This scoping study on women's access to land in East Africa sets up a conceptual framework in which to consider issues of women's land tenure and identifies key aras for future research as well as key actiors toward increased jender equity in land rights.

Pastoralism has suffered untold abuses in the implementation of national policy and laws before in the incorporation of bills of rights in the constitution. These provisions allowed freedom of association that enable formation of CSOs and NGOs, some of which based their interventions into policies and legal issues that denied pastoralists of the rights to engage into livelihood processes through access to, management of, and benefit from land and resources entailed in them.

As with natural resource management reform processes elsewhere in East Africa, Tanzanian CWM has become highly contested terrain, both physically and conceptually. The linear, centrally-led, devolutionary reform processes that were conceptualised by donor and NGO supporters of CWM in the mid-1990s have not materialised. Rather, multi-faceted political and institutional conflicts over the control of valuable land and wildlife resources characterise CWM in Tanzania today.

Conservation enterprises are commercial activities designed to create benefit flows that support a conservation objective. The Koija ‘Starbeds’ Ecolodge was created jointly by a community group, a private sector partner and the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) to help protect a critical wildlife corridor and habitat along the Ewaso Nyiro River in the Samburu Heartland (www.awf.org). Many conservation enterprises claim success mainly based on their noble intentions,

This paper leverages datasets and results from two separate studies carried out across eight Kajiado group ranches and offers a unique opportunity to look at emergent pre- and postsubdivision trends from an interdisciplinary framework that combines ecological, political, and human-ecological research perspectives. It provides insights into the following issues: the loss of flexibility and mobility for Maasai herders’ dues to subdivision, the nature of collective activities that individuals pursue after subdivision, and the emergence of pasture sharing arrangements.

This report is part of a broader comparative effort by the Overseas Development Institute’s Humanitarian Policy Group on Land Tenure in Conflict and Post-Conflict Situations, which aims to inform and improve the policy and practice of humanitarian action and to inform related areas of international policy. It seeks to understand how land issues affect and are affected by violence and conflict resolution, what responses are appropriate and what lessons can be learned from specific contexts of land tenure interventions, both during and after conflict.

This background briefing reports on a study of land access for returnees in Rwanda, and the impacts of land access policies in the post-conflict period. It also seeks to understand better the roles international humanitarian agencies and NGOs have played, and how their performance can be improved. It is not suggested that Rwanda is typical, but rather that the centrality of land issues there has thrown up a revealing set of broader questions.

The briefing ends with the following lessons;

[via UN-HABITAT] Women’s equal rights to adequate housing, land and property are well elaborated under international human rights law but are often elusive in practice. This document is a reference guide to international human rights standards identifying both the substance of women’s rights as well as the commitments made by States with regard to improving women’s rights to adequate housing, land and property.

[via FAO] This report is based on the proceedings of the Technical Consultation on Gender, Property Rights and Livelihoods in the Era of AIDS, organized by FAO in November 2008. It takes stock of where FAO and its partners are in terms of addressing property rights insecurity and provides a proposed framework through which future action can take place.

Secure property rights are a critical component of economic development and social stability. Inappropriate property rights policies and institutional structures that are not synchronized with economic, political, and environmental realities can undermine growth, erode natural resource bases, and catalyze violent conflict.

The report is based primarily on a desk study of donor documents and it is divided in country-specific chapters.

This publication is the second report of the Advisory Group on Forced Evictions (AGFE) to the Executive Director of UN-Habitat. It contains follow-up information on eviction cases documented in the first report, 15 new cases, and a detailed analysis of the current global situation regarding forced evictions and successful counterstrategies, methodologies and tools to stop and prevent forced evictions.

There is important evidence to suggest that corruption is a key factor contributing to the degradation of renewable natural resources. Forestry officials and law enforcement officers who are in the pockets of corrupt logging firms often turn a blind eye to activities that threaten the sustainable management of a forest’s biodiversity. Similarly, fishery inspectors endanger stocks when they accept bribes to ignore official quotas for trawlers.