In Dr. Tajamul Haque’s untimely demise on 2nd May, India has lost a scholar policy maker, a champion of the causes of farmers, tribal, an advocate of land rights for women and dalits and a messiah for marginal farmers and tenants. With his departure, farmers lost a tireless, fearless advocate at the echelon of power corridors, while for ministers and secretaries, gone now is a highly knowledgeable yet an unassuming pragmatic advisor.

Forest tenure reform in the global south has often failed to be gender-responsive, but there is increasing interest in taking up this challenge to activate effective change.

Now, a new guide created by scientists with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) aims to make the process more accessible, recommending a three-step process, billed as “analyze, strategize, and realize,” to support interventions in local and national contexts.

For centuries, people around the world in the continents of Asia, Africa, Oceania and Latin America have been living off the forests and other natural resources to sustain their livelihoods, their cultural practices and sometimes even religious rituals.

How to get tree planting — and growing — right

This article was originally published by Forests News

Forests are critically important for many of the world’s poor who depend on them for food, income, medicine and building materials. As such, forests are a nexus of broadly held policy goals such as poverty reduction, economic growth, conservation and climate change. Most forests in the developing world are governed, in practice, through community-based tenure systems.

Conservation, said Aldo Leopold, is harmony between (wo)men and land. Land should justifiably figure not only into the conservation, but also in development debates, policy and discourses. Missing land rights and land tenure security can be costly for states, communities as well as local and global development.

By Nicholas Tagliarino, Land Portal Foundation

By Madhu Sarin, Fellow of the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI)

Q: What is required to strengthen women’s land and community forest rights in practice in India?

By Anne Larson, Principal Scientist, CIFOR

The recent World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, held this past March in Washington D.C., provided a unique opportunity to reflect on collective land tenure reforms not only from a research point of view, but also from that of governments.

By Myrna Kay Cunningham Kain