This thematic report is the fifth in a series on housing, land and property rights, and tenure, and land conflict in Liberia. It examines land tenure and conflict from a Liberia/Cote d’Ivoire cross-border perspective within the context of forced displacement caused by the 2010 post-election crisis.

The promulgation of the Kenyan Constitution 2010 brought into place concerns about the urgency for land reform. Land reforms hold the key to solving some of Kenya’s greatest challenges such as landlessness, community cohesion, food security and sustainable development. Land reforms lie at the heart of the work of the National Land Commission (NLC) and Kituo cha Sheria and they are also at the heart of many Kenyan communities who live, work and rely on land. Information contained in the book goes a long way in educating these communities about their land rights.

There is widespread belief among development specialists that land tenure security is a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic development.

Property rights to land represent the key institutional asset on which rural people build their livelihoods. In fact, in many countries, landlessness is the best predictor of poverty. The nature of farmers’ property rights to land substantially impacts their willingness and ability to adopt productivity-enhancing inputs and investments.

While many people in the developing world lack secure property rights and access to adequate resources, women have less access to land than men do in all regions and in many countries (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO], 2011b). Women across the developing world are consistently less likely to own land, have fewer rights to land, and the land they do own or have access to is of lower quality in comparison to men
(FAO, 2011b).

Increasingly, economists are examining how the dynamics within households affect the outcomes of household decisions. This paper uses data from the 1991/92 and the 1998/99 Ghana Living Standards Surveys to examine how the share of assets owned by women in Ghanaian households affects household expenditure patterns. In this analysis, assets include business assets, savings, and farmland. The results indicate that women’s share of assets do have an impact on household budget shares for a number of expenditure categories in each time period.

This event, hosted at ODI in London, was convened to discuss the use of new technologies to map and document land rights, and their impact on land registration and administration, and provide updates on recent activities of Forum membe

In this pilot study, we examine the relationship between the organisation of property rights and the economic importance of forestry on the one hand and the degree to which integrative nature conservation is formally implemented in forest policy on the other hand. Further, we are interested in whether political institutions moderate this relationship.

In recent years, growing economic globalisation has been accompanied by rising social support for market systems as a means of managing resource-use. In turn, the free market movement considers definite and secure property rights (especially private rights and, sometimes, communal rights) in resources to be the necessary basis for a desirable market system. Global policies for managing the Earth’s genetic resources have been influenced by this approach.

The debate about ‘land grabs’ by foreign agents should not obscure the role of national governments or the accelerating process of appropriation of land by national agents. Much of the appropriated land is under forms of ‘customary’ tenure. In arguing that a fundamental problem is the denial of property in land to Africans, I lay out the colonial and post-colonial reproduction of ‘customary’ tenure as not equivalent to property rights, the documentation of mounting competition and conflict centring on land, and the more recent threats by national and international agents.

The objective of this paper is to study the invasions (occupation) of land properties held by the so called Brazilian social movements. This conflict concerns the disputes between farmers and social movements, in which the landowners questioned the legality of the invasion for agrarian reform and compliance with the immediate mandate of reinstatement of possession when there is invasion of property. On the side of the social movements, land invasions have become the main form of pressure) to speed up expropriation processes and settlements.

Placing conservation within a broad framework of agrarian and environmental politics, this review article argues that natural resource governance is fundamental to rural politics in China. Much of the environmental literature adopts a technocratic approach, ignoring the political nature of the redistribution of access to and control over natural resources, and of knowledge vis-à-vis degradation.