The livelihood of a large part of the world’s population depends directly on access to land and its secure longterm use. Land access and use have long been organized through informal or traditional tenure rights, but this is changing. In many regions, land use is being transformed by the expansion of large-scale agricultural investments, a development that was triggered by the 2007–08 food, energy, and financial crises.

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.

There are different visions of what constitutes responsible land investment (RLI) and how to successfully implement it, but it is clear that legal compliance alone is not enough.  This resource covers 7 Responsible Land Investment key lessons.  

This study analyses the effect of Kazakhstan’s 2003–2005 agricultural land reform on land rental and credit market participation. Although the reform declared an intention to facilitate efficient land alloca- tion, we observe a major land concentration. We analyze whether new land relations stimulated land sales and rental markets and made credit more accessible.

The aim of this policy paper is to present successful approaches to secure land tenure rights in rural and urban areas. To support future programmatic decisions by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), this paper focusses especially on impacts and good practices. It discusses examples from the German technical cooperation but also includes good practices and impacts achieved by other development partners.

The German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) created the Special Initiative “One world, No hunger” aimed to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty. Special focus is on Action Area 6 “Promotion of responsible land use and improvement of access to land”. The German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) has presently implemented the Global Programme on Responsible Land Policy in 6 countries: Peru, Laos, Benin, Madagascar, Ethiopia and Uganda.

The article presents an analysis of the existing situation of forests of the Republic of Lithuania. The situation is analysed in ten counties of the country. In the Republic of Lithuania, forests occupied 2,178,958.04 ha, country’s forest coverage – 33.38% in 2017. The highest forest coverage was established in Alytus (48.80%) and Vilnius (43.47%) counties. Only in three counties of Lithuania (Panevėžys, Telšiai and Utena) the prevailing type of ownership is private forests.

Land is the main historical basis of Bangladesh. Bangladesh has been attracted lots of races and nations from various continents at different times because of its resourceful land and administered by them one by one. The land system (administration, revenue, ownership, survey etc.) has also been changed with the change of such administration. This study aims to analyze the chronological changes of land administrative management systems in Bangladesh.

The paper provides the analysis of improving the land reform in the Republic of Kazakhstan. The authors examine the main development stages of land ownership relations, during which the work has been performed to transform agricultural enterprises, privatize land and change the land use. The main legal acts, intended to regulate the issues of land ownership and territorial organization and creating conditions for the development of the land market, are shown.

FAO and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH have been providing support to the Western Balkans region to promote progress on Gender Equality, with a focus on measuring the proportion of countries where the legal framework guarantees women’s equal rights to land ownership and/or control.

From the outset, the development of agriculture has been strongly associated with women’s endeavour. In fact, women’s contribution to agriculture goes back to the origins of farming and the domestication of animals when the first human settlements were established more than 6 000 years ago. Over the years, the division of responsibilities and labour within households and communities tended to place farming and nutrition-related tasks under women’s domain. Nowadays, in many societies women continue to be mainly responsible for family food security and nutrition.