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.
The Land Portal Foundation, in partnership with Transparency International, hosted the webinar titled "Breaking New Ground: Insights and Stories on the Impact of Land Corruption on Discriminated Groups in Africa." The webinar brought together a panel of distinguished experts to delve into the challenges and complexities of corruption intertwined with discrimination in land rights and governance. This session provided crucial insights through detailed case studies and expert analyses, offering pathways towards more equitable land management practices.
A selection and review of readings that shed light on the role that open land data can play in equitable and sustainable development, and social justice.
This blog describes the common trends and actions across the projects, and is enriched with additional insights from the LANDac Annual Conference 2022 and other events.
It’s that time of year again! March means International Women’s Day and the annual meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. It’s not surprising, after COP26 in Glasgow, that this year’s CSW66 links gender equality with climate change. The official theme is ‘achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls in the context of climate change, environmental and disaster risk reduction policies and programmes.’
The effectiveness of sustainable land use governance can be undermined if local affected people perceive land-use policies as not reflecting social objectives, or as ‘unjust.’ To transform externally-conceived sustainability principles from the international level into on-the-ground practice, involves the interplay of various organizations and peoples from the government, civil society, and the private sector.
There is an underlying tension in the land rights movement that is rarely addressed head on, which is the perception that securing women’s land rights threatens community land rights. Community land rights are typically held by indigenous people, small-scale and subsistence farmers, pastoralists, herders and many other groups who are directly dependent on land for their livelihoods but whose land tenure is often the most precarious.
The main objective of the LAND-at-scale program is to directly strengthen essential land governance components for men, women and youth that have the potential to contribute to structural, just, sustainable and inclusive change at scale. An ambitious objective, that cannot be achieved in isolation. Alignment is, therefore, a key factor in all LAND-at-scale activities - be it at project level for our country interventions or through our collaborative approach to knowledge management.
Environmental policy interventions often result in conflicts because they fail to recognize people’s identity and sense of belongings, as shaped through the places where they live. A recent paper explores a case study of a palm oil project in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, in which competing claims of recognition and land rights have led to conflict between transmigrants and indigenous Kutai people.
Advancing women’s land rights is a priority for the international development agenda. Yet, there is no consensus on which rights should be monitored and reported. Three indicators of women’s property rights are widely used in the literature. Each captures a different aspect of women’s land rights, but a recent paper explores the extent to which these different rights are held by the same person, using data from six African countries.
