Who Owns the World’s Land? 

A global baseline of formally recognized indigenous & community land rights

In recent years, there has been growing attention and effort towards securing the formal, legal recognition of land rights for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Communities and Indigenous Peoples are estimated to hold as much as 65 percent of the world’s land area under customary systems, yet many governments formally recognize their rights to only a fraction of those lands. This gap—between what is held by communities and what is recognized by governments—is a major driver of conflict, disrupted investments, environmental degradation, climate change, and cultural extinction. While community land rights are garnering greater attention in national and international circles, the actual status and extent of legal recognition has not been well understood. This report seeks to contribute to this field as the first analysis to quantify the amount of land formally recognized by national governments as owned or controlled by Indigenous Peoples and local communities around the world. The study includes data from 64 countries comprising 82 percent of global land area. It builds on the ongoing work of the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) to track ownership and control of the world’s forests, and expands that research to identify lands that are owned and controlled by local communities across all terrestrial ecosystems in the countries studied, including such diverse lands as grasslands in China, taiga in northern Canada, and rainforests in Brazil.

THE RIGHTS AND RESOURCES INITIATIVE RRI is a global coalition of 13 Partners and over 150 international, regional, and community organizations advancing forest tenure, policy, and market reforms. RRI leverages the strategic collaboration and investment of its Partners and Collaborators around the world by working together on research, advocacy, and convening strategic actors to catalyze change on the ground. RRI is coordinated by the Rights and Resources Group, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.rightsandresources.org.

ARTICLE: Babie's The Spatial: A Forgotten Dimension of Property

San Diego Law Review (Vol. 50, No. 323, 2013) just published interesting paper of Paul T. Babie 'The Spatial: A Forgotten Dimension of Property'.

Abstract

This article employs urban sociologist and planning theorist Edward W Soja’s spatial scaffolding found in the ontological "trialectic" to look at property anew, with its obvious, but oft-forgotten spatial dimension brought to the foreground. The article uses Soja’s ontological trialectic to reassemble what we already know about property, demonstrating that theorizing about property implicitly recognizes the importance of spatiality. Recognizing the interwoven complexity to and inseparability and interdependence of historicality, sociality and spatiality — Soja’s three ontological elements — of property allows space an explicit role in defining what property is, when it exists, and how it is central to and affected by human life. But more importantly, it reveals how property is the cause of spatial injustice, which opens the possibility of using property as a vehicle both to seek and to achieve spatial justice. The article concludes by reflecting upon the emerging definition of spatial injustice, how property is one source of such injustice, and how recognizing the spatial dimension may allow us to see and to remedy instances of it.

Full text of the article is available here.