Considerando un proceso de más de cinco siglos de desagregación y consolidación de la desigualdad, el presente documento busca centrar su análisis en las más recientes políticas públicas sobre tierra: ¿qué tipo de política?, ¿cuáles fueron sus resultados?, ¿qué impacto tuvo sobre la estructura encontrada?, ¿qué deja?, ¿qué resulta relevante?

Land laws provide a legal basis for addressing a country’s land-related strategies and are the central land policy instruments through which governments realise land policy objectives. Considering their vital role, it is imperative that land laws be evaluated to ensure that policy objectives are followed and that the laws are not ineffective or counterproductive. The extant literature, however, provides only a fragmentary basis for evaluation.

The importance of land manifests in various components of the everyday lives of people insocieties: cultural heritage, livelihood, the environment, economy, and community, among manyothers. Land is a factor of development. It is the most influential determinant of developmentbecause women, youths, and men (and households) depend on it for their livelihoods and formaintaining their living conditions in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas.

Issues relating to land are specifically referred to in five of the United Nations’ (UN) 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and UN-Habitat’s Global Land Tools Network views access to land and tenure security as key to achieving sustainable, inclusive and efficient cities. The African continent is growing in importance, with climate change and population pressure on land. This review explores an interdisciplinary approach, and identifies recent advances in geo-spatial technology relevant to land governance in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

Opening up land-related administrative data, combining it with data from other sources  and processing and making this data available as easily accessible information for women and men equally could be a means to counteracting land corruption in land management, land administration and land allocation. But does open data and enhanced data transparency indeed help to counteract land corruption?

Transparency is often seen as a means of improving governance and accountability of investment, but its potential to do so is hindered by vague definitions and failures to focus on the needs of key local actors.

New research by CCSI and the Centre pour l’Environnement et le Développement (CED) on transparency of land-based investment in Cameroon. 

In the report, CCSI and CED find that:

• Communities continue to be excluded from decision-making around investments.
• The government pursues a top-down approach to concession allocation and remains reluctant to recognize all legitimate tenure rights.

Bien que des informations sur certains projets d’investissements soient rendues publiques, et malgré une loi récente sur la transparence, la gestion des investissements fonciers au Cameroun n’est, de toute évidence, pas véritablement transparente dans l’ensemble.

Dans un nouveau rapport se concentrant sur les projets d’agrobusiness au Cameroun, le Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) et le Centre pour l’Environnement et le Développement (CED) constatent que :

This independent evaluation by Emerald Network focuses on land rights, access and sustainable use, through an assessment of five companies: the Coca-Cola Company (TCCC), PepsiCo, Nestlé, Unilever and Associated British Foods’ (ABF) subsidiary Illovo Sugar Africa. As a result of the Behind the Brands campaign, these companies have publicly recognized the risk of people being dispossessed of their land to make way for agricultural commodities and have pledged to respect the rights of women, communities and smallholder farmers.

According to the United Nations (UN) Refugee Agency, there were 79.5 million forcibly displaced people worldwide by the end of 2019. Evictions from homes and land are often linked to protracted violent conflict. Land administration (LA) can be a small part of UN peace-building programs addressing these conflicts. Through the lens of the UN and seven country cases, the problem being addressed is: what are the key features of fit-for-purpose land administration (FFP LA) in violent conflict contexts?

This is the presentation of Dr.  Marcello De Maria, Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Agriculture Policy and Development at the University of Reading during the webinar on the Role of Open Data in the Fight against Land Corruption on January 28th, 2021. 

The analysis revealed overwhelming support for the use of open data as an anticorruption tool in the land sector, but it also found strong evidence for the existence of a high degree of untapped potential.