Land access in the 21st century

The present paper seeks to cover the key issues, trends, constraints, challenges, knowledge gaps and policy options on a range of dimensions of land access. Land access is broadly defined as the processes by which people individually or collectively gain rights and opportunities to occupy and utilise land (primarily for productive purposes but also other economic and social purposes) on a temporary or permanent basis. These processes include participation in both formal and informal markets, land access through kinship and social networks, including the transmission of land rights through inheritance and within families, and land allocation by the state and other authorities with control over land and landowners. While understanding all of these processes and their operation for land users as a whole is of relevance to land policy, the concerns of this paper are: a) the opportunities to access and utilise land for the rural poor, considered as those who are landless or with limited, insufficient and insecure access to land, and for whom land access is important for a livelihood and/ or for food security; and b) to assess the place of policy and programmatic interventions in influencing processes and opportunities for land access for these groups.