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Land Reporting Initiative

Supporting global collaboration for monitoring land rights

Many ILC members are engaged in monitoring and evaluating the implementation of land-related laws, policies and programmes, and their impact on poor men and women.  Some organisations are using specific sets of indicators to do this, or are in the process of developing indicators. The Land Reporting Initiative seeks to support and to build upon these efforts. The goal is greater collaboration between civil society, international organisations and governments to improve the monitoring of land rights issues and the evaluation of land policy.

Latest update: Workshop on “Working together to monitor secure access to land”, 8th-9th December 2008 - Report now available
The workshop was the culmination of a period of review of the scope and direction of the LRI involving a wide group of ILC members and partners. The objective was to build a consensus on the way forward for the LRI, based on the experiences of member and partner organisations.
The workshop provided a very rich interchange of experiences, revealing the diversity of monitoring activities that member organisations are engaged in in the three regions. It produced a large range of ideas on how members may be able to work together in the future, such as producing a biannual report on selected themes, developing and index of landlessness, facilitating information exchange through a web-portal, developing a participatory approach to indicator development and collaborative monitoring of programme implementation and participation in policy formulation.

Conclusions of the workshop: A vision for 2009-2011
The workshop revealed how the LRI should be conceptualised for 2009-2011, inline with the ILC Strategic Framework. The initiative should have three main functions. It should be:

• A facility to support the monitoring work of members, and the advocacy work that builds on that monitoring. This is to be achieved through support to monitoring activities, support for knowledge-sharing, facilitating collaboration between CSOs and IGOs on monitoring and related advocacy, and through working to open up spaces for dialogue.
• A mechanism through which members can develop more comparable and comprehensive data collection regionally and globally. This is to be achieved through the facilitation of, and support for, collaborative activities at regional and global levels.
• A mechanism through which members can collate information and develop collective advocacy-oriented outputs at regional and global levels. This is to be achieved through the facilitation of, and support for, collaborative activities at regional and global levels, including the production and distribution or hosting of collective outputs such as reports and web-based resources, and through support to joint advocacy initiatives.

On the basis of workshop discussions, as well as on the Tuesday afternoon follow-up session, it is possible to state the following action points for the ILC secretariat:

• The secretariat will continue to support the regional processes in Asia and Latin America, including through seeking to create spaces for dialogue on the outputs of member monitoring activities.
• The secretariat should support African members to explore initiating collaborative action on monitoring in that region. It should also facilitate inter-regional exchange of experiences so that African members can draw on the experiences of the other regions.
• The secretariat should work to facilitate and pilot partnerships between IGOs and CSOs on monitoring and on the use of monitoring outputs in advocacy. Interest has already been expressed in such an initiative by key IGOs.
• The secretariat should to facilitate inter-regional discussions between members on the development of a global report based on country mapping studies and/or on indicators on national implementation of international agreements. Members and the secretariat should seek to refine this idea with a view to producing such an output in 2010.

The full report can be found here
Please see also: Workshop programme and List of Participants.

The presentations made at the workshop can be accessed here

The secretariat is now developing an approach paper and workplan for the next phase of the Land Reporting Initiative, based on the workshop, in preparation for the relaunch of the initiative at the 2009 ILC Assembly of Members in Katmandu.

As part of the Land Reporting Initiative, the workshop was made possible thanks to the support of the EC and of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Latest Update: Announcing a LRI workshop: "Working together to monitor secure access to land"
Location : Rome
Date : 8 th and 9 th December 2008 .

Background:

The ILC secretariat has been facilitating a process to take stock of the state of the art in monitoring land rights and the monitoring-related activities of ILC members, in order to assess how ILC may best be able to add value to and build on the monitoring work of its members in the future. This has been done through the development of a working paper and its review and further discussion through the LRI Dgroup [link to Dgroup page]. The workshop is being held as the culmination of this stocktaking process, and as a launch pad for ILC’s future work on monitoring land rights.

Objectives of the workshop:

1 To learn from the diverse experiences and perspectives of member and partner organisations in relation to monitoring land issues.

2 To build an inclusive consensus on the next steps for the Land Reporting Initiative.

3 To draw up a plan of action and identify a core group to steer the process in the coming period.

Main themes:

1 The potential for a global standardised reporting system on land issues and how ILC might be involved in such work.

2 Monitoring land governance issues as an aspect of multi-sectoral partnerships (government, civil-society, etc.), and how the ILC network could help facilitate such partnerships.

3 The potential for collaboration by ILC members and partners to monitor global trends in access to land and "land-grabbing", likely linked to the work by ILC members on the impacts of increasing commercial pressures on land.

For more information, please refer to the following:

- Provisional workshop programme
- Workshop Issues Paper
Or contact: t.bending@landcoalition.org
We would be interested to hear about the work of any organisation that has experience in the systematic monitoring of land issues, particularly if using indicators. Also, if you are interested in participating in a discussion or working group on these issues, please contact Tim Bending at the ILC secretariat: t.bending@landcoalition.org