It was good land. Before the company’s arrival in 2011, the people of Ngovokpahun village had used it to grow cocoa and other cash crops to help them pay for their children’s education. But when Italian Agriculture offered to build them a school, health center, and roads, provide them with employment, and pay rent, leasing out the land seemed like the wiser option. The company drafted the agreement and the landowners signed.

In a recent episode of the podcast Uncharted Ground, host Jonathan Levine spoke with Namati about building a global environmental justice movement. You can find it on any major podcast platform or listen to the episode (and access the full transcript)  on Stanford Social Innovation Review's website. A  recap of the episode, written by SSIR, is below.

The Land Rights Law (LRL), enacted on the 23rd of August 2018, was an impressive feat. It recognizes the land rights of all Liberians, especially rural communities who have historically been subject to mere user rights on their ancestral lands. The LRL protects the rights of communities to their claimed customary areas as their lawful property – “with or without deed”. This provision places an estimated 70% or more of the country under customary ownership.

WHY REJECT CUSTOMARY LAND PRIVATISATION 

Most of the world’s land is still stewarded by communities under customary systems. Billions of people rely on communally managed farmland, pasture, forests and savannahs for their livelihoods. 

This collective management of resources is viewed in the colonial or capitalist economic model as an obstacle to individual wealth creation and private profit. 

There is an underlying tension in the land rights movement that is rarely addressed head on, which is the perception that securing women’s land rights threatens community land rights. Community land rights are typically held by indigenous people, small-scale and subsistence farmers, pastoralists, herders and many other groups who are directly dependent on land for their livelihoods but whose land tenure is often the most precarious.

Community forestry has the potential to contribute to sustainable livelihoods in poor and marginalized communities in and near forests. In practice, however, the benefits of collectively managed forests may end up in the hand of local elites. Based on presentations from Bolivia, the Philippines and Nepal, participants in this session discussed, among others: (i) What is the role and importance of individual benefits in a model that is based on collective forest rights?

Environmental policy interventions often result in conflicts because they fail to recognize people’s identity and sense of belongings, as shaped through the places where they live. A recent paper explores a case study of a palm oil project in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, in which competing claims of recognition and land rights have led to conflict between transmigrants and indigenous Kutai people.

My name is Silas Siakor and I am the Country Manager at IDH, The Sustainable Trade Initiative in Liberia. I have worked on natural resource governance for the past 20 years - with a focus on land and forest. I am deeply honored to speak at this year’s conference to share some reflections based on the Liberian experience and to send a clarion call to civil society, academia, and private sector to step up and do more to strengthen land governance. The future of our planet depends on it. 

This roundtable session considered how the ‘practice’ of crisis signals an abrupt temporal ‘rupture’ and how this makes it possible to obscure underlying structures of power, particularly in the context of the relation between land and climate. In particular, it focused asked participants to focus on two questions: 1) within your research, how do you see the politics of crisis framing at work and 2) How might a frame of crisis contribute to reinforcing uneven /exploitative relations.

Key Takeaways

This roundtable session considered what ‘work’ the framing of crisis does in relation to land, and what kinds of politics are made possible when framed in terms of land ‘crisis’ In particular, it focused asked participants to focus on two questions: 1) within your research, how do you see the politics of crisis framing at work and 2) does crisis framing change the view of what people or states have of what land ‘is’ or what it can be in the future.

Key Takeaways

This session sought to explore examples of international community land ownership and to collate the experiences of community land governance during the pandemic.

The session aimed to respond to the following questions:

Access to and control of land is one of the challenges that young people face in Zambia. Land is a valued resource which youth are often expected to access through adults, or wait until they are adults to acquire.