Category: Uncategorized

The global community continues to focus on Voluntary Guidelines for Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests, otherwise known as the VGs. A two day meeting, held in Rome July 18 and 19, attended by more than forty participants from UN member countries, multilateral and bilateral organizations, and civil society focused on developing strategies for implementation of the Guidelines.

Two implementation tracks are being discussed. In one track, bilateral and multilateral institutions intend to directly implement some aspects of the VGs through their development assistance programs. For example, USAID might work to help member countries address policy and legal reform challenges. The second track under consideration would be structured around a facility, possibly located at UN FAO, to provide competitive grants to member countries and/or civil society organizations to implement the Guidelines. Funding options for the proposed facility are under discussion. The FAO Secretariat will develop a concept paper for the facility in September, which will be circulated for comment through an e-consultation process, and presented to a wider audience in Rome in October. Consult FAO’s land tenure web site for further details.

Land tenure in Cote d’Ivoire is closely linked with ethnic conflict, power and economics. Beginning around the 1960s, President Houphouet-Boigny instituted policies that actively encouraged the clearing of new areas of land, the importation of labor and the establishment of laborers as agricultural settlers. This has been the cause of frequent conflicts, relating both to land rights and the ways in which different communities gain access to resources. Unfortunately, the recent crisis in Cote d’Ivoire has rendered existing customary, administrative and judicial mechanisms for managing land disputes less effective. Land conflicts have particularly been a point of contention in the west of the country as highlighted in a recent article from Al Jazeera. Resolving such contentious land disputes and putting in place a sound land policy environment will be a priority for Cote d’Ivoire as it seeks to recover from it most recent post-election violence and to improve its economic potential.

Working with customary legal systems to improve or ensure land tenure security or protecting property rights for people living under those systems is a substantial challenge. Much, though by no means all, development work focuses on improving the formal land administration systems – mapping, building cadastres, changing de jure laws, etc. But here is an example from Ghana of how to work with and within customary systems to create a more stable institutional environment – one that promotes investment and reduces conflict. The “Innovative Tools to Secure Land Rights in West Africa” project was developed by the Land Resources Management Centre with financial support from London-based IIED, this project helps to a) make customary land use agreements legally binding, b) support community-based land administration, including mapping and surveying using para-surveyors, and c) builds capacity for alternative dispute resolution related to land. Lots of experimentation is needed in this area so it’s good see what’s happening in Ghana!

Here’s a new book that addresses one of the most interesting puzzles in the land tenure field: how best to formalize customary or informal rights. With chapters by some of the leading lights in land tenure work (John Bruce, Lorenzo Cotula, and Andre Hoekema) it should be a good addition to the library.

CIFOR’s Forests News blog talks about the importance of recognizing community right to forests in order to promote accountability and clarify who should receive any benefits from REDD+ payments. The challenge of recognizing and enforcing community resource rights, which typically include overlapping property rights within forests, is discussed in this new CIFOR book (see chapter 9 “Tenure Matters in REDD+”) – the basis for a presentation by chapter author Anne Larson at the recent Rio +20 meetings. Although, as the blog points out, this is a particularly complex area, technologies and tools such as the social tenure domain model may increasingly help capture the intricate web of property relations that exists in many countries.

The NGO Namati, along with partner IDLO, has just issued a new report entitled “Protecting Community Lands and Resources.” Over the past decade there has been a strong shift in land tenure work away from projects that provide for individualized titling of lands and towards the recognition of customary tenure systems and the formalization of rights held by communities. Countries adopt various approaches to formalization but often pass laws that are, on their face, designed to help protect communities against illegal or coercive dispossession and loss of rights by documenting rights.

This report analyzes efforts in 58 communities in Liberia, Mozambique and Uganda to use national laws to document and secure their land rights. Using randomized control trials, the study compared groups that had varying levels of legal support from access to copies of laws to assistance from professional lawyers. Among the findings: “when communities have the responsibility to complete most project activities on their own, they are motivated to take the work more seriously, integrate and internalize the legal education more thoroughly, address intra-community obstacles more proactively, and claim greater “ownership” over the community land documentation process than when a legal or technical professional completes all this work on behalf of the community.”

The U.S. Department of State, Bureau of International Information Programs, recently published an article that highlights the PRADD project. PRADD has operated in the Central African Republic since 2007 and assists the national government comply with the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme. The project goal is to increase the amount of alluvial diamonds entering the formal chain of custody while improving the benefits accruing to diamond miners and diamond mining communities. PRADD is managed by USAID’s Land Tenure and Property Rights Division in Washington. Online new aggregator, allAfrica, also ran the Department of State story.

The Rights and Resources Initiative has a new study out that explores the issue of community and indigenous people’s rights to forests and discusses how expanding the bundle of rights that communities hold over forest – by creating and enforcing communal rights to access, use, and manage forests and forest products – can lead to various positive outcomes. The study is a comparative analysis of the legal framework of the 27 most forested countries around the world.

Top on their list of policy recommendations: “Place tenure rights high on the global development agenda.”

On June 20th, the One Campaign posted a blog about USAID’s Kenya Justice Project. The TrustLaw blog of Thompson Reuters also picked up the story.

This innovative project works with local traditional authorities to increase understanding of the contributions women make to their community. This awareness effort is combined with discussions of the gender equality provisions of the Kenyan Constitution. Under the new (2010) Constitution elders and local leaders have increased responsibility for protecting and enforcing constitutional rights, including women’s rights to use and control property – something that customary legal systems do not always do. As a result of these conversations and, no doubt, other factors, elders in Ol Posimoru Kenya have drafted a new local constitution (a “katiba’) that agrees to protect women’s property rights. This is a small step forward but may set the stage for further improvements for women in Kenya.