Next Generation of Land

Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) across the world are affected by environmental, social and cultural degradation that are tied to the way land tenure is governed. In international discourse there has been an increasing focus to not just uplift the struggles of IPLC, but to make sure that their voices, sovereignty and knowledge have a seat at the table. The inclusion of Indigenous peoples in decision making processes and self-determination goes beyond consultation, the rights set forth under United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) obliges the free, prior and informed consent.

This included slide-presentation depicts the research paper ,“Invisible And Excluded: Risks To Informal Wives And Partners From Land Tenure Formalization And Titling Campaigns In Latin America” published at the Conference of Latin American Geography (CLAG) 2023.

This summer, Global Land Alliance (GLA) spoke with Whitney Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community in Michigan. We discussed with community leaders to better understand their voices, actions and leadership in the struggle against encroachment from Enbridge Energy Corporation. We also explored, how different levels of the US government handled treaty rights in their ceded and unceded territories, consulted or sought Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) processes, and how they see the Line 5 pipeline interacting with sovereignty over the land and waters their communities have long stewarded.

This summer, Global Land Alliance (GLA) spoke with Aurora Conley, Vice Chair of the Anishinaabe Environmental Protection Alliance and of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. We discussed with community leaders to better understand their voices, actions and leadership in the struggle against encroachment from Enbridge Energy Corporation. We also explored, how different levels of the US government handled treaty rights in their ceded and unceded territories, consulted or sought Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) processes, and how they see the Line 5 pipeline interacting with sovereignty over the land and waters their communities have long stewarded.

The full-scale war by the Russian Federation against Ukraine has already lasted for more than six months, and its toll is immense. Many thousands of civilians and tens of thousands of combatants have been killed. About 14 million Ukrainians have fled their homes and more than 1.2 million families have their homes damaged or destroyed. The losses to property include not only the physical destruction and damage of buildings and productive land plots, but also looting, forced evictions and contamination with explosives, as well as damage of critical infrastructure (water, electricity, heating supplies, roads, social service infrastructure).

Land tenure security is one driver of success in sustainable agriculture for food security. Here, we review the global rhetoric and evidence trends and map the evidence against both Sustainable Development Goal 2 and the World Food Program definition of Food Security. We recognize how conflict, impacts of climate change, and large-scale land-based investments interact over time with local land tenure, resulting in consequences for sustainable agriculture and food security.

This report presents the results of the perception of land tenure security—the Prindex survey—in 10 municipalities1 across Colombia which were selected for the implementation of the Land for Prosperity (LFP) Activity as some of the most vulnerable areas affected by the armed conflict.

Latin American countries have pursued rural land titling and registration campaigns over the past several decades with a broad range of social and economic goals. These efforts represent a permanent or long-term legal recognition of rights to land as a primary economic asset for agricultural communities and a source of family subsistence, security, and social and cultural wellbeing. Land rights can provide multi-generational benefits to recipients.

The latest IPCC climate report mentions tenure security a whopping 58 times. This is a welcome shift in emphasis from the UN – strengthening land rights is a just and sustainable way to protect vulnerable landscapes in the climate fight, and one that works. By the report’s own estimate, time is almost up. As we push closer to the point of no return, the world needs to stop talking and start acting. Ramping up the recognition of land rights could help us preserve enough of the natural world to pull us back from the brink.

In Indonesia, the decentralization of land governance remains an important step in securing recognition of rights for communities and citizens. For many local government offices, funding and technical resources has been a barrier for completing village mapping activities, leaving knowledge gaps as to how vulnerable communities are to conflict, encroachment, and insecurity. The village boundary setting and resource mapping activity of the Central Lombok District Government seeks to address this gap. In 2020 Global Land Alliance and Cadasta Foundation, working with the Indonesian organization Yasan Puter, supported a rapid sample survey to assess perceptions of land tenure insecurity and land use in the Labulia

Understanding what drives perceived security can help policymakers and urban planners make better choices. Shahd Mustafa shares new findings from Prindex’s report on land rights in the Arab region.

The convergence of the pandemic, climate shocks, and militarized borders presents a dire situation for human rights. Will the Biden administration prioritize support for vulnerable populations in securing land and resource rights and livelihoods to build social safety nets for crisis resiliency?

How can we reconcile the hazards of social interaction in a COVID-19 world with the importance of community participation to the successful, and sustainable, implementation of on-going land projects? The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted all aspects of life and ways of working. From large cities to remote communities, no one has been left untouched from the impact of the pandemic. With strict health standards in place, COVID-19 has significantly impeded the way land tenure projects are operating in the field.

Grenville Barnes grew up and received his early education (BSc and MSc) in South Africa, where he became fascinated by the settlement patterns and distinct land tenure of traditional people in South Africa, mainly the amaXhosa and amaZulu. In spite of the pervasiveness of apartheid, these tenure systems were still clearly based on tradition. Barnes realized that to understand land tenure one had to learn about the fundamental culture and institutions of a community. While reading more generally, he came across the publications of the Land Tenure Center (LTC) at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. At that time the LTC was clearly at the forefront of scholarship on land tenure.

Prindex is the first ever measure of land and property rights that is comparable between countries and is truly global. The data demonstrates the sobering scale of insecurity in how people perceive their property rights. Prindex data and analysis opens key pathways for accountability, transparency, targeting, and, especially with global COVID-19 housing and economic crises, makes monitoring all the more important.

In August of 2019, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change published a seminal report on the nexus of land use for climate mitigation directed at policy makers globally. The report acts as a key scientific input into climate and environment negotiations. This poster published in the context of the 2020 World Bank Conference on Land an Poverty investigates how the international media and the land sector discourse-entrepreneurs portray indigenous voices, actions and knowledge within the context of the IPCC Land and Climate Special Report.

The Global Land Alliance’s Pubic Consultation Desk is developing a different approach to public consultation. The following is a poster presentation accepted to the 2020 World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty.

In the context of land rights recognition and formalization, women involved in informal unions are often effectively ‘invisible’ and as an unintended result, an informal wife stands a high chance of being systematically left-out of the benefits of formalization. This may be true even when the government legally recognizes the property rights of informal partners/spouses: the challenge in this case is that these marriage-like relationships are not formally registered or recorded, so proactive land formalization and titling processes often ‘miss’ informal spouses and provide recognition only to male heads of household.

Forests are a nexus of broadly held policy goals such as poverty reduction, economic growth, conservation and climate change. Most forests are governed, in practice, through community-based tenure systems. GLA is continuing its role with The World Bank’s Securing Forest Tenure Rights for Rural Development program as a technical advisor to pilot the Forest Tenure Assessment Tool (FTAT) in Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Myanmar.

In Brazil and around the world, insecure property rights prevent families from feeling confident about the future, businesses from investing, and communities from becoming more productive and engaged in politics due to lack of recognition. Many residents of Brazil’s favela communities with informal legal recognition of property rights face such threats of insecurity or eviction. Terra Nova, a private social enterprise, is innovating an alternative financially sustainable, and scalable alternative solution to regularizing legal status and bringing infrastructure and services to favelas located on privately-owned land.

As a young law school graduate, John Bruce joined the Peace Corps in Ethiopia in 1968, a move which ultimately transformed his career in land tenure. He became an expert on the intricacies of land tenure systems in Africa, later adding experiences in China and East Asia over several decades. As both a policy advisor and researcher, he taught at several institutions worldwide, including the Land Tenure Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Global Land Alliance sat down with Dr. Bruce as he reflected on lessons learned for the sector, past to present.

Slash and burn agriculture is commonly practiced by poor farmers living in fragile ecosystems in many places throughout the world, particularly relevant in Dominican Republic. GLA and REDDOM have been working to promote the adoption of agroforestry technologies and practices to reduce the negative effects of hillside agriculture, improve agriculture productivity and revert soil degradation while contributing to adaptation and mitigation to climate change.

One key lesson from international development is the importance of community participation and inclusion throughout the project life cycle. Land and resource management projects have the potential to significantly impact communities, but the efforts to consult with communities and incorporate their participation into the project design are sometimes inadequate.

In June 2019 we conducted a review of academic literature that uses the term “perceived” or “perceptions” in conjunction with “tenure security” or “secure tenure”. We limited the review to the 33 countries covered by the baseline Prindex survey in 2018. The aim is to benchmark the Prindex findings against existing quantitative evidence of perceived tenure security.

In her documentary film PUSH, Leilani Farha, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, reveals the human toll that global gentrification trends are taking, by capturing the personal testaments of those living in cities around the world who are experiencing the particular kind of housing insecurity that results from these trends.

On June 4th, Global Land Alliance hosted the ‘Geographic Positioning Solutions for Land in Development’ brainstorming dialogue and panel discussion in Washington D.C. The purpose of the event was to facilitate a collaborative discussion between ‘suppliers’ and ‘appliers’ of positioning technology for use in the land tenure and administration sector.

When people feel secure about their land and property rights, it gives them the freedom to think about, and invest in, their future. This is why secure land and property rights are the essential building blocks of social justice and economic development.

The Global Property Rights Index (PRIndex) initiative aims at filling gaps in basic data about citizen’s perception of the security of their property rights in a global comparative framework. Individuals’ perceptions are a basic and critical element of tenure security because they drive behavior, and critical data element because they illuminate how policies for tenure security are impacting citizens’ own understandings of their rights.

Public consultations prior to land tenure programs can be inclusive, gender-oriented, transparent and participatory processes that help set a similar tone for implementation. Public consultations provide an opportunity to explore environmental and social risks of a land program in a manner that puts stakeholders’ concerns at center stage and that can result in forms of participatory monitoring.

Over the past month, CIAT (Haitian Inter ministerial Committee on Territorial Management) has implemented the public consultation process designed by Land Alliance to engage their target communities in a participatory process to establish a good-willed and transparent relationship between the communities and the project. The teams have held public consultation meetings at 14 different communal sections targeted in the project.

Colombia’s internal war is Latin America’s oldest armed conflict, causing more than 200,000 casualties. Moreover, it has resulted in one of the world’s largest internal displacement phenomena in recent history, affecting an estimated five million people. In this context, land restitution is one of the biggest challenges facing Colombia’s road to peace. 

The Congress gathered renowned jurists and technical experts who shared their experiences in property registration matters and issues related to role of the registries in economic development and the need to implement new technologies to facilitate efficiency and transparency in property transactions and assure legal security to registry users.

The theme of this year’s Association for Women´s Rights in Development Forum was the inter-sectoral nature of the women´s rights movement. Women´s rights encompass identity rights, social rights, political rights, and economic rights. Each element is intrinsically intertwined with the others and improvements in one sector produce effects in many others. 

On June 24, 2016, Land Alliance team of international and Colombian gender, land tenure and legal specialists presented the findings and recommendations from a six-month study of the relationship between the registration of common-law marriages and obtaining secure property rights for women living in rural regions of Colombia.

As transaction costs for formal transfer or sale of land represent between 25-45% of the sales value of the land and the process takes an average of 400 days to complete, most rural land owners in Haiti prefer to enter into informal agreements rather than obtaining formal title to land. As a result, informal, undocumented or not properly registered land rights are the norm and estimates show that 60% of all rural parcels have no formal property title. 

This week in Washington, D.C., the World Bank is hosting its Annual Conference on Land and  Poverty, a professional meeting that has swelled considerably in the past five years. Attendee numbers have expanded to a downright packed 1,200 people from governments, development agencies, academia, nongovernmental organizations and technology firms.

Marriage and divorce in Colombia can be difficult and expensive processes, which has led to a situation where possibly millions of rural Colombians are in long-term relationships that are not legally registered. This creates a problem when it comes to inheritance or rights to a family land parcel for one partner (usually the woman), if the head of household dies, leaves the relationship or leaves the area.

Of all the uses for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles — popularly known as UAVs or drones — their application for acquiring aerial imagery and geospatial data for use in securing land rights in the developing world may be one of the most valuable and lasting. UAVs hold the promise to help solve the developing world’s land rights problem, monitor logging and mining for both production and compliance, and give local people an affordable, accessible tool for securing their land rights and managing their natural and cultural resources.

In the context of peace negotiations and a national initiative to transform the countryside, the Colombian government is revamping land tenure policy and considering major institutional reforms intended to lead to a massive intervention addressing the lingering informality of rural land rights. Through the Land and Rural Development Project (LRDP) funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), LRDP and Land Alliance land tenure specialists are working together with local authorities to build the managerial and technical capacity of municipalities to manage land and use land information. 

In what was once an epicenter of violence in rural Colombia, lives now a hopeful and welcoming community. Ovejas is a small rural municipality two and a half hours southeast of Cartagena, located in the state of Sucre. Through the Colombian Government’s Land and Rural Development Project (LRDP) funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by Tetra Tech 

On July 22, Land Alliance played a central role in the New America Foundation’s “summit meeting” on drones: Drones and Aerial Observation: New Technologies for Property Rights, Human Rights and Global Development.

Revolutionary technological advances frequently face the most resistance from the very people in the technical fields that stand the most to gain from the advance. Change generates uncertainty and fear. Fear the “machines” will supplant the practitioners. It is no surprise, therefore, to see hesitation and reluctance by surveyors and traditional aerial mapping specialists in light of the rapidly increasing use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology for geospatial data collection.

The period 2015-2020 may become one of the most dynamic periods in the modern history of land tenure and governance, if we in the development community can get our act together and use a newfound consensus on prioritizing the resolution of land issues to address the biggest development challenges of our time.