“Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) is the first line of defense when investors and government officials seek to develop projects that may affect Indigenous communities, lands, territories, and resources. For this reason, Indigenous Peoples must be prepared to engage with FPIC from a fully informed, proactive stance. Indigenous Peoples must have their FPIC protocols ready, and be ready to lead engagement around FPIC on their terms.” –Securing Indigenous Peoples' Right to Self-Determination: A Guide on Free, Prior and Informed Consent

In recent times, forest tenure reform has become one of the most discussed agendas among local and global policymakers. Forest tenure is a contract that specifies who has rights to forestry resources and depicts who should utilize, maintain, and acquire them. It can have a significant impact on whether farmers invest in their forestland. The study’s primary purpose is to explore whether and how the reform of forest rights affects farmers’ investment in public welfare forestry.

Through a collaborative process with the Land Law Advisory Group in Laos, this series of briefing notes addresses some of the most pressing issues in the country in relation to the recently passed Land Law (2019) and Forest Law (2019). The five briefs in the series address: tenure rights in state forestlands; customary tenure rights; tenure rights to land for collective purposes; awareness-raising for gender and social inclusive and safeguards in cases of land loss or expropriation.

El derecho internacional ha avanzado en las últimas décadas hacia el reconocimiento del derecho de los pueblos indígenas a la libre determinación, expresada en regímenes de autonomía o auto-gobierno en sus territorios. En este sentido, la autonomía territorial indígena es un régimen acordado, que permite a los pueblos concernidos el control de sus propias instituciones sociales, políticas y culturales y de sus territorios, en el marco del Estado en que habitan. En el caso panameño, la figura donde se concreta la autonomía indígena es la Comarca.

Women represent a large part of the 2.5 billion people who depend on lands managed through customary, community-based tenure systems and are especially reliant on commons for their lives and livelihoods. They have very often limited and unsecured access to land and natural resources and tend to be excluded from decisions concerning them.

For the past few decades, efforts to strengthen women’s land rights in many sub-Saharan African countries have primarily focused on a single approach: systematic registration through individual/joint certification or titling. While registration — individually or with a spouse — may support tenure security in specific contexts, the sheer complexity of land governance practices and tenure arrangements across the continent (both formal and customary) often render an emphasis on systematic titling inadequate.

This guide is intended to supplement other resources that provide broader overviews of human rights due diligence. It will be particularly helpful for downstream businesses or investors as they navigate how to identify, address, and track the impacts of their value chains on indigenous peoples. The guide will also be useful for policymakers as they design due diligence legislation.

Sustainable land governance requires that all members of a community, both women and men, have equal rights and say in decisions that affect their collectively-held lands. Unfortunately, women around the world have less land ownership and weaker land rights than men – but this can change, and this report shows ways how that can be done.

La gobernanza sostenible de la tierra requiere que todos los miembros de una comunidad, tanto mujeres como hombres, tengan los mismos derechos y voz en las decisiones que afectan a sus tierras de propiedad colectiva. Lamentablemente, las mujeres de todo el mundo tienen menos  tierra en propiedad y derechos más débiles que los hombres, pero esto puede cambiar, y este informe muestra cómo hacerlo.

The global community is currently grappling with multiple and overlapping social and environmental threats. These include the climate emergency, COVID-19 and the threat of widespread hunger, and the accelerating loss of biodiversity. All of these threats point to an urgent need to restore and sustainably manage land and forests.

Este documento propone que la gobernanza colectiva de la tierra, otorga derechos y contribuye a reducir las desigualdades al interior de las comunidades y de estas con la población e institucionalidad de su entorno.

Plantea también una revisión exhaustiva de la legislación internacional disponible respecto de los derechos campesinos, los derechos de los pueblos indígenas y la discusión sobre los derechos de la población afrodescendiente.

The reform of collective land ownership in post-socialist contexts offers a useful window into how changes in property rights shape and structure the dynamics of territorial transformation. Focusing on China's rural revitalization campaign, this paper demonstrates how the state, as creator and regulator of land rights and property titles, facilitates landscape change by relaxing regulations over the lease of rural land and creating market institutions that favour land transfers to organized capital, in this case tourism companies and property developers.