Focus AreasTrust Funds and CentresCross-Cutting Areas and InitiativesSearch |
Land Tenure Workshop 31 October – 03 November 2005 Nairobi , Kenya: Land Rights for African Development: From Knowledge to ActionLand Rights for African Development: From Knowledge to Action tackles how to make reforms of land rights work for development. Indeed, at the recent World Bank / African Development Bank / GEF side event on land degradation in Asia and Africa at the 7th CCD COP (see link from UNDP-DDC site), the Chair summarized the GEF County Partnership Experience as showing land tenure to be the single most important factor in sustainable land management. Land tenure means the observed set of rules (written or unwritten) which govern who gets to use what land (and its resources) when, for what, under what circumstances and for long. It generally has an associated enforcement mechanism, which might be formal (ie courts and police) or informal (local social pressure, even violence). Where there are multiple tenure systems, as is common in Africa, and/or no clear or agreement on who has rights to what, the consequences can range from a lack of incentive for investment to violent conflict. On the other hand, simply imposing one system on the diversity of local land rights arrangements can have consequences ranging from simply ignoring the central system to undermining local land use practices and the social glue which binds the local land users together and/or the local community to the larger society. This UNDP / International Land Coalition (ILC) hosted event brings together practitioners, legal experts, policy makers, development partners and civil society representatives with the aim of identifying, from amongst the complex and inter-related land rights - development interactions, those which are most critical to Africa’s development. Furthermore, it aims to build partnerships to address these issues by first of all identifying who is doing what on land rights in Africa, agreeing on comparative advantage, and facilitating a collaborative initiative on mainstreaming land rights into development policies and actions. Workshop Documents |
Land Management Topics
|
