This is the PDF version of an online data story published by Land Portal on 28 April 2022.

Colonial and apartheid land dispossession in South Africa was the most extensive of any country in sub-saharan Africa. Despite a land reform programme initiated after the transition to democracy in 1994, equitable access to land remains an unresolved question in both urban and rural areas.

This publication is the second part to the highlights of the regional workshop on “Land Rights as Human Rights: An Imperative towards the Realization of the Sustainable Development Goals” held on 24-25 November in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

This publication is based on a range of past studies on ICCAs conducted in several regions of the world in the last two decades, and, most recently, on 19 country level case studies. The latter were commissioned as part of a project on ICCA Recognition and Support, undertaken by the ICCA Consortium, coordinated by Kalpavriksh.

It also incorporates some key findings of a parallel project on ICCA Legislation, also undertaken by the ICCA Consortium, and coordinated by Natural Justice.

The publication intends to:

The Independent People’s Tribunal (IPT) undertook an inquiry on the status of implementation of FRA to understand and analyze the reasons behind the lack of implementation and/or the violations in the implementation of the Act. The objectives of IPT were to:

1. Identify and analyze the various violations happening across states on the implementation

of FRA, and whether they are procedural or structural in nature.

2. The direct and indirect impact its non-implementation would have/has had on the

communities.

3. Assess the status of FRA thereof.

This report seeks to highlight the potential of FRA, assess its achievements, identify the bottlenecks, and find the ways forward. Its objectives are to:

Make a quantitative estimate of forest land that has the potential to be recognized as CFR area, and compare it to the actual forest area recognized asCFRs across the country;

Assess the qualitative potential of FRA for gender equal development, poverty alleviation, climate change and biodiversity conservation;

The handbook does not specifically list judicial and court related remedies to any of these problems. In case the problem does not get resolved through the administrative route, clients and community practitioners have the option of accessing avenues such as the National Green Tribunal (NGT) and Courts which are accessed through lawyers. In such instances, the evidence collected, complaints filed and other documentation could form an important basis and support for any legal intervention.

This document, titled Closing the Enforcement Gap: Groundtruthing of Environmental Violations in Sarguja, Chhattisgarh,is the second in the series of community led groundtruthing exercises carried out by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR)-Namati Environmental Justice Program in partnership with Janabhivyakti and Hasdeo Arand Bachao Sangharsh Samiti (HABSS).

Women’s land rights (WLR) have been and continue to be a live agenda in social development discourse of India. The importance of WLR has been discussed in the context of agriculture; poverty reduction; reduction in gender based violence; women’s well-being and agency.This policy brief outlines the gaps that exist in the realisation of women’s land rights on agricultural land and calls for immediate collective action aimed at removing the structural barriers in inheritance, leasing, and joint ownership of privately held land in favour of women.

In Asia, land issues affect women in ways that call for serious deliberation and action. Suffice it to say, the legitimate concerns of females transcend generations and geographical borders. Attaining a stable livelihood, meeting basic resource needs and having adequate housing are just some of the issues that affect women. There is, however, a pressing need to heed the woes of rural women in particular. The poor are swelling in numbers and the condition of poor rural women lies on the fringes of the global economic agenda.

This new policy brief was commissioned by the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) and has been co-authored by Shalini Bhutani and Kanchi Kohli. It captures in one document the SC’s judgement, the course it has taken there after and the policy options that prevail. The document draws from information collected from government departments in several states & UTs, case papers and media reports to understand what is the status of implementation, the challenges in the realisation of the SC’s commons Judgment and where the strengths lie.