The paper examines the pace of land acquisitions in terms of creating legislative and policy options to safeguard local communities that are directly affected, including compensation for land that is taken, and protecting community interests in the socio-economic and environmental continuum of investment projects, from design to implementation. The absence or weakness of formal landholding and land registration systems was evident in most research sites in Isiolo and Lamu.

The Cambodian government redistributed 1.2 million hectares, some revoked from economic land concessions (ELC), to more than 710,000 smallholders as private ownerships (2013-2014). The paper outlines key steps for granting new land concessions and improving the efficiency of existing ELCs (or similar large-scale state land licences). Cambodia’s excessive large-scale state land concessions have adversely affected the livelihoods and land tenure rights of local people, threatening the country’s rich biodiversity and restricting access to land especially for new farmer households.

A new Model Land Use Bill is proposed to address the lapses identified in the Nigerian Land Use Act (LUA, 1978), such as poor administrative system for lands, ownership, and the absence of community participation. This policy brief promotes a new land management structure for ease of business, to improve social and environmental protection, and to reduce land-grabbing by dispossession. The impact of land grabbing is one of many problems of social and environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and livelihoods impacted by deforestation.

The meetings addressed the progress of the International Land Coalition for Africa (ILC), its strategic priorities, and as well, developed ideas on how to apply lessons learned. ILC focuses on providing specific recommendations that instigate land policies that satisfy the agenda of the African Union. The event featured forums on gender justice, and women’s land rights in relation to feminist land and community land protection.

The research aims to develop a legal and policy framework that will facilitate integration of environmental protection with socio-economic activities during land use decision-making, as a mechanism to achieve sustainability. A statutory duty of care, with respect to land use, would make it clear that land owners or occupiers have definite responsibilities to protect and enhance the sustainability of the land that they use or manage; it would aim to reverse existing land degradation, or include a duty to inform other land owners or the state about some kinds of foreseeable degradation.

Public lands accounted for 80% of the country area until a decade ago. As Cambodia emerged from three decades of civil war and internal strife, the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) has granted more than 10% of the country area or 50% of the cultivatable land as large scale “Economic Land Concessions” (ELCs) to private companies, mostly foreign owned, in a mostly rigged process. Land disputes have become a permanent fixture in the press and a hot issue on human rights reports.

This paper highlights how women are interfacing with institutions of power at a local level in Uganda in terms of land claims. According to the Land Act 1998, all land is vested in the citizens who own it. Enormous resistance occurred behind the scenes against women’s efforts to include a provision on spousal co-ownership of land. The provision was passed in parliament but it did not appear in the published Land Act (2003:162).

The conversion of lands used for food crop production to other uses, the ongoing expansion of cultivated areas, and the situation of unused or under-used cropland in Cambodia needs to become closely regulated. The problem of unused and under-used agricultural lands being held for speculative purposes requires serious attention. Specific policy actions could include promulgating agricultural land law and land-use regulations and creating a national Agricultural Land Research and Development authority. These and other recommendations are proposed in this policy brief.

The validity of a title deed, or whether a property owner purchased in good faith, has recently been questioned and rejected by the land commission, a body under the auspices of the office of the presidency. In 2015 for over two weeks, both residents ‘abasangwa’ and repatriates ‘abahungutse’, stood together to oppose the Burundi land commission: the Commission Nationale Terres et autres Biens (CNTB, National Commission of land and other Assets), who are revisiting land restitution cases it had previously settled.

After three days of deliberations on the findings of a decade of research and initiatives across Africa, conference participants presented this series of recommendations affirming women’s rights to ownership, access, and control of land. Specific recommendations are directed towards actions to be taken by governments, intergovernmental organizations, and civil society organizations that focus on customary law; women’s economic empowerment, food security and the environment; political conflicts; and in relation to poor women and urban land.

This chapter uses both classic and contemporary literature to trace how land policies, and particularly land reform, have gained, lost, and regained prominence in development strategies and debates since the Second World War. It introduces contemporary issues and debates on gender and generational issues in land policy and land grabbing involving sometimes spectacularly large corporate land deals, and concluding with reflections on new ideas of food and land sovereignty that drive today’s agrarian movements.