A new report by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) outlines eight reasons why it is important to address HLP issues from the outset of a humanitarian response, including:
Saving lives, preventing further displacement and human rights violations
Adapting humanitarian response to complex urban environments
Ensuring equal access to humanitarian assistance
Promoting access to justice in crises contexts and contributing towards durable solutions

This publication is the result of the workshop on “Responding to Climate Change and Tenure Insecurity in Small Island Developing States – The Role of Land Professionals” held in Christchurch, New Zealand 30 April – 1 May 2016 in connection with the FIG Working Week 2016. It includes a report of the seminar and a FIG Christchurch Declaration as the main outcome of the workshop.

Disputes over land are a prominent feature of many situations of protracted violent conflict in Burundi, Uganda and South Sudan. Research conducted as part of the programme ‘Grounding Land Governance’ underscores that war reshuffles access and ownership, but also critically changes the ways in which land is governed. Land issues often come to resonate with other conflicts in society, thereby affecting overall stability. This makes interventions in land governance politically sensitive.

After conflict, governments and donors often feel a need for up-scaling and modernizing land use. There is an ambition to achieve economic recovery and contribute to food security through stimulating large-scale investment in land. Our research in Uganda, Burundi and South Sudan suggests that policymakers should be extremely careful when promoting large-scale land acquisitions, both foreign and national. Especially in the difficult transition from war to peace, large-scale appropriation of land risks becoming a threat to tenure security and the recovery of rural livelihoods.

In post-conflict settings, securing tenure of local smallholders is considered of major importance to reduce and prevent local land disputes, to contribute to the recovery of rural livelihoods, and to improve agricultural production. Registration and other ways of formalizing land ownership are generally believed to significantly enhance local tenure security and rural development.

Evidence updates, produced by LEGEND’s Core Land Support Team, provide a series of short briefs, summarising emerging bodies of evidence from different sources on key themes related to land governance or particular country issues. They offer technical advisers, policy-makers and researchers a way of keeping abreast of research to provide a source of quick evidence-based pointers on what to do and what to avoid in land-related policy and programming.

This report presents the findings of the Yanacocha Independent Fact Finding Mission (the “Mission”), conducted between August 2015 and March 2016. The Mission was tasked with examining a conflict between a multinational gold mining company and a local campesino family, in the high Andes of northern Peru. At the root of the conflict is a dispute over a parcel of land called “Tragadero Grande”. Located within the Campesino Community of Sorochuco, Tragadero Grande falls within the footprint of a planned multi-billion dollar mining project called “Conga”.

Africa’s Great Lakes Region has in recent years experienced
political strife, armed conflict and population displacements
with severe humanitarian consequences. While these events
have clearly revolved around political struggles for the control
of the state, recent research has pointed to the significance
of access to renewable natural resources as structural causes
and sustaining factors in struggles for power in the region.
Contested rights to land and natural resources are significant,

As part of a F&BKP knowledge agenda on land governance and food security, LANDac organisedthree country-specific learning trajectories on land governance and food security in Uganda, Ghana and Ethiopia. This reflection paper brings together the main findings and outcomes to provide policy recommendations for improved land governance and food security in Africa.

Costing and Financing of Land Administration Services – Challenges in Implementation

Costing and Financing of Land Administration Services – Challenges in Implementation

Based on data from the Land Matrix database, this paper briefly analyses large-scale land acquisitions in the context of current complex and dynamic land and climate governance discourse. The paper tries to explain the inter linkages between land and climate governance, within the water-food-energy nexus, and the increasing and important role for science, technology and innovation in agriculture in order to become more resilient to current and future challenges in climate and land governance.