Extracts from a farewell talk. Includes back to the land; engaging with Oxfam International in Zimbabwe; working on the Zambian Copperbelt; supporting post-tsunami, post-conflict land and property rights advocacy in Aceh, Indonesia; helping to create and sustain national land alliances and support awareness campaigns in Africa; women’s land rights in Southern and Eastern Africa; concluding thoughts, some publications.

Includes formal and customary land systems for property rights; legal and customary rights for women; formalization and documentation of land rights; women’s involvement in land transactions; governance and institutions; access to information about women’s land rights; recommendations.

An exciting new collection inspired by a 2003 Oxfam/FAO workshop in Pretoria. Foreword briefly looks at the struggle for women’s land rights across the globe and the lack of concrete gains. Women have been confronted by resistance and patriarchy. Many land reform programmes over the past 60 years were falsely premised on notions of a unitary household. Women were disadvantaged by the codification of customary law in colonial Africa and are now by privatization in a context exacerbated by the coming of HIV and AIDS, which is breaking down notions of reciprocity.

A guide to the World Bank’s Policy Research Report on land policy, on which an email discussion takes place from 30 December 2002 to 10 January 2003. Details the websites for the Report and the discussion. Asks whether it was worth engaging in the PRR process, examines the Report’s structure and says what it does not contain, offers general and particular comments, and concludes by saying don’t forget the politics.

An updated (and final) select bibliography of press cuttings on biofuels, land rights in Africa and global land grabbing. It is organised geographically: global, Africa general, 37 African countries and regions, Middle East, Asia, 10 Asian countries, Latin America, 5 Latin American countries with the focus always on land rights in Africa. It now runs to 157 pages.

Includes discourse on land tenure reforms and tenure security, conceptual framework, evolution of land tenure reform and agricultural productivity in Mozambique, data and estimation strategy, results, conclusion. Analyzes the determinants of household perceived tenure insecurity and its effect on long-term land-related investment. The presence of a significant demand for certificates of land ownership implies the opportunities to strengthen the pro-poor impacts of the ongoing land reform programmes by establishing a system that would respond to this demand effectively.

Short report on Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh annual international conference. Its focus was on the highly marginalized hunter-gatherers and forest people who are increasing in number but are heavily discriminated against and are losing many struggles for land. They are often invisible to donors. Discusses international efforts to support indigenous rights and the difficulty of applying this concept in Africa. Lists the papers presented at the conference.

This book is a compilation of 11 papers that explore the limits of the current approach to land redistribution in South Africa and propose policy alternatives. Centres on 3 themes: how land is to be acquired (which land, and for whom), under what tenure arrangements it is to be held, and how production is to be supported. Focus moves beyond debating alternatives to the ‘willing-buyer, willing-seller’ paradigm to the kind of agrarian change that land reform should pursue. Central to all is reconfiguring the roles of state and market.

Argues the need for landowners in South Africa to draw lessons from events in Zimbabwe and to be much more radical, proactive and imaginative in promoting needed changes in land reform, failing which they will have no future, as pressures from the landless intensify. The current status quo is unsustainable and the national effort inadequate. The private sector has a key role to play to break the current logjam. Increasing number of landowners are beginning to see the light and accept political realities. Calls for a land summit to negotiate a comprehensive agrarian transformation.

Contains mix-and-match ministries, separating Land Reform from Agriculture, dualism and the ‘missing middle’, rethinking rural development, what are the policy alternatives?

Short summary of possible different futures on the land, land laws in Uganda and Tanzania, and the work of NGO land alliances.

Research sought to evaluate the determinants of urban land markets, to analyse trends in urban land markets and values, and to assess impacts of urban land prices and policies. Concludes that if current land policies are not reformed there is a risk of increased negative impacts on the poor and more low-income people will be exposed to displacement to areas away from the urban centres which could cause social instability and an increase of informal settlements in suburbs.