Sub-Saharan Africa has always been perceived as a land-abundant continent. Deininger & Byerlee (2011) estimate that the continent has the largest area of potentially available uncultivated land. Despite these abundant resources, the agricultural sector continues to be dominated by smallholder production that is characterized by high labor and low capital intensities – but still produces the majority of food in Africa (IFAD & UNEP, 2013).

Across Africa, Asia and Latin America, investors are increasingly approaching rural communities seeking land for logging, mining, and agribusiness ventures. Even in those situations where the investors have followed FPIC guidelines and undertaken a formal “consultation” with the community, these consultations are generally conducted in a context of significant power and information asymmetries. Part of the power imbalance comes from communities’ lack of information about the value of community lands and natural resources.

This note is for private sector project implementers and financers (development finance institutions, international development agencies, commercial lenders and equity investors) seeking to invest responsibly in new greenfield sites in low and middle- income countries. It aims to provide practical guidance on identifying and addressing community land conflicts to prevent them escalating into disputes between the project and local communities.

The study was commissioned to the KIT Royal Tropical Institute in July 2017 by the Land Dialogue, with financial support from the Dutch Government. The objective is to provide insight and guidance into the relevance of land governance as a possible priority theme t o be considered in the process of the International Responsible Business Conduct (IRBC) Agreements.

Southern Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley is one of the most culturally and biologically diverse areas in the world, yet the Ethiopian government is transforming more than 375,000 hectares (1450 sq. miles) of the region into industrial-scale plantations for sugar and other monocrops.

Pastoralism has been under pressure due to a number of factors including climate change, population pressure and socioeconomic dynamism. These factors have affected the relationships among different pastoral groups and the functioning of the customary institutions in managing natural resources. Interference of the state structures into pastoral areas, land alienation for large scale investment and delineation of protected area from communal grazing areas have negatively affected the relationships between pastoralists and the state.

Mokoro’s practical and action-oriented long-term strategic research project, the Women’s Land Tenure Security Project (WOLTS), is piloting its methodology through a ‘Study on the threats to women’s land tenure security in Mongolia and Tanzania’.

O investimento é, certamente, um factor com grande influência sobre a produção, por via do aumento de novas capacidades produtivas, da modernização do tecido produtivo, através da inovação, mais eficiente e com maior produtividade.

Novas capacidades produtivas significam mais emprego, mais renda para as famílias e aumento de impostos. Mais exportação e/ou menos importações. Pode implicar mais segurança alimentar, dependendo dos tipos de investimentos realizados (tipos de produtores, culturas e mercados de destino dos bens produzidos).

This report draws on the Land Matrix database to analyze and better understand the phenomenon of large-scale agricultural land deals. It focuses on:
» land acquisitions or investments (“deals”) targeting the Global South and Eastern Europe, including only low and middle income countries;
» transnational deals, excluding deals where only domestic actors are involved; and
» deals where the envisioned land use is agricultural.

This report documents the contemporary ecological, social and economic transformations occurring in one village in Lao PDR’s central Khammouane province under multiple sources of development-induced displacement. Rural development policy in Laos is focused on promoting rapid rural modernisation, to be achieved through foreign direct investments in two key resource sectors: hydropower and plantations. Laos’ land reformprogram is also a key component of the changes underway in the countryside, as swidden (or shifting) upland cultivation is targeted for stabilisation and elimination.

This paper focuses on one community in Cambodia that won back land from a large land deal by grabbing onto the rupture in property relations initiated by a one-year land titling campaign. I document the struggle between competing legibility and illegibility projects which I examine through two moments, one of the state choosing to see its population and their relations to territory, and another in which the state’s excuses for not recognizing smallholders’ claims began to falter.

This article focuses on how climate change mitigation policies and economic land and mining concessions in Prey Lang, Cambodia, accommodate and facilitate each other physically, discursively and economically. Maps and project descriptions reveal that climate-related policies and extraction coexist in the same landscape, even the same projects. Knowledge co-produced by the authors and affected individuals suggests that climate change mitigation initiatives are not only intimately linked to economic intensification in Prey Lang, but they also contribute to conflict and dispossession.