Resource information
The purpose of this guide is to provide support to those who are assessing and designing appropriate responses to food insecurity and rural development situations. This guide aims to show where and why land tenure is an important issue in food security and sustainable rural livelihoods. The main objective of these guidelines is to provide detailed suggestions for consideration of land tenure issues in rural development policy. The authors facilitate this by:defining land tenure and how it is administered in different situationsrevealing the various stakeholders who have an interest in land: those who control it and how they exercise that control; those who use it; and those, often women, indigenous peoples and other disadvantaged groups, who may be landless or may have insecure claims to landanalysing contexts where land tenure is currently of critical concern, such as:situations where unsustainable increases in pressure on, or insecure tenure over, land resources give rise to environmental degradationwhere gender-discrimination in access to land disadvantages individuals, households and communitieswhere conflicts may have been provoked by disputed access, or may make problems of access difficult to addressThe authors main conclusions for effective consideration of land tenure include:ensuring that the State provides necessary regulations and assurances to maintain secure access to land even during periods of land administration decentralizationensuring that the States involves local communities and local governments in the administration and management of land and other natural resources, to create a new form of social contract between the two groupsoffering short-term interventions to ensure that any policy changes happen smoothly and sustainably, and being vigilant to the effects of these policy changes on populations and environmentsThe paper concludes with a list of relevant literature for further research.[adapted from author]
