Land Tenure
There are currently two initiatives in this area
- Land Tenure Cross Practice Initiative on land rights empowerment for development.
- Support to SADC Land Reform Technical Facility and to land reform activities in the region.
Land Tenure Cross Practice Initiative under service line 3.4: sustainable land management to combat desertification and drought. The objective is to promote and build UNDP capacity related to the critical and cross-cutting issues of land tenure practice areas to improve access to, productivity and sustainability of land resources through improved governance of natural resources.
Support to SADC Land Reform Technical Facility and to land reform activities in the region: The objective of the SADC support is to develop a detailed operational and governance framework and resource needs to operationally the SADC Virtual Regional Land Reform Technical Support Facility.
The Importance of Land
Land is a critical productive asset, and many livelihoods depend on this asset, particularly in the developing world, and even more so for the some one billion people living from the easily degraded resource base in drylands. For many drylands populations, land degradation is a major factor that affects their ability to achieve food security and improve their standard of living. Because drylands typically have low vegetation cover, they are particularly vulnerable to mismanagement that results in the removal of whatever grasses, bushes and trees exist, exposing the thin layer of fertile topsoil to wind and waterborne erosion. Poorly-managed, intensified land use, and deforestation of productive drylands may result in land which cannot support agriculture, and sometimes not even pastoralism.
Land Tenure Reform as Part of the Development Process& UNDP's role
In order to be effective, land tenure reform process must take place in the context of concrete policies to protect and manage the natural resource base for economic and social development. Land policy reform efforts have been shown to be particularly successful when built on the foundations of broader natural resource management and income-generation programmes to enhance sustainable livelihoods in vulnerable areas. In order to achieve this, the UNDP--DDC Global Programme on Land Tenure Reform in Drylands strives to involve a broad range of stakeholders from multiple sectors and to capitalize upon UNDP's access to senior decision makers to lobby for the inclusion of land tenure reform issues to be addressed in ongoing policy debates. The Programme also ties into existing policy reform processes in countries where there is evidence of the political will to effect genuine change and in particular to address marginalized populations such as in drylands. Finally, the programme endeavours to help create,
through UNDP Country Office and in conjunction with other partners, an enabling environment in which policy experiments can occur which will offer hope for a solution to what are sometimes dismissed as intractable issues of multiple claims on finite and valuable resources.
More on Land Tenure..
Discussion Forum on Land Tenure.
UNDP Drylands Development Centre in conjuction with other development support agencies recently launched a discussion forum. One of the topics of discussion is Land Tenure.
To go to the forum, please click here |
