There is widespread belief among development specialists that land tenure security is a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic development.

The potential contribution of land based financing to the development of sustainable and equitable cities and properly serviced communities is often underestimated. Land based financing is a collective name given to a range of instruments by which local governments could expand their revenue base and generate funds that will help them to deliver services and infrastructure development and achieve their maintenance goals.

This gender study forms part of the International Land Coalition’s ‘Commercial Pressures on Land Initiative’ Global Study. As stated by the International Land Coalition (ILC), the goal of this initiative is to support the efforts of ILC members and other stakeholders to influence global, regional and national processes on land to enable secure and equitable access to land for poor women and men in the face of increasing commercial demand for land (ILC 2010a, emphasis added).

The nature and significance of China's engagements with African agriculture continues to be hotly debated in the media, academia and policy circles around the world. Although China has been engaged in Uganda’s agriculture for more than 40 years, the recent jostle for agricultural land by private Chinese investors is dystifying and justifies the need to conduct a scientific study to provide clear evidence before the issue gets bundled into the messy anecdotal media inquiry.

Across Africa, Asia and Latin America, investors are increasingly approaching rural communities seeking land for logging, mining, and agribusiness ventures. Even in those situations where the investors have followed FPIC guidelines and undertaken a formal “consultation” with the community, these consultations are generally conducted in a context of significant power and information asymmetries. Part of the power imbalance comes from communities’ lack of information about the value of community lands and natural resources.

This guide aims to support the process of valuation of unregistered land and property for the public and private agencies that undertake this exercise. It will be relevant for policy makers, local authorities, international finance institutions, investors, property developers, banks, civil society organisations, citizens, land owners, local communities and women’s groups.

The tool presented in this guide aims to assist policy-makers and land administrators to adopt appropriate technologies and methodologies for land administration services more efficiently, cost effectively and with options most appropriately tailored to national and sub-national contexts. It was developed after recognizing the need to modernize the budgetary approach to land agencies and to provide effective, cost-efficient, affordable and sustainable services, particularly in developing countries.

Globally, increased investor interest in land is confronting various types of political mobilisations from communities at the grassroots level. This paper examines the case study of a land occupation movement called Chengara struggle in the largest corporate plantation in southern India. The movement is led by the historically dispossessed scheduled caste and scheduled tribe communities. The objective of the study is to understand the type of institutional transformation of property rights that the movement is calibrating.

The period for public comments is now closed. Thank you to all those who submitted feedback. The revised version is available here.  

Value, and its attribution to unregistered land, is important information for effective land acquisition, taxation and transfer processes and a key component of land administration systems.

Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods.