Short summary of a Ph.D. thesis. The dominance of the white farm issue has delayed serious attention to more subtle land conflicts. Thesis focuses on the continued maintenance of communal land rights by urban property owners. Explores what would happen if these rights disappeared. In reality and in the absence of explicit state policy, poor families and women are already relinquishing these rights, which has very practical implications for urbanisation.

Includes key concepts for understanding land rights; land tenure and women’s property rights in Uganda; land acquisition in Uganda; who owns the land? Perspectives from the local level. Analyses how different ways of defining landownership provide very different indications of the gendered patterns of landownership and rights. Although many households report that husbands and wives jointly own the land, women are less likely to be listed on ownership documents, especially titles, and women have fewer land rights.

Includes introduction: a new rush for land; framing the issues: historical and development questions; impacts of land grabs on rural women; concluding notes; proposed pointers for action.

Covers land-tenure system in Amhara Region, the land rights registration process, women’s access to and control of land, land use by men and women, marital property rights, inheritance rights, female-headed households, legal services, conclusions and recommendations.

A framework to strengthen land rights, enhance productivity and secure livelihoods. Includes background; the context of the land question; land in the national development process; the process of land policy development; land policy implementation; tracking progress in land policy development and implementation; overall conclusion.

Includes inheritance: a key way women access land; local mechanisms: ‘custom’, power dynamics and lack of engagement; formal justice system: community pariah status and systemic barriers. The lack of access to land cannot be framed as a failing of formal or informal systems, but rather as issues with both. The key to increasing access to justice at both formal and informal levels is to address power dynamics and understand how they operate to the detriment of women.

Covers achievements and weaknesses of local land tenure management system; the local land tenure management system in the context of decentralization.

Introduction to a new book, At the Crossroads: Land and Agrarian Reform in South Africa into the 21st Century, based on a PLAAS/NLC conference of July 1999. In addressing whether land and agrarian reform has a future in South Africa and who might benefit, the book’s editor discusses the political context of the conference; integrated rural development; the new policy directions announced in February 2000; and the structure and contents of the book

Covers the rush to acquire land in Africa by foreign governments and private investors, fuelled by fears for global food security in the face of climate change and volatile food prices on the international market. Warns that the political and economic risks of these land purchases are colossal and outweigh any gains, and argues that African governments must make food security and sufficiency for their own people paramount.

Contains executive summary; food insecurity and the AIDS epidemic; barriers to women’s farming; women’s land rights; economic and social empowerment; violence against women; inheritance rights and property grabbing; politics, ideologies and vested interests; recommendations.

Contains introduction, conceptual framework, issues for the land policy (sovereignty, land tenure systems and issues, land and sustainable livelihoods, land administration and management, natural resources, land markets, land/property taxation), policy implementation, the gaps and areas for future study.

Identifies the drivers of the land use changes that have displaced millions of rural people and continue to threaten millions more – particularly women; it unpacks the key land policy guidelines and why they have so far failed to ‘stick’ on the ground, and it sets out 14 actions to get to grips with the problem and push forward community land rights across Africa.