Who Owns the World's Land? A global baseline of formally recognized indigenous and community land rights

Abstract

The first analysis to quantify the amount of land formally recognized by national governments as owned or controlled by Indigenous Peoples and local communities around the world. Ownership of the world’s rural lands and natural resources is a major source of contestation around the globe, affecting prospects for rural economic development, human rights and dignity, cultural survival, environmental conservation, and efforts to combat climate change. Communities are estimated to hold as much as 65 percent of the world’s land area through customary, community-based tenure systems. However, national governments only recognize formal, legal rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities to a fraction of these lands. Some countries are in the process of recognizing communities’ rights, and estimates from those countries provide some indication of the size of these gaps in recognition. As demands for land tenure reform increase and national processes to recognize land rights advance, this report provides a baseline that documents the current status of formal, statutory recognition of community-based tenure.

Deep democratisation of technology can support a pluriverse of approaches for sustainability

“…Dominant international approaches tend to be one-size ts all and based on modern cultural forms that are clearly inadequate. Numerous alternative approaches with much better track records for integrating humanity and human activity with nature exist among many, often-marginalised Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC) across the world [19][20][21][22][23] . These existing worldviews and practices may be more effective in securing our future than the technocratic solutions currently proposed at the international level 20,21,24,25 .…”