From Cambodia to Kosovo, and now East Timor, the United Nations has undertaken broad governmental functions in an effort to ensure that peace is maintained after the departure of the peacekeepers. On its face, these “peace-building” missions have a powerful logic. Brokering a peace, but leaving behind a vacuum in institutional capacity, only encourages the return of conflict after the peacekeepers leave. Providing urgent humanitarian relief, but failing to integrate it with development aid, ignores the way that development assists in preventing future humanitarian crises.

In 2015, 193 countries affirmed their commitment to the 17 goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including Germany. According to an estimate by the United Nations in 2018, the international community loses 5% of global gross domestic product through corruption. Effective measures to combat corruption are therefore a prerequisite for achieving the ambitious goals of the 2030 Agenda. 

Over the past two decades, academics and development practitioners have written extensively about the harmful impact of corruption on economic development and social outcomes. From an economic perspective, corruption diverts resources away from their most productive uses, acting as a regressive tax that supports the lifestyles of the elite at everyone else’s expense. Corruption undermines the legitimacy of political systems by providing the elite with alternative ways of holding on to power, rather than through genuine democratic means.

ABSTRACTED FROM EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Since its establishment in 1999, the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (SUHAKAM) has been dealing with allegations of violations to indigenous customary rights to land, many of which have not been resolved. SUHAKAM in 2010 therefore decided to conduct a National Inquiry into the Land Rights of Indigenous Peoples (the Inquiry) in Malaysia as it is of the view that the issue could not be resolved using piecemeal approaches or addressed on a case by case basis.

Driving Dispossession: The Global Push to “Unlock the Economic Potential of Land,” sounds the alarm on the unprecedented wave of privatization of natural resources that is underway around the world. Through six case studies — Ukraine, Zambia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, and Brazil — the report details the myriad ways by which governments — willingly or under the pressure of financial institutions and Western donor agencies — are putting more land into so-called “productive use” in the name of development.

This report provides a summary of a two-part online workshop in June 2020 to explore the creation of a community of experts to support the ongoing development of the LandVoc concept scheme, and to support ongoing contributions from the LandVoc community to AGROVOC. The workshops brought together 35 experts mprove awareness of the importance of controlled and multilingual vocabularies, and of value of semantics to management. of agriculture and land related knowledge.  

In 2015 we celebrated world leaders’ recognition of the foundational and strategic role that secure land rights for all –women and men, regardless of ethnicity, religion, place of residence, or civil, economic, social, or political status—must play to achieve a world free of poverty, hunger and systemic gender discrimination.

Coming two years after a political transition from post-war authoritarianism, this Shadow Report to the United Nations Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights is framed in the backdrop of two concurrent processes of ‘transformation’ currently underway in Sri Lanka. The first is the process of constitutional reform initiated by the Government that was elected on the platform of restoring democratic, inclusive and accountable governance.

Language and technology barriers are a very serious constraint to effectively exchange and learn from land data, information and technologies across the globe. We would like to explore whether we can gain inspiration from how semantic web technologies have overcome knowledge-sharing challenges in other sectors, such as the agriculture sector. With emerging technologies, new tools and ever-growing amounts of land data, we face a very real risk of losing the overview. Without this overview, data is much less likely to be used and thus be useful.

The debate over governance is something that will not pass overtime or become outdated. Governance in its essence is significant to ensure proper and sustainable development. Efficiency and effectiveness in management on the other part is vital in ensuring good-governance continuity especially to those dependent on governance institutions. Land on the other hand is an important finite resource for development of a country that requires exclusive management and control.

Backroom Bullying: The Role of the United States Government in the Herakles Farms’ Land Grab in Cameroon, shows how bullying by US government officials may have played a critical role in the granting of nearly 20,000 ha by the Cameroonian government to the US-based firm Herakles Farms in 2013, instead of the cancellation of clearly flawed project.

A landmark report from the Oakland Institute, Taking On the Logging Pirates: Land Defenders in Papua New Guinea Speak Out! elevates the voices of communities across the country who are opposing the theft of their land, made possible by the corrupt practices of local officials and foreign companies.