London, UK – 12 May 2016
Links
On May 11, coinciding with the 4th anniversary of the Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land (VGGT), DFID’s LEGEND flagship programme launched a comprehensive “State of the debate” report on land governance. The report reviews progress made in the four years since the Voluntary Guidelines were adopted, and makes recommendations on next steps, including a call by businesses to governments to show more political will to drive transformation and be robust on implementation.
The following questions are addressed:
- What has been done to realise the VGGT principles?
- What are the current debates surrounding implementation of the VGGT?
- What challenges and obstacles have emerged, and how are they being addressed and resolved in different contexts?
- What are the ways forward for different stakeholders?
To answer many of these questions, the authors analysed major outcomes of the Donor Platform’s Working Group on Land, amongst other groups, in their efforts to implement the VGGT. For example, it refers to the creation of the Land Governance Programme Map & Database and the commissioning of four studies that have assessed and provided strategic direction on how donors could improve technologies, multi-stakeholder partnerships, corporate performance standards and coherence among funded programmes. In the recommendations, global donor agencies are particularly called into action by, for example, continuing to coordinate initiatives through the Working Group on Land and analysing the Map & Database and discuss the appropriate balance of country programmes with governments versus other partnerships, their regional spread and other issues (see more on pages 51-51).
The launch of this report complements the work of the Platform’s Working Group on Land, which is particularly keen in 2016 to support the exercise of taking stock of the VGGT implementation, a topic which will be addressed at the upcoming Committee on World Food Security in October 2016.
