This report includes a situation update submitted to KHRG in November 2011 by a villager living in a hiding site in northern Lu Thaw Township, Papun District. The villager described an incident that occurred in October 2011 in which Tatmadaw soldiers fired six mortar shells into an area in which civilians are actively seeking to avoid attacks by Tatmadaw troops; no one was killed or injured during the attack.

Significant progress has been made over the past decade or so in the development of policy and legislation that support the recognition of customary rights to land, with important legal rulings in Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique, South Sudan, and South Africa. At the same time, the strengthening of communities’ traditional rights to use resources has progressed through community forest reserves and community conservation areas.

The main objective of this paper is to provide a) a presentation of the diversity of land related conflicts in Africa, b) an analysis of underlying causes of conflicts and experiences in conflict resolution and, c) lessons learnt and best practices from the policy and legal responses and links with enhancement of land governance in the region.

Urban LandMark has developed a booklet that focuses on the creation, measurement and capture of value from transport interchanges. It also looks into the opportunities/obstacles to municipalities' use of value capture instruments. And it investigates the economics of value creation and value capture to identify the possibility of 'getting ahead of the curve' in securing these sites for more socially orientated development. Read more.

News, views and experiences on securing rights to rangelands from East Africa and beyond.

This document summarizes a legal and policy review of the Community Land Bill (Oct. 2011 draft), the Land Bill (5 Dec. 2011 draft), and the Land Registration Bill (12 Dec. 2011 draft) with respect to the recognition of community land rights. This review was commissioned by the USAID Kenya SECURE Project upon request of the Ministry of Lands and Land Reform Transformation Unit.

The LAPSSET Corridor project, a major infrastructure development project that will run from Kenya to South Sudan and Ethiopia, will impact, positively or negatively, on the lives of more than 100 million people in the three countries. Indigenous peoples will potentially suffer the most negative impacts as a result of their having been historically marginalized economically, socially and politically. The recent discovery of oil in Turkana will add to the suffering of the Turkana peoples.

This work aims to contribute to the debate on social conflicts generated by coastal development and the process of land tenure reform as a conflict resolution mechanism. We will present the case of the Territorios Costeros Comunitarios reform movement (TECOCOS) currently mobilized in Costa Rica and integrated by over 60 coastal communities. This reform movement initiated in reaction to a recent wave of planned evictions threatening specific coastal communities on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica, following a decade of aggressive coastal tourism development.

The Sustainable Rangeland Management Project (SRMP) aims at securing land and resource
rights of pastoralists, agro-pastoralists and crop farmers, while improving land management
by supporting village and district land use planning and rangeland management in Kiteto,
Bahi, Chamwino and Kondoa Districts in Tanzania. More broadly, it aims at influencing policy

Ekta Parishad along with support organisations launched a decisive movement called Jan Satyagrah whose focus was to bring together people’s voices for a ‘National Land Reforms Act & Policy’ as a broad framework and means of land re-distribution to the landless and homeless poor.

Cette publication, Mobilisation des ressources financieres locales: documentation des registres fonciers urbains des communes du Benin, retrace le parcours des Registres Fonciers Urbains (RFU) tels qu'experimentes dans les communes beninoises depuis plus de deux decennies. Ce document constitue une contribution majeure a la connaissance des RFU. Il ressort de cette publication que les RFU mis en place dans presque 20 communes au Benin ont prouve leur valeur et leur popularite dans leur capacite a mobiliser les ressources financieres necessaires au meilleur fonctionnement des communes.