Issues Paper for ECOSOC 2005
ECOSOC 2005 HIGH-LEVEL SEGMENT
Ministerial Roundtable - Issues Paper
New York, 30 June 2005

Resource based conflicts, especially over rights of access to land, are increasing in frequency and intensity. Whether caused by greed or grievances, land conflicts cause serious social dislocations; suspend or destroy income opportunities; create food insecurity; damage the environment, and frequently result in the loss of life.

Poor households bear the heaviest burdens of land-related conflicts for the simple reason that their daily needs and future livelihoods are directly tied to their property rights. Their land dependency ratio is high. Poor households face a high risk of becoming victims of conflict if their fragile access to land is threatened further. Currently, fifty percent of the rural poor are smallholders, with vast numbers lacking security of tenure; twenty-two percent are landless families who often work in agriculture, frequently under unjust conditions; and eight percent are herders, hunters and gatherers whose access to common land is increasingly subject to individual titling or being granted to others under surface or sub-surface concessions.

Land conflicts have an enormous impact on the fight against hunger and poverty; on the goal to empower women; on building peace and security; on sustainable land use; and, on the vision for a world where people live in a "larger freedom" - the vision put forward by the UN Secretary General in preparation for the Millennium +5 Summit in September.

Land conflicts are complex because they involve many actors with vested interests; inter-connected processes; multiple authorities; biases in the rule of law; and, in the more complex situations, conflicts are an accumulation of grievances which may be embedded in wider and deeper conflicts.

The roots of conflicts are numerous; including: structural or historically-based inequalities; economic and social policies and patterns of growth and development; political or territorial disputes; communities in competition with commercial interests, particularly extractive industries; overlapping jurisdictions among government ministries; former landlords and land reform beneficiaries; intrusions onto pastoralist lands; and, contradictory regulations, such as differences in legal and customary ways of managing or mediating land rights.

Armed conflicts are often both the cause and effect of land conflicts in rural and urban areas. Such conflicts immediately impact poor rural people, displacing them to urban barrios. Whenever there is displacement, land grabbing occurs, often because communities are unable to defend their rights or refugees and internally displaced people, lacking land titles or user rights documents, return to find their land is occupied by powerful others. Displacement exacerbates food insecurity as poor households can no longer use their land to feed themselves, and creates additional pressures on urban areas and resources. In May 2005 the FAO Committee on Food Security reported that armed conflicts are the leading cause of world hunger.

Land grabbing is not only related to armed conflicts, it can involve customary land users finding that powerful interests have grabbed common lands in anticipation of formalisation processes, or women find that their joint titles did not prevent male family members from grabbing their land upon the death of their husband.

Land tenure institutions are inherently political, meaning that the resolution of land conflict is subject to significant power imbalances between stakeholders. This may involve different levels of political influence, abi lity to block negotiated agreements, moral claims on public sympathy and unequal access to legal protection during the escalation of a conflict and the resolution process. Strengthening the institutions of less powerful groups to negotiate and defend their interests with legislators and public officials is an essential pre-condition to conflict mediation.

Land conflict management needs to be understood to be a development process. It involves developing governance processes, involving state and non-state actors, that can bridge class, ethnic, and socio-political lines. Lasting effectiveness requires informed participation by and empowerment of local groups and communities in the conflict resolution processes and in the structural changes. This requires transparent decision-making, and spaces for dialogue in which the vulnerable and less powerful parties are not the victims, before or afterwards, of intimidation.

The causes of land conflicts are numerous, but their nature is largely systemic, meaning that they should be analysed and addressed in a governance context. In this way, policy choices can be decided upon by including all stakeholders effecting and affected by the conflict. In a governance context, resolution begins by seeking to understand the underlying and interconnected elements of the conflict before assessing which may be the appropriate road to resolution.

While land conflicts are situation specific, some areas of preparation, action and intervention are generally common.

• Establishing an inter-ministerial process to: correct fragmentation in the system of land administration; reconcile overlapping authorities; establish coherent adjudication procedures; and, work toward a "seamless" process between ministries with land related responsibilities.

• Streamlining the administrative procedures and tenurial instruments by which poor urban and rural households and other vulnerable populations, such as indigenous peoples, can gain legally binding land rights.

• Developing policies and programmes in anticipation of conflicts that may be generated by the internal migration that often results from the granting of commercial concessions.

• Enforcing the rule of law where by poor households are confident that the state will protect their legal entitlements to land, such as agrarian reform beneficiaries with title deeds.

• Providing legal assistance or training para-legals so that land-poor households have access to legal assistance to claim and defend their rights.

ECOSOC and the Millennium +5 Summit can promote the need to reduce land conflicts by incorporating the following ideas into the outcome declarations.

"Lack of secure access to productive resources, especially land, water and forests, is one of the main causes of hunger and poverty and a significant contributor to environmental degradation and conflict. We recognize that when rights to land are made more secure and equitable that the productivity and incomes of the poor rise; there is an uptake of sustainable resource practices; resource based conflicts are reduced; and societies generally achieve improved levels of peace, security and democracy."

Prepared by the International Land Coalition in association with intergovernmental and civil-society partners.