Planning support for the 2014 Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty
The land tenure team in the Agriculture and Rural Development Group in the World Bank’s Research Department leads Bank research on land tenure and governance (including large scale acquisition of land) as well as the impact evaluation of scalable land interventions. In an environment where the importance of land issues is increasingly recognized at global level (including the G8 and the discussion on MDGs post-2015, and private sector debates on responsible land-based investment), the Bank’s Annual Conference on Land and Poverty (click herefor the 2013 website that includes links to earlier years) has become an important venue.
By bringing together representatives from key partners in government, the development community, civil society, academia, and the private sector, has emerged an important avenue to identify new challenges, disseminate innovative approaches and best practice, and strengthen collaboration and networking between partners in this field. The 2013 event featured 750 participants and more than 200 presentations, from academia, governments, civil society, and the private sector.
The 2014 conference is scheduled for March 31 – April 4, 2014 in the World Bank’s Main Complex (1818 H Street NW) in Washington, DC. The event is organized around several themes, and presentations are organized into six parallel “tracks” according to theme. In addition, the conference typically includes a Pre-Conference Workshop on land governance and several side events hosted both within and outside the World Bank Main Complex, as well as sponsor booths hosted in the Main Atrium for the duration of the conference.
To fully utilize the potential of this event to shape the global agenda, the services of a consultant are needed. Key responsibilities will be in two areas:
· Oversee the thematic planning for the conference by taking responsibility for convening and managing an organizing committee to help decide on thematic priorities, identify key invited sessions and keynote speakers, and agree on innovative and interactive ways to engage participants.
· Take responsibility and manage all aspects of event preparation and implementation, including sponsorships, program, registration, website, and travel.
The position offers an exciting opportunity for a dynamic and committed individual to be part of a rapidly emerging global agenda that can serve as a foundation for a career in operations or analytical activities in the land sector. Applicants must be fluent in English, be able to professionally communicate with high-level development partner and government representatives, and excel in a fast-paced and multicultural work environment. Prior experience in event planning and project management is highly desirable but not required.
This will be a one-year ETC position with potential of renewal based on successful performance. This position will be based at World Bank Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Applicants should submit a resume, two references, a writing sample and a brief statement of key qualifications to Pauline Kokila (Pkokila@worldbank.org) with copy to Klaus Deininger (kdeininger@worldbank.org)
Last Updated: 26th July 2019 by admin
Community land and natural resource rights
On 23 September, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DME and DDE), in cooperation with LANDac organized a lecture & lunch about community land and natural resource rights. The meeting was a follow-up of an international conference held on 19 and 20 September in Interlaken, Switzerland. The meeting addressed scaling-up strategies to secure community land and resource rights. Peter Veit, interim Director or the Institutions and Governance Program at the World Resources Institute, and Duncan Pruett, Land Advisor at Oxfam Novib, presented the main outcomes of the conference in Interlaken and presented follow-up activities during a lecture hosted at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Please find more information about the Interlaken meeting through the press release:
http://www.communitylandrights.org/reuters-resource-rights-groups-call-f…
For further information about the initiative, please visit the conference website:
http://www.communitylandrights.org
Last Updated: 26th July 2019 by admin
The governance of large-scale farmland investments in Sub-Saharan Africa
PhD defence George Schoneveld
2 October 2013, 16.00 hrs, Academiegebouw Utrecht University
African states offer their populations insufficient protection from foreign land grabs
Growing global resource scarcities and increasingly unstable commodity markets have in recent years encouraged large numbers of investors to seek access to the cheap and fertile farmlands of sub-Saharan Africa. Though potentially providing its often neglected agricultural sector with much-needed investment capital, with many of these investments threatening to deprive the rural poor of vital livelihood resources and contribute to environment degradation, these investments have become a topic of heated debate in the public, political, and academic arenas.
Amidst a rapidly growing body of research on particularly trends and outcomes, The Governance of Large-Scale Farmland Investments in Sub-Saharan Africa examines a critically under researched aspect of this trend, namely, host country governance. With an absence of sufficiently comprehensive international regulatory frameworks, the investment governance burden often falls solely on host country governments, which in the African context are typically ill-equipped or disinclined to provide adequate oversight. This exacerbates the risk of adverse local social, economic, and environmental impacts and undermines the effective capture of investments’ potential developmental contributions.
The primary aim of this book is to deepen our understanding of the conditions under which large-scale farmland investments can contribute to sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa. It does this by identifying the different factors that shape local outcomes. In so doing, it examines and links a range of issues that have to date often been evaluated in isolation – ranging from the formal laws and policies in host countries to institutional dynamics and local community responses. The analysis is based on original field research conducted by the author in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Zambia.
Findings show a remarkably uniform array of adverse effects across the case study countries. This poses an interesting conundrum: can these outcomes be attributed to systematic deficiencies in the content of the law aimed at regulating these impacts, or is the law rendered meaningless by poor implementation and enforcement, or do other structural social and economic factors outside formal governance structures explain outcomes? The Governance of Large-Scale Farmland Investments in Sub-Saharan Africa shows that an answer can be found in all three options, but highlights in particular the important mediating influence of institutional issues.
Through systematic, in-depth analysis of the conflicts and interactions between a diversity of stakeholders it highlights how investment capital tends to attach itself to and strengthen powerful local coalitions of modern and customary elites to the detriment of the rights of the rural poor. Such trends are reinforced by high-modernist ideologies, discriminatory perspectives on rural systems of production, co-optation, lack of inter-institutional coordination, collective action problems, and distortionary incentive structures. Although this calls for a reevaluation of the formal rules that govern and protect Africa’s land-based resources, this book shows that any legalistic reforms to that effect must be preceded by far-reaching institutional reforms that address institutional mandates, enforcement and implementation capacities, and incentive and accountability structures.
A Powerpoint of George’s presentation of his research findings is available via this link.
Last Updated: 26th July 2019 by admin
Vacancies PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
PBL, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, offers four vacancies linked to work on Global Food Systems and natural resource scarcity. The vacancies can be accessed through this link: http://www.pbl.nl/en/aboutpbl/vacancies.
Last Updated: 26th July 2019 by admin
Successful fourth summer school Land Governance for Development
The fourth edition of the Summer School Land Governance for Development brought together a very interesting group of participants and lecturers to study current debates on land governance and land deals. The 2-week course, organized by LANDac (8-19 July 2013), was attended by 20 participants: Masters and PhD students and development practitioners from countries such as the US, Japan, Uzkbekistan, Malaysia, Philippines, Ethiopia, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.
The intensive programme included lectures, workshops and an excursion given by a variety of high-quality lecturers from academia and practice. The course included a number of lectures which provided a general overview of various important themes such as the global land rush, land governance and land administration, and land issues in post-conflict situations. This was combined with a variety of illustrative case studies on topics such as land deals in Mozambique, soy expansion in Argentina, urban and hydropower-related land pressures in Vietnam, oil palm expansion in Indonesia, stakeholder responses to land deals in Kenya, real estate and tourism in Central America, and post-conflict land governance in South Sudan. Furthermore, participants had the opportunity to look at the issues from different stakeholders’ different viewpoints: there were – among others – a session on the role of farmers organizations; a workshop from a human rights approach; and a private sector-oriented session. In many of the presentations and insightful discussions, the roles of local and central governments and local communities were also discussed in depth. In an excursion to a Dutch organic farm, participants had the opportunity to learn from different experiences of Dutch livestock farming and land use, and their relevance for other countries and contexts. This was beautifully illustrated by a visit to various parts of the farm.
Towards the end of the course students elaborated cases based on their own interests, which they shared with the group through a presentation and a poster. This served to further broaden everyone’s knowledge, and it resulted in a number of very insightful discussions. As such, many new and interesting themes were dealt with, such as nature conservation and ‘green grabs’; the role of donors; land acquisition for state infrastructural projects; local communities’ responses to land deals and mobilization; land administration and economic development in Kosovo and in Greece; national and international policies to improve local livelihoods under land deals; land policies and rural-urban land use changes in Bolivia; and a narrative analysis on food crisis and land grabbing.
The day-to-day programme of the 2013 summerschool can be accessed here
Last Updated: 26th July 2019 by admin
New article: land conversion for urban development in Vietnam
A new article on urbanization and land conversion by LANDac-related PhD researcher Nguyen Quang Phuc (Hue University Vietnam / IDS UU) and LANDac (co)chairs Guus van Westen and Annelies Zoomers just appeared online in Habitat International journal. The article deals with the massive conversion of agricultural land for industrial and urban development in the medium-sized city of Hue in Vietnam, which has increased social tensions and complaints from affected people. The article can be accessed here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197397513000568
Last Updated: 26th July 2019 by admin
Updated Land Matrix now available
The updated data-sets of the Land Matrix are now available via the Land Matrix website: www.landmatrix.org. The Land Matrix is a tool that aims to contribute to transparency in large-scale land deals. The updated information now differentiates between intended, concluded and failed land deals. In addition, information about land deals is directly linked to its sources – with that offering users the opportunity to judge reliability of information themselves.
Last Updated: 26th July 2019 by admin
Job announcement World Bank Conference
Planning support for the 2014 Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty
The land tenure team in the Agriculture and Rural Development Group in the World Bank’s Research Department leads Bank research on land tenure and governance (including large scale acquisition of land) as well as the impact evaluation of scalable land interventions. In an environment where the importance of land issues is increasingly recognized at global level (including the G8 and the discussion on MDGs post-2015, and private sector debates on responsible land-based investment), the Bank’s Annual Conference on Land and Poverty (click herefor the 2013 website that includes links to earlier years) has become an important venue.
By bringing together representatives from key partners in government, the development community, civil society, academia, and the private sector, has emerged an important avenue to identify new challenges, disseminate innovative approaches and best practice, and strengthen collaboration and networking between partners in this field. The 2013 event featured 750 participants and more than 200 presentations, from academia, governments, civil society, and the private sector.
The 2014 conference is scheduled for March 31 – April 4, 2014 in the World Bank’s Main Complex (1818 H Street NW) in Washington, DC. The event is organized around several themes, and presentations are organized into six parallel “tracks” according to theme. In addition, the conference typically includes a Pre-Conference Workshop on land governance and several side events hosted both within and outside the World Bank Main Complex, as well as sponsor booths hosted in the Main Atrium for the duration of the conference.
To fully utilize the potential of this event to shape the global agenda, the services of a consultant are needed. Key responsibilities will be in two areas:
· Oversee the thematic planning for the conference by taking responsibility for convening and managing an organizing committee to help decide on thematic priorities, identify key invited sessions and keynote speakers, and agree on innovative and interactive ways to engage participants.
· Take responsibility and manage all aspects of event preparation and implementation, including sponsorships, program, registration, website, and travel.
The position offers an exciting opportunity for a dynamic and committed individual to be part of a rapidly emerging global agenda that can serve as a foundation for a career in operations or analytical activities in the land sector. Applicants must be fluent in English, be able to professionally communicate with high-level development partner and government representatives, and excel in a fast-paced and multicultural work environment. Prior experience in event planning and project management is highly desirable but not required.
This will be a one-year ETC position with potential of renewal based on successful performance. This position will be based at World Bank Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Applicants should submit a resume, two references, a writing sample and a brief statement of key qualifications to Pauline Kokila (Pkokila@worldbank.org) with copy to Klaus Deininger (kdeininger@worldbank.org)
Last Updated: 26th July 2019 by admin
New publication JPS on land grabbing & methodologies
Just released: The Journal of Peasant Studies Forum on Global Land Grabbing Part 2: on methodologies
There are five contributions to this Forum (see the list below), and these can be accessed free of charge for a limited period: http://www.tandfonline.com/r/fjps40-3
Table of contents:
The politics of evidence: methodologies for understanding the global land rush, by Ian Scoones, Ruth Hall, Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Ben White & Wendy Wolford
Messy hectares: questions about the epistemology of land grabbing data, by Marc Edelman
Methodological reflections on ‘land grab’ databases and the ‘land grab’ literature ‘rush’, by Carlos Oya
Creating a public tool to assess and promote transparency in global land deals: the experience of the Land Matrix, by Ward Anseeuw, Jann Lay, Peter Messerli, Markus Giger, and Michael Taylor
Collating and dispersing: GRAIN’s strategies and methods, by Grain
Last Updated: 26th July 2019 by admin
‘Land grab’ draws attention in g8 and media
Land is on the agenda of the current G8 summit, and the topic of ‘global land grabs’ therefore draws renewed attention. LANDac chair Annelies Zoomers was interviewed for the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant (see article here) and for the radio programme ‘Met het oog op morgen’ (17 July 2013), which can be accessed here.
Download the leaders’ communique and the declaration of the Lough Erne G8 summit.
Here are some links to more publications on the G8 and land by Oxfam and GRAIN.
Last Updated: 26th July 2019 by admin
Protective laws don’t prevent ‘land grab’ in Africa
A new World Development article co-authored by LANDac PhD George Schoneveld explores the relationship between policy and practice associated with customary rights protections in the context of large-scale land acquisitions in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Findings point to the difficulty of safeguarding customary rights even in countries providing “best practice” legal protections. A press article on this study was published here. The complete article can be accessed here.