Issue Briefs
Issue Brief: Land Tenure, Property Rights, and Gender Challenges and Approaches for Strengthening Women’s Land Tenure and Property Rights Governance
The limited research on the benefits of women gaining secure rights to land and property suggest positive results: an increase in women’s participation in household decision-making; an increase in net household income; a reduction in domestic violence; an increased ability to prevent being infected by HIV/AIDS; and increased expenditures on food and education for children. Understanding the complexity surrounding women’s land rights is critical to ensuring that those rights are protected and improved. Because laws, customs, and norms can change from country to country, and even vary between regions and ethnic groups within countries, to secure women’s land and property rights women must be meaningfully included in the design and implementation of projects and policies. Final: January 2011
Issue Brief: Land Tenure, Property Rights, and Food Security: Emerging Implications For USG Policies and Programming
Food security is the state of having sufficient quantity and quality of food throughout the year for a healthy and productive lifestyle. The essential problem in linking property rights with food security is how to sequentially and effectively integrate these factors in ways that help households, farmers, and businesses obtain access to property rights, resources, and markets to improve food production and/or consumption. Final: March 2011
Issue Brief: Climate Change, Property Rights, and Resource Governance: Emerging Implications For USG Policies and Programming
In both climate change adaptation and mitigation, contentious struggles for access and control of resources may turn violent unless stakeholders from the local to the international scale engage in open and transparent processes to negotiate new rules of access to land and other natural resources. Dispute resolution must go hand-in-hand with policies to restructure both statutory and customary tenure. National and international policy makers are beginning to explore the place of property rights and resource tenure in the discussions of climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. Final: March 2011
Issue Brief: Land Tenure, Property Rights, and HIV/AIDS Approaches For Reducing Infection and Enhancing Economic Security
Strengthening women’s property and inheritance rights (WPIRs) is critical to reversing the downward spiral and stemming the tide of female poverty and new HIV infections across the globe. Insecure land tenure indirectly contributes to HIV risk and vulnerability, but it also directly affects families after HIV infection as they experience asset erosion. Still, we have more to learn about how insecure land tenure and property rights influences and increases vulnerability to HIV. Similarly, we need a better understanding about how intervening to improve land tenure and property rights can reduce vulnerability.
Issue Brief: Haiti
This brief describes the importance of land tenure and property rights issues and post-earthquake recovery in Haiti.
Issue Brief: Pakistan
This brief describes how failure to address land tenure and property rights grievances may foster support for the Taliban.
Issue Brief: Afghanistan
The brief looks at how local disputes in Afghanistan are related in part to conflicting claims over land and resource rights, including disputes related to resettlement of Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs) and refugees, conflict over control of pasture and water, and participation in the opium economy.
Issue Brief: The Future of Customary Tenure
The first section of this issue brief reviews the concept and characteristics of customary tenure systems. It next summarizes the factors contributing to the evolution of customary tenure in response to a wide range of institutional and economic pressures. This is followed by a brief assessment of how statutory and customary rights systems interact, the circumstances that propel one or the other to dominate, and examples of where and why the two are likely to come into conflict. The brief concludes with a short summary of the types of interventions that USAID projects have implemented in this domain.
Issue Brief: Land Disputes and Land Conflict
This brief first examines the causes of land-related conflict, then examines how the issues and opportunities change through the conflict cycle: before, during and after violent conflict. This approach gives less attention to staples of the post-conflict land literature such as restitution and dispute management, but provides a more robust understanding of the longer-term challenges that are typically addressed by development rather than relief agencies.
Issue Brief: Pastoral Land Rights and Resource Governance
This briefing paper examines current challenges to pastoral land tenure in developing counties and explores the potential role of USAID in addressing these issues.
Issue Brief: Tenure and Indigenous Peoples
Indigenous peoples (IP) often live on lands governed by customary or informal law. Securing access to these natural resources and formalizing land tenure rights is an essential foundation for vulnerable IP to maintain themselves; exercise their civil, social, cultural, political, and economic rights; and contribute to local, national, and global sustainable development. Legal recognition and demarcation of tribal areas, territories, or domains are the key means for empowering IP. However, these legal protections often do not exist. Reasons include weak states, land acquisition for agriculture, infrastructure developments, biodiversity conservation, inappropriate tenure instruments, agrarian reforms, Global Climate Change (GCC) mitigation, extractive industries, and an inability to work effectively with remote IP. Assistance to IP through strengthening tenure security requires attention to issues and limiting factors with which IP identify when they produce their own long-term plans for development. Therefore, development efforts should address the specific needs of IP while also ensuring that well-intentioned initiatives do not inadvertently harm indigenous communities. This brief discusses the key issues, opportunities, and recommendations for strengthening land and resource rights of indigenous peoples.
Issue Brief: Land Tenure and REDD+: Risks to Property Rights and Opportunities for Economic Growth
Global climate change threatens to impact the livelihoods of millions of the poorest and most vulnerable populations in profound and unpredictable ways. In addition, society‘s responses to mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions leading to climate change may provide opportunities for economic growth for rural populations, or dangers to local livelihoods. This paper focuses on understanding how mitigation efforts based on reducing emissions and increasing sequestration by forests (REDD+) may interact with property rights and, by extension, poverty and economic growth for smallholders.
Issue Brief: Property Rights and Artisanal Mining
The first section of this issue brief reviews the largely under-recognized place of the artisanal and small-scale mining sector in national economies. Next, it describes briefly how artisanal and small-scale mining has been at the root of many resource conflicts in developing countries and primarily those in West and Central Africa. This is followed by a discussion of how the clarification of property rights contributes to the reduction of conflicts over mineral resources. By way of illustration, the Property Rights and Artisanal Diamond Development (PRADD) project of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) shows how the clarification of tenure arrangements can encourage greater transparency in the diamond mining sector and rehabilitation of natural resources damaged from artisanal mining practices. The issue brief concludes with a short summary of the types of interventions USAID might consider for strengthening tenure and property rights regimes in the artisanal and small-scale mining sector.
Resumen Informativo: La Tenencia de Tierras y el REDD+
El documento "Issue Brief: Land Tenure and REDD+" traducido en Español.
Informe Tematico: La Tenencia y Los Pueblos Indigenas
El documento "Issue Brief: Tenure and Indigenous Peoples" traducido en Español.
