What is it about?
For land tenure security, binding laws called hard laws are manipulated because of information asymmetry and skewed modernisation process, including education in many countries in the global south. The issue is ramified when it comes to customary tenure that sustains on oral traditions, and large tracts of their lands are separated from their means of livelihood. This essay unfolds the attempt in global public policy to address this concern and highlight the challenges within that narrative. A generalised attempt of the global policies on conservation and investment as the yardstick may risk portraying the global ‘good practices’ as the unapologetic agent of neoliberalism at the expense of the livelihood of many poor settlers in the global south. The essay also highlights the need for inclusivity in mainstreaming soft law as a balanced land-use policy approach.
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Why is it important?
The land is among the many common threads of realising the global imperatives of food security, development and climate change challenges. However, the fact that land tenure security weighs differently on different societies has not been accounted for with commensurate contextual requirements. Because of that, public policy tends to generalise good practices like conservation and investment in scale as the paradigm of sustainable development. This paper shows that such generalisation further marginalises many poor societies practising customary tenure and calls for an urgent need to retrospect public policy, particularly in the global south.
Perspectives
There is an increasing acceptance that the more we conserve and produce, the more we contribute to sustainable development and security to rising global demands. But if such a process challenges the livelihood for many vulnerable groups of people in different countries, what then. Several case studies discussed in this essay suggest that these are facts that one cannot deny. So, responsible investment and accountable institutions to see that laws are respected at the local level are becoming critical to the global ‘good practices’ for sustainable development.
Shimreisa Chahongnao
Jawaharlal Nehru University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Customary Tenure and Large-Scale Land Acquisitions in the Global South: Issues and Redressal Approaches in Governance Policy, November 2021, Academia.edu,
DOI: 10.20935/al4074.
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