Following adoption of the Voluntary Guidelines (VGs) on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security in May 2012 and as the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) approaches negotiations for the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment (PRAI) – as well as other global discussions taking place such as Millennium Development Goals and post-2015 Development Agenda that focus greater attention on creating better land tenure security to promote food security, increased economic income, and better natural resource management – it is becoming increasingly apparent that the global community requires an accepted and standard indicator for “good land governance” that can be used to measure best practice.
For a discussion on the impacts of tenure insecurity for smallholders see Land Tenure Property Rights and Food Security: Emerging Implications For USG Policies and Programming.
For impacts on the large-scale investors see The Financial risk of Insecure Tenure: An Investment View, by the Munden Project for the Rights and Resources Initiative.
For a discussion of land rights and agricultural productivity, see this issue brief from Landesa.
The Earth Security Initiative’s recent paper, The Land Security Agenda: How Investor Risks in Farmland Create Opportunities for Sustainability, highlighted potential financial risks and suggested a “Land Security Index,” which could form the basis for a good land governance indicator.