Africa’s Great Lakes Region has in recent years experienced
political strife, armed conflict and population displacements
with severe humanitarian consequences. While these events
have clearly revolved around political struggles for the control
of the state, recent research has pointed to the significance
of access to renewable natural resources as structural causes
and sustaining factors in struggles for power in the region.
Contested rights to land and natural resources are significant,

This report presents the findings of the Yanacocha Independent Fact Finding Mission (the “Mission”), conducted between August 2015 and March 2016. The Mission was tasked with examining a conflict between a multinational gold mining company and a local campesino family, in the high Andes of northern Peru. At the root of the conflict is a dispute over a parcel of land called “Tragadero Grande”. Located within the Campesino Community of Sorochuco, Tragadero Grande falls within the footprint of a planned multi-billion dollar mining project called “Conga”.

With deforestation and other land uses accounting for 11 percent of annual global greenhouse gas emissions, the international community agrees on the need to address deforestation as an important component of climate change. Community forests represent a vital opportunity to curbing climate change that has been undervalued. Today communities have legal or official rights to at least 513 million hectares of forests, only about one eighth of the world’s total, comprising 37.7 billion tonnes of carbon.

Evidence updates, produced by LEGEND’s Core Land Support Team, provide a series of short briefs, summarising emerging bodies of evidence from different sources on key themes related to land governance or particular country issues. They offer technical advisers, policy-makers and researchers a way of keeping abreast of research to provide a source of quick evidence-based pointers on what to do and what to avoid in land-related policy and programming.

This document provides guidances on how businesses can respect legitimate tenure rights and human rights in their land-based investments. It

• translates principles of responsible land governance and tenure (see the VGGT) into practical mechanisms, processes and actions,

• gives examples of good practice – what has worked, where, why and how, and

• provides useful tools for activities such as the design of policy and reform processes, for the design of investment projects and for guiding interventions.

This publication is the result of the workshop on “Responding to Climate Change and Tenure Insecurity in Small Island Developing States – The Role of Land Professionals” held in Christchurch, New Zealand 30 April – 1 May 2016 in connection with the FIG Working Week 2016. It includes a report of the seminar and a FIG Christchurch Declaration as the main outcome of the workshop.

Disputes over land are a prominent feature of many situations of protracted violent conflict in Burundi, Uganda and South Sudan. Research conducted as part of the programme ‘Grounding Land Governance’ underscores that war reshuffles access and ownership, but also critically changes the ways in which land is governed. Land issues often come to resonate with other conflicts in society, thereby affecting overall stability. This makes interventions in land governance politically sensitive.

After conflict, governments and donors often feel a need for up-scaling and modernizing land use. There is an ambition to achieve economic recovery and contribute to food security through stimulating large-scale investment in land. Our research in Uganda, Burundi and South Sudan suggests that policymakers should be extremely careful when promoting large-scale land acquisitions, both foreign and national. Especially in the difficult transition from war to peace, large-scale appropriation of land risks becoming a threat to tenure security and the recovery of rural livelihoods.

In post-conflict settings, securing tenure of local smallholders is considered of major importance to reduce and prevent local land disputes, to contribute to the recovery of rural livelihoods, and to improve agricultural production. Registration and other ways of formalizing land ownership are generally believed to significantly enhance local tenure security and rural development.

A surge in land grabbing over the past decade has seen millions of people displaced from their homes and farmland, often violently, and pushed deeper into poverty. As demand for food, fuel and commodities increases pressure on land, companies are all too often striking deals with corrupt state officials without the consent of the people who live on it. Until now, there has been little analysis of the role that corruption plays in the transfer of land and natural resources from local communities to political and business elites.  

Cutting 996.01 ha of land in Pu Luh village of Busrar commune in Pech Chreada district of Mondulkiri province: 474.83 ha from Phnom Namlea Wildlife Sanctuary, 107.98 ha from Mondulkiri Genetic Resources, Plants and Wildlife Conservation Protected Forest, 5.82 ha from ELC of Sethikula, 379.66 ha from ELC of Dak Lak, and 27.72 ha from ELC of K Peace; Reclassifying 874.10 ha as state private land for donating to 352 families; and Reserving 121.91 ha as state public land.

Reclassifying 9,015 hectares as state private land in Promae commune of Tbeng Meanchey district and Tor Sou commune of Chey Sen district in Preah Vihear province for suggar, accacia and rubber plantations investment.