The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) in Iraq has published a comprehensive urban analysis on Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and the focus of an international military campaign to liberate it from occupation by the terrorist group that calls itself “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).”

The global population is facing a range of large-scale challenges, which create increased competition and conflict over land at the transnational, national, subnational, local and family levels. This will increase over the next decades.
By 2050 the world’s population will grow to around 9.6 billion people, with a population growth rate of 1 billion every 12 years. Already more than 50 per cent live in urban areas. All these people will need access to land and have to be fed in a…

The farmers of Fátima were sceptical t first: what did the provincial government want to do with their land? Fátima is a bairro (neighbourhood) on the southeastern edge of Huambo, the second-largest city in Angola, close to the airport. The provincial government wanted to make the land available for the city’s expansion. The area was still mostly farmland, but it was divided up into lots of irregular plots: too small and higgledy-piggledy to plan in a rational way. Each plot by itself was not…

Many developed countries have strong land institutions and laws that protect the citizens’ relationship with land and provide land administration services to secure and often guarantee land rights. These services directly support land markets that underpin modern economies. Security of tenure is taken for granted.

A significant portion of land interests around the world are not recorded, leaving a large number of people vulnerable to land grabbing by the state and other powerful interests. The continuum of land rights is gaining traction globally as a metaphor to guide policies and strategies to improve equity in land tenure and land transactions, and to increase official recognition of different tenure types that provide various levels of security. The continuum offers an alternative approach to the…

One important pattern among highly urbanized countries is that they tend to rely more heavily on land-based taxes. A review of 64 countries shows a strong positive correlation between the urban population percentage and land-based taxes as a percentage of GDP.
The table presented in the adjacent box illustrates this point. While the average land-based tax revenue for these countries is about 0.75 per cent of GDP, the average among highly urbanized, high-income countries is over 1.5 per…

This guide is intended for trainers and facilitators in the GLTN and UN-Habitat Land-based Finance (LBF) Training course. LBF is a collective name given to a range of instruments by which local governments expand their revenue base and generate funds that will help them realize their service delivery, infrastructure development and maintenance goals. The broader contexts within which this tool is being developed are local governance and sustainable urbanization. The LBF tool is premised on the…

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) both recognize the importance of prioritizing and addressing issues related, but not limited, to customary land because of its huge potential to contribute to poverty reduction and positive potential impacts at a global level. In this regard, the two agencies are supporting the Ministry of Lands, Physical Planning and Urban Areas Management (MLPPUAM) of the Turkana County Government in Kenya to develop and…