India Land and Development Conference, ILDC is back with its eighth episode at the picturesque FLAME University in Pune this week. It has been quite a journey for this collaborative convening. Despite its 8th edition, it has emerged as a globally recognized land convergence event, drawing attention from far and near. 

Just thinking of a conference on a topic like ‘Land’, in a country like India, is in itself a big challenge, forget organizing it year after year, for eight years - setting a stature that has grown every year!  

India has made significant strides in empowering women over the past few decades, starting with self-help groups (SHGs) that became powerful vehicles for social inclusion. Government and NGO efforts later expanded to skilling and livelihood initiatives, helping women increase their income and build small businesses within their communities. Yet, despite this progress, the urgent need remains for a long-term, sustainable solution to women's empowerment.

Reliable tamper-proof records with a real time link between Registration, Survey and Revenue departments with common shared textual and spatial data that are geo-referenced and ground-truthed so that there is no need for repeated universal ground survey.

Such records are available to the respective land-holders/ owners with a simple system to update whenever a transfer takes place through sale, inheritance or any other transfer.

Inclusive land governance at the local level allows for the community’s broader governance ‘muscle’ to be exercised in a constructive and practical way. This can reduce conflict and spark transformative social change.

Defending the rights of nature represents a big step forward in the fight against climate change.

Speaking truth to power is an art, but increasingly a lost art. This goes as much for academia as for the rest of the world. Indeed and unfortunately, much of academia reflects the world in which it functions and often makes the challenge of deepening social justice harder rather than smaller. To put it bluntly, much of academia has resorted to instrumental and naïve beliefs in innovation, technology and efficiency (which dominate the natural sciences) or (as in much of the social-economic sciences) increasingly arcane niche debates that too often revolve around virtue-signalling, methodological-theoretical wizardry or apolitical pragmatism. What we seem to have lost to a good degree – though to be sure: it was never a dominant endeavour and at the same time it has never been absent either – is the art of speaking truth to power.

In Cambodia, a recent Human Rights Watch report documents how Indigenous Chong people have faced eviction and criminal charges following the establishment of a carbon offsetting project on their lands. In Kenya, “the world’s largest soil carbon removal project”, whose credits have been used to offset the emissions of global corporations including Meta and Netflix, has been accused of dispossessing Indigenous Peoples of economically and culturally significant land, and reducing the climate resilience of thousands of people. 

My heart aches for all those who have lost their loved ones from the tragedy facing Kenya today as the death toll nears 100. Heavy rains have lashed Kenya in recent weeks, causing widespread flooding that has displaced thousands, destroyed infrastructure, and devastated livelihoods. In the interest of student and staff well-being, the Ministry of Education has announced a delay in school re-opening. While these seasonal floods are not uncommon, the severity of this year's event highlights a crucial issue: our relationship with land.

Climate change poses an existential threat to ecosystems, with potentially far-reaching impacts on agriculture, forestry, wind and solar energy, and other land-based investments. These investments can also further exacerbate detrimental climate change impacts if they are not sustainably implemented. 

Buea, a picturesque city in the foothills of Mount Cameroon, is experiencing rapid urban development in the region. However, the town faces a number of urban governance and environmental challenges such as poor waste management, deforestation and poor air quality amongst others that demand urgent attention. Recognizing the critical importance of addressing these challenges, this policy brief aims to highlight the complexities of urban governance and environmental management in Buea.

Terra Firma and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) are pleased to announce the launch of a new LAND-at-scale project: Scaling Community Land Rights Certification in Municipal Areas of Mozambique. The project started implementation this month (February 2024) in the rural hinterlands of four municipalities in Manica, Sofala and Zambezia provinces.