Category: Uncategorized

Originally appeared on Exposure.

The history of land rights in Colombia is a centuries-old tale of colonialism, highly concentrated land ownership and unsuccessful agrarian reforms. Fifty years of civil strife have left vast sections of the country’s land undocumented, vulnerable to land record manipulation and outright lawlessness. Under the landmark peace agreement, the Government of Colombia has committed to addressing the land issues that have so often been at the heart of the nation’s conflicts – by formalizing property rights across the country, organizing the national registry and recovering lands that belong to the state.

Originally published on IUCN’s blog.

Around the world, women play a critical role as natural resource managers –often tilling land and conserving biodiversity while managing household food and energy needs. This close relationship with the environment also means that women face higher risks and suffer disproportionate burdens from environmental impacts and degradation. This is due also in large part to entrenched socio-cultural biases, such as women and girls being primarily responsible for the majority of unpaid care work like cooking and water collection.

These considerations emphasize that gender equality and women’s empowerment–particularly when it comes to ensuring that women and men have equal opportunities in accessing, benefiting from and participating in environmental decision-making–are essential for effective conservation and sustainable development.

A few weeks ago, marking International Women’s Day, IUCN’s Director General made a strong statement on the importance of women in conservation and sustainable development. Today, we are joining advocates from around the world to also mark Women’s History Month and noting the importance of women on World Water Day. We’ve recently expanded our USAID-International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) partnership into a broader program that enhances environmental programming in a wide range of sectors through the robust integration of gender-responsive approaches and actions throughout USAID programs focused on biodiversity, energy, land rights, urbanization and forestry, among others.

Through Advancing Gender in the Environment (AGENT), USAID Transforms communities by ensuring that environmental programs advance a more sustainable and equitable future for all by recognizing women as agents of change; valuing the diverse knowledge, experiences and capacities of women and men alike; and working to bridge gender gaps.

Over the last year, USAID and IUCN conducted research, and created knowledge products and tools, on the status of women and relevance of gender issues across the environmental sector. When studying national energy policies and frameworks, we found that less than a third of 192 frameworks from 137 countries identified issues that have gender dimensions–i.e. some policies note that women suffer from energy poverty disproportionately–and/or included objectives and strategies that have gender considerations. Furthermore, when women are mentioned, they are often characterized as potential stakeholders or beneficiaries and seldom as innovators or leaders in solutions.

AGENT is underscored by the knowledge that gender equality and women’s empowerment are powerful levers for change: women are vital to conservation and resilience-building efforts and contribute valuable perspectives. For example, in Malawi, when local communities were asked what trees they would like to have planted, men were the majority of respondents, and they requested trees that provide non-renewable sources of income like timber and charcoal. However, when efforts were made to ensure women were surveyed, they asked for fruit-bearing and medicinal trees that provide added nutrition, health benefits and income–all without cutting down trees, thereby helping ensure the success of reforestation objectives.

We know from these kinds of experiences that gender equality and women’s empowerment are intrinsically linked to achieving sustainable development. Yet, as highlighted, critical gender inequalities and gaps persist that limit the ability of women to access markets, capital, training and technologies.

Women also do not have the same rights as men when it comes to customary or legal rights to land, property and resources. This reduces their access to critical means for survival and resilience. Data demonstrate a solemn reality on this issue; women do not have the same legal rights as men to own and access land in over 100 countries. Also, in 90% of 143 economies studied have at least one law restricting women’s economic equality.

Women are often underrepresented or restricted from participating in environmental decision-making and their contributions, innovations and leadership are frequently overlooked. The result is a lost opportunity for environmental initiatives to achieve multiple benefits, scale impacts and increase effectiveness.

Over the next year, AGENT will build new evidence on many important topics, such as why women’s empowerment and participation matters in the power sector, the connections between gender-based violence and the environment, and which gender issues are most prevalent in urban services. Platforms and curated resources are supporting forest and biodiversity programs, and networks of experts will be convened to share best practices and identify new areas of research.

USAID and IUCN are committed to filling critical information gaps on gender and environment, and will work to ensure that strategies and approaches for environmental sustainability are more effective and benefit all people. We are equipping our projects, programs and partners with data, analysis and tools. By doing this, we are working to ensure USAID Transforms by advancing a sustainable future — one that delivers gender equality and women’s empowerment outcomes.

Read the original article on IUCN’s blog.

Addressing gender disparities in the context of land reforms is not easy. Effectively addressing gender issues takes time and effort, which can sometimes make it more expensive in the initial stages of a project or program. However, evidence shows that integrating gender throughout land reform interventions not only increases benefits for women, but strengthens the intervention overall. Meaningfully including gender into land reform approaches often requires a change in behavior among decision-makers and program participants that, in some cases, may take years, even decades. In the meantime, land reforms can sometimes move faster than changes in gender stereotypes that impede women’s land rights. If land reform efforts and the donors that support them do not urgently and specifically focus on the inclusion of gender issues, these reforms may solidify and perpetuate land rights inequities for women and girls.

In Liberia, the community organizers for USAID’s Land Governance Support Activity (LGSA) program on community self-governance understand this. In a packed meeting room in LGSA’s office in January 2018, women and men community organizers engaged in an interactive gender and women’s land rights training, sharing stories, challenges and approaches to addressing gender discrimination in customary land governance. The discussions grew lively as participants tackled difficult issues and challenged their own beliefs around gender and land rights. In the midst of a discussion on whether special efforts should be made to secure women’s rights to land, one woman organizer coined the phrase “full rights for all,” which the group enthusiastically agreed should be the goal of all community-level efforts to implement Liberia’s 2013 Land Rights Policy.

Achieving full rights for all requires a deep understanding of the status quo, including who does and does not have rights within both formal and customary systems. To fully understand this context, LGSA and its partners recently completed report on Women’s Land Rights in Liberia. The report draws on past and recent USAID-led research on customary norms, as well as legal analysis, including statutes related to land, family matters, succession, immigration, and Supreme Court case law related to land and gender. In addition, the report incorporates 2017 field research, conducted in three counties by a joint team from LGSA, Landesa, the Female Lawyers Association of Liberia, and the Women’s NGO Secretariat of Liberia. Key findings from the study include:

1. Women’s access, use, and control of land differ from, and are less secure than, those of men. Rural women depend on accessing and using community land for their housing, livelihood, and welfare, but face discrimination and barriers not experienced by men. This makes their land and property rights insecure, particularly in customary settings. Most women access land through their male relatives, and do not approach chiefs directly for land. Women’s use of land is often temporary and limited to planting seasonal crops.
2. Laws and practices around marriage reinforce land-related gender biases. The laws governing women’s land rights are inconsistent, do not achieve their intended purpose of treating all “wives” equally, do not treat men and women equally, only cover privately owned land, and do not cover all relationships where land rights matters arise. Civil marriages are rare, customary marriages are on the decline, and marriage informality is increasing. Women in de facto unions do not have recognized rights upon separation or abandonment, even when they have contributed to the family property and its maintenance.
3. The law regulating inheritance contains critical gaps. Liberia’s laws on inheritance vary for civil and customary marriages, and the latter appears only to apply to private land, which excludes much of the land held within customary marriages. In much of the interior, inheritance of land is customarily reserved for men. In practice, women in customary land tenure systems are not entitled to their husband’s land; if the husband dies, the wife is expected to re-marry a member from his family and to transfer family property to him.
4. Women’s participation in land governance is low, and in certain cases absent, in both statutory and customary governance systems. Women are disadvantaged in both statutory and customary land governance systems due to underrepresentation, customary norms requiring male accompaniment, lack of consultation and information, low recognition of women’s legal rights to land and inheritance, and the dual system of land governance, both of which contain biases against women.
5. Access to justice and dispute resolution systems for land are largely biased against women. While the formal court system is out of reach for most rural women as compared to men – requiring language skills, education, money, travel time and access to lawyers that most lack – customary justice institutions, run almost exclusively by men, often reflect customary biases against women and fail to deliver gender-equitable outcomes.
6. Women in concession areas face unique, gender-specific challenges to land rights. In all the three counties researched, the women affected by concessions mentioned that they were faced with scarcity of food and could not gather herbs to treat the ill members of their families. The concessions drastically disrupted women’s lives through destruction of farmlands, pollution of drinking water, and restrictions from accessing the forests which, among others, provided food, medicinal herbs, and crops for the market.

While more research must be done to inform gender-equitable implementation of Liberia’s Land Rights Policy, the LGSA report on Women’s Land Rights in Liberia is part of a growing movement among donors, civil society, and the Liberian Land Authority to seriously consider gender disparities in the land reform process and their impact on sustainable development. Like the LGSA community organizers, people representing a range of institutions in Liberia increasingly realize that moving forward toward community land governance without a gender-responsive plan in place would compromise the end goal of the reforms, including gains in productivity, and food security.

As Liberians chart a path forward toward gender-equitable and responsive land governance, USAID will support the shared vision of socially inclusive land reform that could become a model for other countries and contexts. The Women’s Land Rights Study represents an important milestone in this regard.

Learn more about USAID’s work on land rights in Liberia.

For hundreds of years, pastoralists in Ethiopia’s lowlands have relied on strong customary land tenure systems to survive. Historically, legislation has failed to clearly define communal rights to rangelands, and the specific roles and responsibilities for both communities and local government to administer and manage these resources. This legislative deficiency prevented pastoral communities from fully exercising their constitutional rights to land (Ethiopia’s Constitution broadly recognizes pastoral communities’ right to access land and prevents their involuntary displacement). Past legislation also created an institutional vacuum in which government officials no longer consulted community leaders on decisions to convert pastoral rangelands to plantation-style irrigated agriculture. Restricting access to pastoral land has devastated livelihoods by severely curtailing access to dry season pastures, depleting wet season pastures and degrading rangeland resources leading to bush encroachment and shrinking livestock herds.

USAID’s Land Administration to Nurture Development (LAND) project has been working with the Ethiopian government to certify pastoral communal land use rights, negotiating a resolution to a long-held impasse between government and pastoral communities. In 2014, the project began collaborating with Ethiopian government officials in the Oromia regional state to pilot methodologies that would formally recognize communal pastoral landholdings.

LAND started by reviewing international experience in protecting pastoral land rights in 11 countries, including eight in Africa. The project also studied customary organization and management of rangelands by pastoral groups in Oromia and the successful methods developed to date. The project also determined that strengthening pastoral land rights required legislation that recognized and defined rights to communal rangeland held and used by a group of pastoralists.

The ideal legislation had to allow for a legal entity to hold group title to such landholding on behalf of a community, specify procedures to map the boundaries of the landholding, and define the different responsibilities of local government and communities to manage the land and its natural resources. The hardest obstacle to developing this legislation was obtaining agreement between government officials and the pastoral communities over the size of the communal pastoral landholding to be registered and certified.

The pastoralists in the Guji and Borana pilot areas wanted their customary dheedas (traditional grazing areas) to be the unit of landholding to be certified and registered. But dheedas can cover hundreds of thousands of hectares and straddle multiple administrative boundaries. Oromia officials were reluctant to certify a landholding this massive in the name of a single community. Further, they argued that the dheeda had to be subdivided per administrative boundaries to be more effectively administered and managed by local land administration officials. The pastoral communities steadfastly argued that the government must recognize their constitutional rights to land based on customary possession and certify the uncontested boundaries of their landholdings, as was done previously in the highland regions.

LAND facilitated learning workshops and negotiations between the parties to resolve the impasse. It provided government with evidence-based research demonstrating that administrative boundaries do not accommodate access to seasonal pastures and the mobility necessary for viable livestock production. After nearly three years of negotiations, Oromia officials accepted the communities’ arguments and developed, with assistance from LAND, legislation providing the legal basis to register and certify community landholdings and enable customary institutions to function as Community Land Governance Entities (CLGEs) that will hold title to communal land, manage rangeland resources and represent the community in dealings with third parties, including the government and the private sector.

In November 2017, LAND assisted three communities to establish their land governance entities in compliance with the legislation. LAND trained community members on their roles and responsibilities under the legislation, and on the procedures to demarcate and register the boundaries of their dheeda landholdings. LAND will further support the governance entities through training to help them establish more transparent and accountable governance practices, and build skills in financial management and negotiations with government agencies and third parties.

USAID’s assistance to Oromia regional state to produce legislation that strengthens land rights of pastoral communities and build government capacity to implement the legislation will enable the federal Ethiopian government to replicate and scale up these interventions nationally to help secure pastoral land rights, prevent rangeland degradation, improve productivity of rangeland resources and increase economic opportunities for Ethiopia’s 12 million pastoralists.

The Malbe dheeda customary leader, Mr. Dima Doyo summed it up well, “The Borana community’s grazing system and its customary institutional leaders have been neglected by the formal administration, and this negligence has caused numerous rangeland problems. The recent recognition of our governance system has already empowered us to take some important measures and manage our rangeland resources in a better way.”