This HPG Policy Brief explores the role that land issues have played in the current crisis, and why it is essential that humanitarian actors understand these issues as they seek to assist displaced populations and facilitate the process of return or resettlement. Its key messages are as follows:
• Current post-election displacement in Kenya is not a new phenomenon but a recurring trend linked to unresolved land grievances, in a context of poor governance and socio-economic insecurity. This is of concern to humanitarians as the failure to understand the dynamics involved and the implications for recovery can exacerbate tensions and jeopardise attempts to resolve the crisis.
• Humanitarians need to engage with land specialists to ensure that their programming not only avoids exacerbating tensions, but is also consistent with efforts to address the structural causes of conflict.
• Return, relocation and local integration processes should not be promoted as durable solutions in the absence of serious attempts to resolve land-related grievances. If durable solutions are to be found, programmes must take account of those who were forced to move in earlier waves of displacement.
• The government’s urgency in encouraging IDPs to return despite continued political uncertainty and insecurity raises clear protection concerns. This includes both physical security and wider issues to do with rights, community reconciliation and sustainable access to the means of subsistence.
• In the absence of political progress and stability, urbanisation is likely to accelerate as displaced people seek alternative livelihoods.
About the project
Violent conflict is usually accompanied by changes in land distribution and transformations in property rights. This creates a situation whereby a significant proportion of the affected population will claim or re-claim access to land and land-based resources.
Access to land is a major issue with respect to the return of refugees and IDPs, affecting both the choice to return and the prospects for recovery. Yet concerns about land and understanding about ownership, use and access to land are minimal within the humanitarian community and plans for large scale return of refugees and IDPs rarely incorporate sufficient analysis of the local land tenure situation. Post-war re-establishment of ownership, use and access rights is often complicated and problematic, but if land and property issues are left unattended they can provide significant potential for renewed confrontation.
This two-year HPG study will provide a much needed examination of land tenure issues in countries affected by or emerging from conflict. It will form part of a broader ODI research agenda on land which includes the Rural Policy and Governance Group, the Chronic Poverty Research Centre and the Rights in Action Programme.
There is a widespread perception amongst the humanitarian agencies that land ownership problems are too complex or sensitive to be addressed and as a result approaches to land tenure matters tend to be superficial and ad hoc. Most strategies are designed around returning land to pre-war owners and fail to recognise and address the very volatile tenure issues which develop during conflict and which are most to the fore at the end of a war.
While the relationship between land and violent conflict is complex, it is clear that competition over land has been a critical cause of violence in some conflicts (e.g. Rwanda ) and an underlying factor in many others (e.g. Mozambique , East Timor, Sudan and Bosnia ). Violence can also trigger new competition over land, as well massive population movement and forcible displacement. In any of the three scenarios land issues have played or continue to play a significant role when planning return and/or resettlement of IDPs and refugees as well as disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of combatants.
International experience in addressing deep-rooted land tenure issues is quite limited and the ability of aid agencies to tackle such issues has generally been deficient. However, recent experience (e.g. in the Nuba Mountains, Sudan ) has proven that it is possible and relevant to invest in analysis and policy development related to land tenure while the crisis is still ongoing, in order to develop adequate policies for the post-conflict phase.
The project approach
Building on a review of existing research in this area, action research will then examine innovative, land tenure-related aid interventions to assess how these have actually impacted on the local land tenure situation and how they might be enhanced.
For a methodology and contact details for the lead researchers, see the HPG website.
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