issues arising from the reconstruction process, with an emphasis on the planned relocation aspects thereof. Displacement Solutions undertook a three-person mission to Nepal in November 2018 during which time extensive interviews were carried out, field visits made, and film footage taken for the production of a short documentary film which has since been completed.

Property rights and management regimes for high-elevation rangelands in Bhutan have evolved over centuries in response to environmental, cultural, and political imperatives. The 2007 Land Act of Bhutan aims to redress historical inequities in property rights by redistributing grazing leases to local livestock owners in a process known as rangeland nationalization.

Semi-nomadic yak herders of Bhutan depend on high altitude rangelands and yaks for their livelihoods. Conflicts over high altitude rangelands among herders can lead to sub-optimal management with negative impacts on the environment, livelihoods and socio-economic well-being of semi-nomadic yak herders.

This report summarizes the background, achievements and emerging outcomes of the Securing Access to Land and Resources (SALaR) project implemented towards improving land and natural resources tenure security for rural poor smallholder farmers, including women, men, youth and vulnerable groups in Uganda, Philippines and Laos.

For the estimated 70% of the world population that lives on property without a formal land title, life can be precarious. The absence of ownership documentation raises families’ vulnerability to forced eviction and conflict; it precludes the use of the property to access financial services and other economic benefits; and it diminishes the value of property by restricting its transfer to an informal, opaque market. And yet, in many parts of the world, the process of obtaining a land title is not only expensive but also complicated and sometimes nearly impossible.

The following are the major steps that were used before in allocating residential stands in Harare. However, these have been changed to accommodate the interests of the policymakers and senior council management. These new changes have opened the system to manipulation of town planning regulations. The Harare Residents’ Trust (HRT) is sharing these steps in the public interest. Several residents have lost their money through corruption involving officials, Councillors, land barons and real estate agencies who sometimes pocket money that they do not deserve.

This one-pager provides details on the LAND-at-scale project in Somalia. This project is implemented by International Organization for Migration (IOM); United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); UN-Habitat; Regional Coordination Office Somalia (RCO), and financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs via the Netherlands Enterprise & Development Agency. 

These messages were developed based on the field experience in fragile and crisis affected contexts of UN-Habitat and the partners of the Global Land Tool Network and the HLP Area of Responsibility of the Global Protection Cluster. They are a quick reference on how to empower women and protect their housing, land and property rights in fragile and crisis affected contexts and why this is an essential element to sustain peace and stability.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 1.4.2 and 5.A.1 refer to the strengthening of women’s land and property rights as a fundamental pathway towards poverty reduction and women’s empowerment. Securing women’s land and property rights can increase agricultural productivity, incentivise the adoption of climate-resilient natural resource management and increase household spending on health and education.

In this paper, we explore how different norms around property rights affect the empowerment of women of different social positions over the life cycle. We first review the conceptual foundations of property, empowerment, and intersectionality, and then present the methodology and empirical findings from ethnographic field work in Nepal. Going beyond formal ownership of property, we look at changes in property rights over personal and joint property at different stages of women’s lives.

Women’s land and property rights are increasingly understood as an important driver of economic
growth and social development, as well as being critical to human rights for women. Growing evidence
confirms that women’s land and property rights lead to important social and economic outcomes for
women and their families.Yet around the world, women remain significantly disadvantaged

Land questions have invigorated agrarian studies and economic history, with particular emphases on its control, since Marx. Words such as ‘exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ describe processes that animate land histories and those of resources, property rights, and territories created, extracted, produced, or protected on land. Primitive and on-going forms of accumulation, frontiers, enclosures, territories, grabs, and racializations have all been associated with mechanisms for land control.