Local and indigenous communities across the world are advancing innovative sustainable development solutions that work for people and for nature. Few publications or case studies tell the full story of how such initiatives evolve, the breadth of their impacts, or how they change over time. Fewer still have undertaken to tell these stories with community practitioners themselves guiding the narrative. The Equator Initiative aims to fill that gap.

Local and indigenous communities across the world are advancing innovative sustainable development solutions that work for people and for nature. Few publications or case studies tell the full story of how such initiatives evolve, the breadth of their impacts, or how they change over time. Fewer still have undertaken to tell these stories with community practitioners themselves guiding the narrative. The Equator Initiative aims to fill that gap.

Esta publicação é resultado de um processo de trabalho coletivo, conduzido entre junho e outubro de 2002. Inicialmente, foi constituído um Grupo Coordenador, composto por profi ssionais de destaque na área da regularização, provenientes de várias regiões do Brasil e com atuação em vários setores governamentais, não governamentais, acadêmicos.

A review of Zimbabwe in 2001, focusing on the land question and farm workers. Reflections on conferences on Zimbabwe in Copenhagen and on farm workers in Southern Africa in Harare, with a section highlighting the key issues brought out in a new book on farm workers in Zimbabwe. Argues that issues around farm workers need to be seriously rethought and debated across the political spectrum and that land is a part of a much wider crisis of governance.

A summary of a larger study commissioned by DFID Ghana. Covers findings of the study and suggestions for moving forward. The conclusions include that tenure insecurity is more widespread than generally recognised, its sources are complex, current strategies are inadequate, promising conditions exist, reform rather than improvement is needed, a community based approach is the way forward. The National Land Policy is not pro-poor, nor are classic titling approaches serving the poor.

The mandate of the Kenya Government in its objective to achieve sustainable development is to reduce poverty by half by 2015 and transform the country into a newly industrailized nation by the year 2020. This paper reviews the cadastral systems that have been formulated and implemented in Kenya ; the different concepts and techniques used in the preparation of cadastral survey plans and maps; and the impact of the cadastre as a source of spatial data in support of land administration processes.

For a long time the issue of land and related problems has been debated mostly by academicians, politicians and professionals. Although the problem has remained more or less one of the most talked of in Kenya, the public has very often been left out of the debate. Again mostly the debate has been dominated more by complaining about either the lack of policy or the bad land policies and laws and the failure by successive governments to correct those problems.

Land is the most important productive asset in agrarian societies such as Cambodia’s. Throughout Cambodian history, land ownership rights have varied with changes in government. In the period before French colonisation (pre-1863), when all land belonged to the sovereign, people were freely allowed to till unoccupied land and could cultivate as much as they liked. With French colonisation, a property-rights system was introduced in 1884.

Over the last decade, forests have played an important role in the transition from war to peace in Cambodia. Forest exploitation financed the continuation of war beyond the Cold War and regional dynamics, yet it also stimulated co-operation between conflicting parties. Timber represented a key stake in the rapacious transition from the (benign) socialism of the post-Khmer Rouge period to (exclusionary) capitalism, thereby becoming the most politicized resource of a reconstruction process that has failed to be either as green or as democratic as the international community had hoped.

An overview of the legislation and judgements of the LCC regarding the Extension of Security of Tenure Act No 62 of 1997 (as amended)

Examines the evolution of the World Bank’s land policy since its 1975 Land Policy Reform Paper. Shows how the Bank has moved away from its earlier views on titling.

To accommodate the needs of hundreds of thousands of returnees after war and fgenocide in 1994, the new Rwandan Government launched a settlement programme, Imidugudu. Since early 1997, this programme has targeted the entire rural population: all scattered households in the country had to be regrouped in villages. What started as a response to an emergency turned into an ambitious but controversial development programme. The programme has been implemented with support from international organizations, including UNHCR and numerous NGOs.