Angola, like Mozambique, inherited its legal framework from the Portuguese Civil Code, which was not based on a traditional African concept of community occupation under customary law. With Portuguese settlement, large areas of land were appropriated for and incorporated into the colonial cadastre (the formally surveyed and officially recorded land boundaries of the land concessions granted by the state). After winning independence from Portugal in 1975 the new Angolan government, influenced by socialist principles, affirmed the constitutional role of the state as the owner of all land.

Improving urban management is a crucial precondition for developing South African townships. While the urban management deficit in these areas has deep historical roots, an array of contemporary problems also needs to be overcome if improvements are to be realised. Urban management, broadly defined, is about government’s responsibility for the planning, development and day-today operations of a city.

In urban areas, the poor struggle to access well located land in cities and legal, institutional and procedural constraints impede secondary residential property markets from functioning effectively in black townships. The purpose of this paper is to examine how municipal property rates policies are, or could be, used as an instrument to promote access by the poor to urban land markets.

This paper reviews the current state of the literature on Indian urbanisation to analyse existing urban development trajectories at the state level.

This paper examines the paradoxes of land governance in Brazil by putting them in their historical context, highlighting in particular the continuing subordination of peasant farmers’ interests to those of large landholders. It traces the development of the country’s regional divisions and systems of land-holding back to colonial times, when Portuguese settlers began carving up the territory.

Costa Rica, the subject of this article, is an upper middle income country that is widely regarded as having a generally positive human rights record. It has also avoided the violent conflicts and political instability that have characterised most of its closest neighbours in the last decades of the 20th century. However, as with almost all other countries considered to have good track records on human rights, the situation of indigenous peoples stands out as a major blemish.

Land Management embraces systems of land administration, land use management, land information management, and land taxation. Land management is generally understood in South Africa as the manner in which land is controlled, managed, planned for, utilised and transacted.

In Pakistan, the case for both land reform and, more broadly, agrarian reforms, is premised on the need to create sustainable livelihoods which is widely agreed to be the most effective method of alleviating poverty. In addition, land reform combats social injustice while achieving sustained economic growth.

Women’s land ownership and control have important connections with their empowerment in Pakistan’s agricultural context. However, the link between these has largely remained unexplored; and there has been only a few research to determine how many women own or control land in Pakistan. The Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) carried out a multiple pronged research in 2007-09 to fill this knowledge gap and to examine the reason behind women’s land ownership and empowerment.

This paper is intended to provide a framework and guide for the review of policy and institutional literature relevant to understanding the issues and opportunities for future development of the Limpopo River Basin. The actual literature review will be carried out during the first year of the Limpopo Basin Focal Project, and will be supplemented with key informant interviews.

The draft Indian Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, which was introduced in the Lok Sabha on September 7, 2011 is one of the most important legislations waiting for Parliamentary approval. In its present form, the bill is a major improvement over the archaic 1894 land law that has contributed to the impasse over land acquisitions across the country. The bill makes a genuine push for a better land acquisition regime in the country by doing three things: combining both compensations, resettlement and

Mitchells Plain is about 20km from the Cape Town city centre. It was built in the 1970s as a township for people classified as ‘Coloured’, who were forcibly removed from areas that had been declared ‘whites only’ under the Group Areas Act. Various attempts were made to upgrade the Mitchells Plain Town Centre (MPTC) after the advent of democracy in 1994, but these were disjointed and lacked a champion to drive the process.