IIED, the Sustainable Development Strategies Group (SDSG) and the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) have created a collection of community development laws for the mining sector to encourage and facilitate better research and policy. The resource, with all community development laws available to search via the map above and all legislation and agreements in the list below, includes relevant legislation from 54 countries. All documents are available to download in PDF format.

El propósito de esta publicación es identificar buenas prácticas en proyectos mineros que afectan a comunidades indígenas y compartir las lecciones aprendidas con empresas mineras, entidades públicas con injerencia en el sector, organizaciones indígenas y otras organizaciones de la sociedad civil, y el público en general.

Executive Summary

Violence has spiked in Zimbabwe’s gold mining sector, costing hundreds of people their lives and triggering a police operation that led to the arrest of thousands. Media and government blame artisanal miners, who dig using little mechanisation and often without licences but are the country’s main gold producers. Yet the bloodshed is better seen as a symptom of Zimbabwe’s flawed centralised gold buying scheme, patronage-based economy and obsolete legal and regulatory system.

For the past decade, the land rush discourse has analyzed foreign investment in land and agriculture around the world, with Africa being a continent of particular focus due to the scale of acquisitions that have taken place. Gabon, a largely forested state in Central Africa, has been neglected in the land rush conversations, despite having over half of its land allocated to forestry, agriculture, and mining concessions. This paper draws on existing evidence and contributes new empirical data through expert interviews to fill this critical knowledge gap.

The intersection between land grabs and climate change mitigation politics in Myanmar has created new political opportunities for scaling up, expanding and deepening struggles toward ‘agrarian climate justice’. Building on the concepts of ‘political opportunities’ and ‘rural democratization’ to understand how rural politics is relevant to national regime changes in the process of deepening democracy, this paper argues that scaling up beyond the local level becomes necessary to counter the concentration of power at higher levels.

This list of bibliographic references is an accompanying piece to the data story written by Rick de Satgé and published by the Land Portal on 28 April 2022.

This is the PDF version of an online data story published by Land Portal on 28 April 2022.

Colonial and apartheid land dispossession in South Africa was the most extensive of any country in sub-saharan Africa. Despite a land reform programme initiated after the transition to democracy in 1994, equitable access to land remains an unresolved question in both urban and rural areas.