With USAID support, an Afro-Colombian community received a collective land title, guaranteeing ownership of their traditional lands.

Rapid response mechanisms (RRMs) are a new, proactive legal approach designed to provide legal and technical support to communities facing nascent conflicts related to land-based investments. RRMs provide preventative rather than reactive legal help the moment a conflict arises or community members’ rights are threatened, rather than trying to reverse rights violations once they have already occurred. 

In Cambodia, a recent Human Rights Watch report documents how Indigenous Chong people have faced eviction and criminal charges following the establishment of a carbon offsetting project on their lands. In Kenya, “the world’s largest soil carbon removal project”, whose credits have been used to offset the emissions of global corporations including Meta and Netflix, has been accused of dispossessing Indigenous Peoples of economically and culturally significant land, and reducing the climate resilience of thousands of people. 

Chad is at the verge of an emerging land tenure crisis. As observed in many countries in Africa, formal and customary tenure systems overlap. Customary tenure systems, that generally prevail in rural areas, differ from region to region, with each its own needs and practices. Land conflicts are abundant, caused by degradation and transformation of land surfaces caused by climate change, as well as land investments by domestic investors with disputed legitimacy.

In the context of the joint IOS-Fair Transitions-LANDac International Conference, the parallel session on Justice at the heart of land governance: Envisioning the intersections of informal justice with land conflict, climate vulnerability, and food insecurity took place on June 30th, 2023.  

CALPI received information that the community of Wilú has been attacked by settlers on March 11, 2023 and that on March 10, 2023, three Mayangna community members and two children members of the Mískitu indigenous people were kidnapped; the kidnapped people were on their way from the community of Musawás to the community of Betlehem in the Mayangna Sauni As territory, in the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve, within the Autonomous Region of the Northern Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua.

On 15 December 2022 the LAND-at-scale Knowledge Management team hosted a webinar Land tenure security revisited: Do we know what we need to know? that presented the preliminary findings of a study on tenure security authored by Guus van Westen, and Jaap Zevenbergen. The presentation of the study was followed by breakout sessions on tenure security and its relationship to women's land rights, the role of the state, land conflicts, and economic development facilitated by land experts and panelists who reported back to the plenary on the discussions with their respective reflections on the findings of the study.

Against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, this What to Read digest reviews three articles that explore different, lesser-known territorial disputes - all of them in Asia.

Burkina Faso has a long history of land interventions aiming to achieve tenure security at the local level. The “Observatoire National du Foncier au Burkina-Faso” (ONF-BF) is one of the key players in the country working on mapping land rights within communities at commune-level. How does ONF-BF address the challenge of not only attaining tenure security through mapping, but ensuring these tenure rights last over time?

Overcoming Land Disputes by Fostering Relationships in Communities: Experiences from Zambia’s Systematic Land Titling Program

Written by Dimuna Phiri and Kamiji Malasha

Unresolved disputes and disorder, can be addressed through the judicial system. However, the process is expensive, slow, unscalable, and does not focus on reconciling individuals, families and communities. Through the lens of beneficiaries, this article reveals the importance of alternative dispute resolution in land reforms, particularly adjudication committees.