Land and Resource Rights
WRI’s Land and Resource Rights project aims to ensure that rural people and the urban poor have secure rights over their land and natural resources.
Rural people in developing countries are losing their land and natural resources because of insecure property rights, with negative effects on livelihoods, well-being, local environments, and ecosystem services. Land acquisitions by governments and companies that fail to meet minimum national or international standards contribute to this insecurity. Furthermore, rural people are increasingly migrating to ever expanding cities, contributing to informal settlements vulnerable to climate change and other environmental hazards.
WRI’s Land and Resource Rights (LRR) project aims to ensure secure property rights for rural people and the urban poor. Operating across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, our work focuses on connections between land and equitable access to forests, food, and water. We work with governments, civil society organizations, development agencies, and other actors to strengthen land, resource, and property rights as a path to poverty reduction, sustainable development, and environmental management.
Learn more about our work; view our brochure (PDF).
Photo Credit: CIAT/Flickr.
Our approach includes aggregating and visualizing data, conducting policy and legal reviews, and performing cutting edge research to influence progress on a large-scale. LRR is organized around the following four cross-cutting themes representing the key land and resource rights issues:
Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities: Indigenous peoples and local communities often have insecure land tenure, leaving them vulnerable to violations of their land and resource rights. We aim to help indigenous peoples and local communities strengthen their tenure security as both a human right and a means of sustainable environmental management.
Private Sector: Large-scale land acquisitions have increased in recent years, with resultant encroachments on the land and resource rights of rural people. LRR encourages the private sector to improve internal policies and comply with international best practices, ensuring companies and their suppliers do not violate the land and resource rights of indigenous peoples and local communities.
Sustainable Cities: Urban growth is expected to continue, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent. While beneficial, urbanization also produces informal settlements and other tenure issues impacting a city’s sustainability. By working on urban tenure issues, LRR aims to make cities more sustainable.
Procedural Protections: In many countries, land and resource rights are vulnerable to government expropriation without compensation or proper procedural protections. Moreover, private acquisitions can fail to meet minimum safeguards of participation and transparency. As a major weakness in many countries’ policy and legal frameworks, LRR works to understand and improve land acquisition procedures around the world.