What is the state of land information in South Africa? Is there really a lack of land data to support decisions and to improve land governance? This was the point of departure that a team of specialists grappled with to uncover the many different sources of land data and information available in South Africa. For the very first time, they attempted to systematically review and categorize the entire ecosystem of data and information related to key land topics in the country, assessing over 104 land datasets from 59 different sources.

While agrarian change has been a recurrent theme in Ghana’s endeavor for economic development, questions on how land resources should be managed to ensure prompt attainment of economic growth remain unanswered. In Ghana, land is controlled by customary actors, while the state is the custodian of agricultural policies. The need for interaction between the two actors to ensure that the envisioned economic gains from agriculture are attained is paramount.

Development practice over recent years in much of Africa prioritized formalization of land policies deemed to enhance better handling and use of land as an asset for social development. Following this trend, land reform policy in Ghana was based on a pluralistic legal system in which both the customary land tenure system and the statutory system of land ownership and control co-exist by law. The primary research question for this study was the following: What implications emerge when customary land tenure system and the statutory system of land ownership and control co-exist in law?

The recent spate of violence mostly in north-central and southern Nigeria, typically credited to conflicts between herders and farmers, and the reactions, narratives, and representations that have attended them, calls for an examination of core security questions: who or what is to be secured, from what threat and by what means. In fact, it could be further contextualized as: how is the conflict between farmers and herders constructed, framed, and represented as (in)security within the Nigerian context?

This third report comprises two parts: Part 1 contains an analysis of policy options and recommendations for the preparation of a law on land rights and title restitution. The recommendations are based on LLP’s research findings, its comparative case studies, an analysis of existing legislation and on relevant input of stakeholders that participated in LLP’s roundtable on land rights in June 2004. Part 2 presents LLP’s research methodology, results and analysis for the development of land policy concerning land rights and title restitution.

PIM support to work from ILRI and partners contributed to adoption of a woreda (district) participatory land use planning approach in Ethiopia and to expansion of the joint village land use planning approach in Tanzania, resulting in more secure tenure rights for pastoralists in rangeland areas.

Land tenure security is widely considered to be a fundamental factor in motivating farmers to adopt sustainable land management practices. This study aims to establish whether it is true that owner-operators adopt more effective soil conservation measures than tenant-operators, and whether well-designed agro-environmental instruments can provide sufficiently strong motivation to compensate for the differences between these two groups.

Pastoralism faces diverse challenges, that include, among others, land tenure insecurity, that has necessitated the need to formalize land rights. Some governments have started regularizing rights for privately owned land, but this is complex to implement in pastoral areas where resources are used and managed collectively. Our aim was to assess how the scale of communal land tenure recognition in pastoralist systems may affect tradeoffs among objectives such as tenure security, flexibility, mobility, and reduction of conflicts.

While strengthening women’s land rights is increasingly on national and international agendas, there is little consensus on how to understand women’s tenure security. Analyses of women’s land rights often use very different definitions of land rights, from formal ownership to women’s management of plots allocated to them by their husbands. This paper identifies aspects of women’s tenure that should be included in indicators. It then provides a conceptual framework to identify the various dimensions of women’s land tenure security and the myriad factors that may influence it.

Brazil has the fifth-largest national land area in the world and this land resource represents a critical asset for the country’s urban, agricultural, and economic development, also providing essential environmental services. Nevertheless, it has a historical lack of governance over its lands, failing to provide secure land rights and to control the extensive frauds resulting in public and private land grabs. The objective of this study is to depict evidence of these land grabs and propose a typology for analyzing them.

This year's 2nd edition of the European Security and Defence Union journal is looking into climate change as global security and humanitarian challenge. Janani Vivekananda, Senior Adviser for Climate Change and Peacebuilding at adelphi, has contributed to the journal with a piece on the climate security crisis currently plaguing the Lake Chad basin. Lake Chad is a geophysical and ecological miracle.

The NATO Parliamentary Assemblies’ Science and Technology Committee drafted a new report on Food and Water Security in the Middle East and North Africa. The report underlines that pressures on natural resources and connected impacts on food production are factors that contribute to the (in-) security of the MENA region. The document summarizes causes as well as possible technical and governance approaches to improve food and water security in the region. The initiative shows that the role of environmental resources is increasingly taken seriously in the sphere of security policy.