Research

This paper explores the role of Edith Brown Weiss’s scholarship in international environmental law with regard to property rights and resource governance, particularly for Indigenous Peoples. Edith Brown Weiss has helped pioneer creative strategies for governing our increasingly crowded, interconnected landscapes to avoid impending local and global ecological catastrophes. Her path-breaking concept of “Intergenerational Equity” addresses the depletion and degradation of resources and the discriminatory access to resources passed on from previous generations.

With a significant portion of the world’s land being undocumented, it is widely understood that technology can play a key role in accelerating the pace of land rights documentation and formalisation. ‘Responsible land administration’ shifts the paradigms of land administration design and management, challenging conventional forms; and promotes innovation that integrates the understanding of ethical and social dimensions.

The Government of the Republic of Zambia, with the support of the World Bank, is implementing the Zambia Integrated Forest Landscape Project (ZIFLP) in Eastern province of Zambia. Given that legally secure land rights are essential for sustainable land management and increases in productivity of land use, ZIFLP includes a land component towards the regularization of land and resource rights. This sub-component aims to provide analytical and Technical Assistance to carefully pilot, evaluate, and where necessary, expand past any on-going efforts to strengthen tenure security by documenting land rights in support of the National Land Titling Project (NLTP) and enhance title-based revenue collection.

Substantial resources have been mobilized to capture and formally register land in Uganda; however, as across most of Africa, registered land in Uganda amounts for less than 20 percent of plots across the country. Following the successful implementation of the National Land Information System (NLIS) with the support of World Bank funding, the next phase of support to the Ugandan land sector is now in the advanced stages of design, with a focus on exploring ways to build the capacity of district and sub county level institutions to locally capture and integrate customary land into the NLIS.

Through a partnership between IFAD, the Secretariat of the International Land Coalition (ILC) and two of its members, Cadasta Foundation, and World Resources Institute, this initiative explores innovative approaches to improving GIS data on local communities’ lands in three countries—Tanzania, India, and DRC—and to foster their inclusion through a data platform called LandMark.