This booklet arises from GLTN's work on Islamic dimensions of land which began in 2004 with the commissioning of research leading to Sait and Lim’s “Land, Law and Islam: Property and Human Rights in the Muslim World” (London: Zed Press/UN-Habitat, 2006). Based on this research a training course on "Islamic Land, Principles and Housing Rights in the Muslim World" has been produced in 2010.

The following recommendations are made in this report:
1. The continuum of land rights is a metaphor, not a theory. A metaphor can be applied in a number of theoretical contexts, whereas a theory has an ideological perspective.

The crisis that engulfed the Central African Republic (CAR) in the end of 2012 resulted in the perpetration of gross human rights violations, including the widespread looting and destruction of homes. As people fled the violence they left behind land which others occupied illegally. More than a year after the height of the crisis, approximately 440,000 Central Africans continue to be internally displaced. Almost half a million are refugees in neighbouring countries.

Palestinian women living in refugee camps and gatherings in Lebanon have little opportunity to realise their HLP rights. They face the double discrimination, challenged by both formal Lebanese law and familial Palestinian social systems.

In 2001, the Lebanese Government passed a law forbidding people who do not hold citizenship to a recognised state from getting property rights in the country. This has left many Palestinian refugees either losing property that they owned, or unable to inherit property from family members.

Land is of tremendous importance in South Sudan. It represents community, belonging and place as well as provides a source of income, subsistence and survival. Control of land and resources was at the centre of the conflict that lasted five decades, leading to South Sudan’s independence in 2011.

Land area is a fundamental component of
agricultural statistics, and of analyses undertaken by
agricultural economists. While household surveys in
developing countries have traditionally relied on
farmers' own, potentially error-prone, land area
assessments, the availability of affordable and reliable
Global Positioning System (GPS) units has made GPS-based
area measurement a practical alternative. Nonetheless, in an

The City of Ulaanbaatar (UB) is
undergoing a historic transformation toward market-driven
urban development. This growth remains strongly influenced
by city policy decisions that affect the supply and location
of land for public and private uses. Private investment is
concentrated in well-serviced land located in the central
portion of the city and along major transportation
corridors, which represent a small part of the total built

Land markets that allow access to
land-and to buildings-through secure property rights, at
transparent prices, and with efficient permitting processes
and land tax systems are essential to a good business
environment. Creating such markets, however, can be a long,
complex, politically charged process, especially where most
land is untitled and where there are conflicting claims. But
experience points to practical interim or step solutions

This paper analyzes the effects of land
market restrictions on the rural labor market outcomes for
women. The existing literature emphasizes two mechanisms
through which land restrictions can affect the economic
outcomes: the collateral value of land, and (in) security of
property rights. Analysis of this paper focuses on an
alternative mechanism where land restrictions increase costs
of migration out of villages. The testable prediction of

Land and real estate reforms have not
been effective at achieving their objectives, in part
because of how they have been designed and implemented. To
be successful, reforms must become comprehensive in design,
argue the authors, although implementation may be phased
over time and take local conditions into account. Reform
must include three elements: 1) Institutional reforms that
better define property rights, reduce information asymmetry,

This book examines issues at the
forefront of the debate on land law reform, pays particular
attention to how reform options affect the poor and
disadvantaged, and recommends strategies for alleviating
poverty more effectively through land law reform. It reviews
the role of the World Bank in land law reform, examining
issues of process as well as substance. It also identifies
key challenges and directions, and stresses the need to

This study exploits a natural experiment
to investigate the impact of land reform on the fertility
outcomes of households in rural Ethiopia. Public policies
and customs created a situation where Ethiopian households
could influence their usufruct rights to land via a
demographic expansion of the family. The study evaluates the
impact of the abolishment of these pronatal property rights
on fertility outcomes. By matching aggregated census data