What are the effects of trends away from legal pluralism towards more uniform approaches to the law? This paper analyses the effects of legal changes in property rights for people's welfare and development in India.

This report, a summary of the substantial challenges that continue to plague South Africa’s efforts to reform land administration system, proposes that key decision-makers and informers involved in communal land administration undergo a mindshift in thinking. This shift should be from focusing exclusively on transferring communal land to traditional leaders, Common Property Institutions and private individuals, to recognising and accommodating existing forms of social tenure.

This report by Colin Marx and Margot Rubin explores how urban land is divided and re-divided within the context of the interaction between formal and informal land use management systems.

In recent decades, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have pursued national water permit systems, derived from the colonial era and reinforced by “global best practice.” These systems have proved logistically impossible to manage and have worsened inequality in water access. A new study conducted by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and Pegasys Institute, with support from the UK government, traces the origins of these systems, and describes their implementation and consequences for rural smallholders in five countries – Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

Since the reform era began in 1978, there have been significant changes in the nature and incidence of disputes, conflicts, and social disturbances, as well as the mechanisms for addressing them. As with economic and governance reforms, the government has adopted a pragmatic, problem-solving approach as it has attempted to meet the broad and, at times, conflicting goals of justice and efficiency while maintaining sociopolitical stability and rapid economic growth.

The land is an integral part of every state. Especially land has sacred and cultural value in most of the Asian traditions apart from its social and economic value. Sri Lanka is an island state which has 25,330 sq. Mi for 21,670,000 ("Department of Census and Statistics-Sri Lanka," 2019) of population and a country which inherent legal pluralism as a result of multi-cultural ethnicity and imperialism.

Transforming a pluralistic tenure system into unified statutory rights has been a major objective of the development of property law in many developing countries. Many law and development scholars have assumed that unified land rights are a pre-condition to development and that a pluralistic tenure land system is a major source of uncertainty and insecurity. This article challenges this commonly held assumption by way of a case study of Indonesia's effort to unify the laws governing land.

Current Tanzanian land law offers registration of private interests in land in the form of Certificates of Customary Rights of Occupancy (CCROs) within a broader community lands approach. We conducted qualitative research on the issuance of CCROs along a mountain slope transect in Meru district in northeast Tanzania. This area features intensified smallholder agriculture that evolutionary theory suggests is well adapted for registration of private interests in land.

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.

Land is an imperative and crucial factor in the social, cultural and economic identity of the people in Sri Lanka due to the importance it has been given throughout our history. Moreover, the rights and interests over land are unequivocally and legally secured without any discrimination on the basis of gender, caste, religious or ethnic lines for its peaceful enjoyment and for the economic development of the people and the country.

This report assesses the legislation of Sudan relating to land tenure and administration (see the list in the Annex to this report) against the provisions of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (the VGGT). The assessment is structured along a set of indicators from the VGGT that were considered most relevant for the legal framework on governance of land tenure in Sudan.