
April 10, 2025
While the landmark Beijing declaration 30 years ago on women’s rights mentioned land rights 30 times, this year’s UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) declaration fails to mention them at all. Naomi Shadrack explains why we need to put land firmly back on the global feminist agenda.
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How the surge in land seizures and violence by Israel in the West Bank adds up to a brutal new level of oppression
February 27, 2025
The incursion of Israeli tanks into the West Bank this week is just the latest step in an intensifying and systematic crackdown. Bushra Khalidi on five repressive tactics the Israeli government has been using, including new laws that will accelerate annexation. The strategy, she says, is now clear: make Palestinian life unlivable.
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#PowerShifts Resources: Collective Mapping
July 1, 2019
Maybe you’ve already read one of the recent #PowerShifts pieces on how the Waorani are using maps in court to uphold their land rights. Pretty powerful, right? For a while now, I’ve been increasingly curious about collective cartography as a concrete method and tool that can encourage participation, generate collaborative knowledge, and politicise change processes as it visualizes power relations.
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Maps in Court: how the Waorani are upholding their rights in Ecuador
June 12, 2019
Aliya Ryan is an anthropologist working with Digital Democracy on their Ecuador programme to support the Waorani and Siekopai territory mapping projects. Last month the Waorani hit the headlines due to a landmark win against the Ecuadorian Government. Sixteen Waorani communities contested the supposed consultation that the government carried out in 2012 before putting millions of hectares of rainforest up
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How a new land rights study amplifies women’s hopes and fears – and makes us think again about solutions for everyone
March 26, 2019
Guest post by Renée Giovarelli on a new report published today A couple of weeks ago, writing on this blog, Duncan asked a question: How do we, in the international development community, recognize and work with (let alone measure) issues like love, shame, fear, solidarity? As an advocate for women’s land rights, this question resonated with me. Whenever I hear
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Ten Signs of an impending Global Land Rights Revolution
March 16, 2017
Exfamer Chris Jochnick, who now runs Landesa, the land rights NGO, sets out his stall ahead of a big World Bank event next week. The development community has experienced various “revolutions” over the years – from microfinance to women’s rights, from the green revolution to sustainable development. Each of these awakenings has improved our understanding of the challenges we face;
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Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities use 65% of the World’s land; how much do they actually own?
September 30, 2015
Andy White, the Coordinator of the Rights and Research Initiative (RRI) introduces a new report. A new, unprecedented legal analysis has revealed that despite using and inhabiting up to 65% of the world’s land, Indigenous Peoples and local communities—a population of about 1.5 billion—possess legal rights to barely 18%. That’s a huge gap. And it’s a gap that explains a
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Is ‘give them land rights’ enough? Taking the temperature of the global land debate
May 22, 2015
A bunch of students and academics from Sheffield University had what sounds like a fun time at last week’s big global meeting on land. George Barrett, Yoshabel Durand, Tom Goodfellow, Vremudia Irikefe, Mikael Omstedt, Edward Searight, Julie Shi, Deborah Sporton and Nguyen Vo report back. Last week, dispersed among 700 participants at the International Land Coalition’s global forum in Senegal sat
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Why is Coca-Cola championing land rights at the UN?
May 16, 2014
I usually try and minimize Oxfam’s excessive tendency for trumpet-blowing, but this one from Oxfam America’s private sector czar, Chris Jochnick (@cjochnick), looks worth it – some real progress in working on land rights with the epitome of consumer capitalism This week at the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), Coca Cola publicly declared that “land grabs” are unacceptable and
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