The plight of women has largely been ignored, not only by local officials and lawmakers, but also by the way in which data about land rights is understood and processed

When Rajkumari Devi’s husband died 12 years ago, the world that centred on the mud hut they shared in a village in north India fell apart. Reeling from the loss of her husband, she was unable to secure title to her home and the scrap of farmland nearby that they had worked together.

Peruvian indigenous communities have shown themselves to be exceptional environmental and conservation leaders. Their leaders have worked for a decade to ensure a government commitment to conserve 54 million hectares of forest, as a part of the REDD+ program.

Welcome to 2019. In San Francisco, commuters shuttle to work in self-driving Ubers. In Rwanda, drones deliver blood to patients. In China, Xiaomi released a $500 phone that allows users to map the world with 30 centimeter accuracy.

And yet, a quarter of the world’s population lacks a fundamental human right: the right to property.

With the inclusion of several land-related indicators in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), land data collection and monitoring has reached an unprecedented momentum. There is a palpable positive drive within both global and local civil society to contribute to the official process through advocacy, data collection and international monitoring efforts. The broad consensus is that data and information are building blocks that support better informed decision and policy making at all levels.

Following last week’s meeting of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), this piece reflects on a key CFS soft-law instrument. It is an edited extract from the article “International Soft-Law Instruments and Global Resource Governance: Reflections on the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure”, Law, Environment and Development Journal (2017) 13(2):115-133. The full article can be freely downloaded at https://lead-journal.org/content/17115.pdf.

A revolution is underway. In Latin America, it has likely crested. In Southeast Asia and West Africa, it is moving apace. In East Africa, it is at its most intense.

It is brewing most remarkably not in storied national capitals and megacities, but in the medium sized, second-tier cities, less watched by governments and journalists. Cities that might double in size in 12-15 years, yet already under-resourced.

It is a demographic revolution: significant population growth which drives the epochal growth of city dwelling, as the world becomes ever more urban.

Until today, the world had no internationally comparable data on citizens’ perceptions of the security their property rights; no way of tracking how people evaluated the likelihood of their home or other land being taken from them.

In 2015 the UN agreed a new tranche of global sustainable development goals, signed up to by all member states and due to be achieved by 2030. Among them was a target to increase not only the proportion of adults with legally documented property rights, but also the proportion of adults who perceived their property rights to be secure, whether legally documented or not.

 Soumya Chattopadhyay takes a look at Prindex’s 2017 trial data from India, and raises questions to drive future research.

In October, Prindex will publish our first full tranche of data from 15 countries worldwide, and a total of 33 by the year’s end. While preparing our final survey, we conducted two trial runs, including one in India, Colombia and Tanzania in 2017. That data provides an insight into some of the questions that our full survey data – eventually to cover around 140 countries – may help answer.

This July is the first time the United Nations will review the progress made towards meeting Sustainable Development Goal 15, which is about Life on Land. Each goal will be reviewed about every 4 years until 2030.

The reviews will be based on the 10 indicators countries agreed on, that assess change in each country over time. Two important developments relating to the indicator on land degradation neutrality (15.3.1) have occurred, since its adoption in 2015.

Land is the maker and the marker of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  For the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), our aim is to contribute squarely to relevant land-related results where solutions exist and actions are needed, which is at subnational or national levels in countries. We work with national and local governments as well as with other locally mandated actors that in most cases get assistance from international organisations .

The National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda (NSDFU) is a network of approximately 350 community groups with a membership of approximately 38,000 people. NSDFU is a member of the Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) network, a transnational network of the urban poor founded in 1996, and which brings together over a million federated slum dwellers in 30 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.