A land observatory can document dispossession, explain how it happens, and show why a reform is failing. Whether that knowledge helps people retain their land depends on the institutions and political relationships through which it travels.
That was the issue that stayed with me from the October 26 discussion organized by AGTER, with the Observatoire du Foncier au Tchad (OFT) and FAO’s land governance team. The session examined Chad’s experience, but its significance extends well beyond one country. It exposed the distance between producing knowledge about land and making that knowledge useful to people whose homes, livelihoods, and access to resources are at risk.
As Founder of TenureSecurity.org, I see this as a central challenge for our field. We need credible evidence, accessible research, and sustained public discussion. We also need to be honest about what these can achieve, where their influence ends, and what must happen for them to support enforceable rights.
The discussion offered grounds for optimism about the OFT’s evolving role. It also left important questions open.
Quotations below are translated from the French session transcripts, with light editing for readability.
An institution that connects research with public decisions
Established in 2001 and based at the University of N’Djamena, the OFT brings research and professional training into the same institutional setting. Its coordinator, Dr. Trépose Neinlembaye, described its fundamental mission as:
“To conduct research on land issues, but also to train land professionals and specialists.”
Her presentation showed how that mandate is expanding through field research, provincial structures, collaboration with local actors, and a framework for monitoring land reform. She reported that eight indicators had been identified with FAO’s support. Students contribute to data collection, while postgraduate training helps develop the next generation of land specialists.
Professor Amane Tatoloum emphasized the wider purpose of observatories. Alongside producing knowledge, they can provide early warning and create space to examine sensitive questions:
“They are tools for debate and questioning.”
This combination matters. A university can preserve knowledge across political cycles and train people who will later work in administration, research, or civil society. An observatory can connect that capacity to decisions being made outside the university.
Yet the discussion also challenged the boundaries of the institution. Chadian land expert Malloum Mahamat Abdoulaye argued for greater openness to researchers and practitioners beyond the university. I understood this as a question about whose expertise counts. An observatory’s academic foundations should help it scrutinize evidence rigorously while allowing farmers, pastoralists, local associations, and other researchers to shape the questions it investigates.
Participation must influence the substance of reform
Malloum traced Chad’s reform process through repeated attempts to revise land legislation. He described a more inclusive approach emerging from 2017–2018, involving public officials, researchers, traditional authorities, and civil society.
A consequential decision was to develop a national land policy before completing the legal code. As he explained:
“A land policy will provide an overall picture of the main directions before focusing on the code.”
The sequence is important. A legal code determines how rights are recognized, transferred, administered, and contested. Those choices should follow a public discussion about the problems reform is supposed to address and the people it is supposed to protect.
According to participants, the policy process included consultations outside the capital, contributions from civil society, and engagement with traditional authorities. Amane highlighted a declaration by traditional chiefs addressing sensitive issues, including women’s access to land and land grabbing.
Participants nevertheless described formal adoption of the national land policy as still pending at the time of the session. Preparatory work and pilot activities were advancing, but agreement among those involved in drafting should not be confused with an adopted policy or implemented reform.
The questions from the audience also tested what participation meant in practice. One participant asked specifically whether a national farmers’ organization had been involved. Responses described representation in the reform process and provincial consultations.
That exchange deserves attention. Listing categories of participants tells us relatively little about who influenced the outcome. An observatory could make participation more accountable by tracing which proposals entered the policy, which were rejected, and why.
For women’s land rights, this would mean examining whether women’s own priorities survive negotiation and implementation. A declaration of support from traditional authorities can be valuable. It does not establish whether women can claim land independently, contest discriminatory decisions, or obtain a remedy when their rights are denied. These are questions I would want a monitoring framework to follow over time.
Land grabbing requires a closer examination of power
The discussion resisted a familiar simplification of land grabbing as a transaction between a foreign investor and a national government.
Malloum stressed the importance of domestic elites in the Chadian cases he was discussing. Amane referred to research around Moundou examining the role of administrative actors in dispossession. These were participants’ accounts, rather than cases independently adjudicated during the session. Their analytical implication is nevertheless significant: scrutiny must follow the people and institutions enabling a land transfer, including those close to the affected communities.
Adriana Blache, Deputy Director of IFRA Nairobi, widened the discussion further. Drawing on her research in Tanzania, she described overlapping pressures from agricultural investment, conservation, mining, and hydroelectric development.
“Land grabs are not only agricultural; they are also much more complex and can occur at several scales.”
Her intervention helps explain why an observatory needs to look beyond a register of large agricultural concessions. Changes in access can result from the interaction of projects, administrative decisions, and restrictions on land use. The cumulative loss may be difficult to see when each intervention is assessed separately.
For me, this has a direct implication for the evidence we publish. The size of a transaction and the nationality of an investor are relevant, but insufficient. We need to establish who used the land beforehand, whose rights were recognized, who negotiated, and who lost access. We also need to examine where people can challenge those decisions.
That approach would make an observatory useful across rural areas, expanding cities, conservation landscapes, and pastoral territories, while preserving the specificity of each setting.
Legal authorization does not settle the question of justice
One of the most substantive exchanges concerned the relationship between legality and dispossession.
A doctoral researcher working on Senegal emphasized that land acquisitions can proceed through existing legal procedures. From the perspective of an investor holding official documents, an acquisition may be authorized. For a community whose claims derive from longstanding occupation or customary arrangements, the same transaction may represent the loss of its livelihood.
Amane’s response foregrounded the ethical consequences of taking land from people who depend on it. The exchange revealed a productive tension between legal analysis and an assessment of what a transaction does to people’s lives.
I would take both arguments seriously. We need precise analysis of the rules through which land changes hands. We also need to ask whether those rules recognize the full range of existing rights and give affected people a meaningful opportunity to defend them.
The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure, which framed FAO’s contributions, provide a useful reference. They call for recognition and respect for legitimate tenure rights, including rights that have not been formally recorded. They also call for safeguards against dispossession associated with investment and for access to remedies. These are voluntary standards, not evidence that a particular national legal system already provides those protections.
An observatory can help expose where formal procedures fail to capture legitimate claims. It can document the difference between an authorization on paper and the situation of people affected by it. That evidence becomes more useful when communities and their legal advisers can use it in negotiations, administrative challenges, or court proceedings.
The missing link between evidence and action
Several participants pressed for concrete examples of what observatories had done about land grabbing. Their questions addressed an uncomfortable possibility: a growing body of research can coexist with continuing dispossession.
Elysée Tchonbourbo described local organizing in Mayo-Kebbi Ouest, where young people had used public gatherings to explain the Voluntary Guidelines and raise concerns about land loss.
“They have organized themselves as defenders of rural people.”
He also described local mediation efforts and engagement with traditional authorities to address disputes before they escalated. Other contributions highlighted networks of land champions involving civil society, local officials, and customary authorities.
These accounts illustrate how knowledge can circulate through institutions that people already know and use. They also show that communities are organizing and interpreting the issues themselves.
The distinction between activity and outcome remains essential. Training people, establishing a network, and issuing an alert are meaningful steps. They do not, by themselves, tell us whether a household retained its land, a disputed allocation was reviewed, or an agreement was implemented. The session provided examples of engagement but did not establish a systematic record of those outcomes.
I would therefore like to see observatories document the course of a case after it has been reported: what was verified, where the evidence went, which institution responded, and what changed for the people concerned. Where nothing changed, that result matters too.
This need not turn a research institution into a court or campaigning organization. It would clarify how its work connects with institutions that have the authority to act. It would also reveal where that connection breaks down.
Pastoral mobility and urban expansion test what gets observed
FAO specialist Lamine Samaké brought the discussion back to conflict prevention, particularly around pastoral land. He asked how an observatory could support monitoring and help institutions develop:
“Well-documented interventions that are based on evidence.”
A representative of Chad’s pastoral platform described information sharing, monitoring bulletins, and local mediation mechanisms. The OFT was presented as part of this wider network of institutions.
For an observatory, pastoralism raises a demanding question about what counts as a land right. A system focused on fixed parcels can overlook access that depends on movement, seasonal agreements, or shared resources. Monitoring needs to follow the relationships that make those uses possible and identify where changes are creating pressure.
A question about urban expansion exposed a related problem. Participants discussed speculation and the conversion of land around growing cities, including the strain on planning and the interaction between formal and informal systems.
In both settings, recording a boundary is only part of the task. The observatory needs to understand how changes affect existing uses and relationships. A blocked route and the conversion of farmland at a city’s edge are different processes, but both can undermine livelihoods before those losses appear clearly in administrative records.
Early warning will be useful only if someone is responsible for responding. The design of an alert system should therefore specify which institution receives the information, what it can do, and how affected people can follow the response.
Independence must be demonstrated in practice
Adriana also asked how FAO’s support for observatories relates to its wider engagement with agricultural investment. This was a question about institutional consistency; the discussion did not establish misconduct in a particular project.
Ingeborg Gaarde explained that FAO’s land governance support responds to requests from governments and is grounded in the Voluntary Guidelines. She also corrected the idea that FAO should be understood as the political leader of the reform:
“Leadership really rests with national actors.”
That distinction matters for accountability. External partners can provide technical support, resources, and connections across countries. Decisions about reform and responsibility for protecting rights remain embedded in national institutions and political processes.
The same scrutiny should apply to observatories. Trépose emphasized institutional neutrality, but neutrality needs practical foundations. An observatory must be able to publish inconvenient findings, explain its methods, and scrutinize the conduct of institutions with which it collaborates.
My view is that independence should be assessed through these practices: transparent funding, clarity about who sets research priorities, publication arrangements that protect analytical judgment, and channels through which communities can question findings.
An observatory needs access to government to be useful. It also needs the freedom to show when government action, private investment, or customary authority is contributing to insecurity. Managing that relationship is part of its substantive work.
Sustained institutions need sustained funding
The financing discussion was unusually candid. Trépose described a combination of state support, assistance from partners, and internally generated resources from publications and training. She also made clear that the available resources were insufficient:
“All this funding does not really allow us to achieve our objectives.”
Other participants questioned how observatories and their networks could survive beyond a few years of external support. The concern went beyond the next project. It was about their place in national institutions and budgets.
That concern is supported by earlier research. A 2023 study by Quentin Grislain and colleagues examined the gap between observatories’ stated ambitions and their actual production and circulation of knowledge. It identified difficulties involving funding, institutional arrangements, and the political sensitivity of land information. That earlier diagnosis should not be treated as a current assessment of the OFT’s activities, but it helps explain why the challenges raised during this session are so consequential.
Repeated field observation, maintaining relationships, checking information, and following unresolved disputes all require continuity. A short grant may support a study. It cannot ensure that someone will return to the same community several years later.
Participants discussed building stronger connections among observatories in Chad, Burkina Faso, Niger, and elsewhere. Elysée’s comparison was valuable because he described different strengths and constraints in each setting. A network could allow institutions to learn from these differences.
The proposal should remain grounded in that purpose. Shared methods and exchanges can help, but another coordination structure will need staff, resources, and a clear reason to exist. Its value should be visible in better evidence and stronger national institutions.
What I would want to see next
AGTER coordinator Mathieu Perdriault brought the discussion back to the underlying question of:
“What kind of agriculture we want.”
That question places observation within a wider public choice. Assessing land investment requires examining livelihoods, employment, food production, environmental consequences, and the distribution of benefits alongside the area transferred or capital committed.
For Chad’s observatory, the next stage could make its contribution easier to assess through a small number of well-documented cases showing how evidence informed a decision, a public explanation of its monitoring indicators, and follow-up on the outcomes experienced by rights holders. These are my priorities arising from the discussion, rather than commitments announced by the OFT.
For funders, the implication is to support the continuing work behind those results: field presence, research capacity, community relationships, and the freedom to investigate difficult questions.
For TenureSecurity.org, I see a responsibility to make that evidence accessible while preserving its context. Publishing a success story is useful when readers can understand what changed, who contributed, and what remains unresolved. Publishing a failure can be equally valuable if it explains why a well-founded claim went unanswered.
Chad’s experience shows the potential of an observatory that connects academic research, local knowledge, and reform. Realizing that potential will depend on whether people can use its findings, whether responsible institutions respond, and whether the observatory has the means and independence to keep asking difficult questions.