Forests managed by Indigenous and other local communities generate important benefits for livelihood, and contribute to regional and global biodiversity and carbon sequestration goals. Yet, challenges to community forestry remain. Rural out-migration, for one, can make it hard for communities to maintain broad and diverse memberships invested in local forest commons. This includes young people, who can contribute critical energy, ideas, and skills and are well positioned to take up community forest governance and work, but often aspire to alternative livelihoods and lifestyles.

While agrarian change has been a recurrent theme in Ghana’s endeavor for economic development, questions on how land resources should be managed to ensure prompt attainment of economic growth remain unanswered. In Ghana, land is controlled by customary actors, while the state is the custodian of agricultural policies. The need for interaction between the two actors to ensure that the envisioned economic gains from agriculture are attained is paramount.

Development practice over recent years in much of Africa prioritized formalization of land policies deemed to enhance better handling and use of land as an asset for social development. Following this trend, land reform policy in Ghana was based on a pluralistic legal system in which both the customary land tenure system and the statutory system of land ownership and control co-exist by law. The primary research question for this study was the following: What implications emerge when customary land tenure system and the statutory system of land ownership and control co-exist in law?

Les inégalités foncières sont en pleine croissance dans la plupart des pays. Pire encore, les nouvelles mesures et analyses publiées dans le présent rapport de synthèse montrent qu’elles sont sensiblement plus élevées qu’annoncé précédemment. Cette tendance représente une menace directe pour les moyens de subsistance d’environ 2,5 milliards de personnes travaillant dans l’agriculture de petite échelle partout dans le monde.

Both land expropriation and eviction constitute a threat to the properties and life of local communities. In Southern Cameroon, the phenomenon has increased with the implementation of structural projects to ensure the emergence of Cameroon by 2035 and the resumption of the control of urban space by the State. The aim of this article is to show how structural projects and the regulation of urbanization in big towns affect local communities.

In the search for rural transformation, this paper analyses the effect of agriculture on rural nonfarm entrepreneurship (NFE) highlighting the role of land rights and assesses the impact of rural NFE on households’ livelihood focusing on rural Burkina Faso. To achieve these objectives, the study uses two techniques: (i) propensity score matching technique to investigate the nonfarm entrepreneurship impact on farm households’ income; (ii) logistic regression to assess the role of agriculture in the development of nonfarm enterprises.

Este documento propone que la gobernanza colectiva de la tierra otorga derechos y contribuye a reducir las desigualdades en el interior de las comunidades, y las existentes entre estas, y la población e institucionalidad de su entorno.

Chapter in a book;“Rethinking land reform in Africa;opportunities and challenges” by the African Natural Resources Centre;edited by Cosmas Milton Obote Ochieng for the African Development Bank. A think piece reflecting on changing commercial pressures on land in low and middle-income countries; the role of law in shaping the ways those pressures manifest themselves; the limits of business standards in driving systemic change; and the case for comprehensive law reform to secure rural land rights.

The author has now run this site as an absolute dictator for 20 years;first in Oxfam space (2000-12) and since 2012 in Mokoro space. The article covers the origins of the site;the various motivations and the important role of changing technologies. The site is essentially a place to disseminate arguments in favour of pro-poor land reform and against simple solutions to complex issues. After the 2008 global financial crisis it included work on the impact of the global land grab on Africa.

Given the urgent need to prevent a collapse of biodiversity across the Earth, certain governments, organizations, and  conservationists have put forward proposals for
bringing 30 percent and up to 50 percent of the planet’s terrestrial areas under formal “protection and conservation” regimes. However, given that important

Este informe se basa en el imperativo de evitar el colapso de la biodiversidad sin olvidar el respeto a la tenencia y los derechos humanos de PI, CL y AD[26]. Asimismo, al formular las siguientes preguntas, busca destacar los riesgos y las oportunidades para los PI, las CL y los AD inherentes a la expansión propuesta de las áreas de conservación:

This guide is for forestry practitioners from local communities, governments, the private sector, civil society and academia in Southeast Asia. It explains the fundamentals of forest landscape restoration (FLR) and serves as a starting point for future exploration and design of FLR initiatives.