This document provides guidances on how businesses can respect legitimate tenure rights and human rights in their land-based investments. It

• translates principles of responsible land governance and tenure (see the VGGT) into practical mechanisms, processes and actions,

• gives examples of good practice – what has worked, where, why and how, and

• provides useful tools for activities such as the design of policy and reform processes, for the design of investment projects and for guiding interventions.

In Burma, where 70 percent of people earn a living through agriculture, securing land is often equivalent to securing a livelihood. But instead of creating conditions for sustainable development, recent Burmese governments have enacted abusive laws, enforced poorly conceived policies, and encouraged corrupt land administration officials that have promoted the displacement of small-scale farmers and rural villagers.

“It is paradoxical but hardly surprising that the right to food has been endorsed more often and with greater unanimity and urgency than most other human rights, while at the same time being violated more comprehensively and systematically than probably any other.”

Richard Cohen, in Causes of Hunger, 1994

This issue paper No. 6 of the Rangelands Series consolidates a set of case studies which document how pastoralists plan landvand resource use in pastoral and agro-pastoral areas of Ethiopia. 

This publication is the result of the workshop on “Responding to Climate Change and Tenure Insecurity in Small Island Developing States – The Role of Land Professionals” held in Christchurch, New Zealand 30 April – 1 May 2016 in connection with the FIG Working Week 2016. It includes a report of the seminar and a FIG Christchurch Declaration as the main outcome of the workshop.

Disputes over land are a prominent feature of many situations of protracted violent conflict in Burundi, Uganda and South Sudan. Research conducted as part of the programme ‘Grounding Land Governance’ underscores that war reshuffles access and ownership, but also critically changes the ways in which land is governed. Land issues often come to resonate with other conflicts in society, thereby affecting overall stability. This makes interventions in land governance politically sensitive.

After conflict, governments and donors often feel a need for up-scaling and modernizing land use. There is an ambition to achieve economic recovery and contribute to food security through stimulating large-scale investment in land. Our research in Uganda, Burundi and South Sudan suggests that policymakers should be extremely careful when promoting large-scale land acquisitions, both foreign and national. Especially in the difficult transition from war to peace, large-scale appropriation of land risks becoming a threat to tenure security and the recovery of rural livelihoods.

A surge in land grabbing over the past decade has seen millions of people displaced from their homes and farmland, often violently, and pushed deeper into poverty. As demand for food, fuel and commodities increases pressure on land, companies are all too often striking deals with corrupt state officials without the consent of the people who live on it. Until now, there has been little analysis of the role that corruption plays in the transfer of land and natural resources from local communities to political and business elites.  

In a first study of this kind, International Justice Mission has used mixed methods assessment to portray the depth of widow and orphan property grabbing problem and lack of justice system response in Mukono County, Uganda. The report demonstrates that nearly a third of widows have experienced land grabbing with virtually no criminal justice system response.

This publication is the summary of the proceedings of the Regional Learning Workshop on ‘Land and Natural Resources Tenure Security’ held in Nairobi, Kenya from 30th June -2nd July 2015 as jointly organized by UN-Habitat/Global Land Tool Network and International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

In this publication, the issue of tenure security is addressed and assessed in several countries where government, civil society, the private sector and development cooperation initiatives have been implemented for decades. The selected case studies from fifteen countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America ensure not only a eographic balance but they also represent countries with different socio-economic and land-related histories and that have followed different pathways. The studies’ key findings underline the still precarious state of tenure security in many countries.

Land administration is defined as the acquisition, maintenance and dissemination of information on the ownership, value and use of land. This information is necessary to support land policy implementation. Besides being complete and current, land administration systems – including the information contained within the systems and the processes used for their establishment and maintenance - should ideally be transparent, accessible, simple and low-cost to efficiently and effectively allocate land fairly to citizens.