The purpose of this toolkit is to provide a practical introduction to the relationship between land and violent conflict. The toolkit is designed to familiarize practitioners with a range of programmatic interventions and to sensitize officers to the fact that development activities, such as infrastructure projects and the exploitation of underground resources, can inadvertently cause land conflicts to erupt.
It also offers a rapid appraisal guide that can help determine which land issues are most relevant to conflict in a particular setting and identifies a number of approaches to monitoring and evaluation.
Key findings:
- Land is a very strategic socio-economic asset, particularly in poor societies where wealth and survival are measured by control of, and access to, land. People have fought over land since the beginning of recorded history. Population growth and environmental stresses have exacerbated the perception of land as a dwindling resource, tightening the connection between land and violent conflict. When symbolically or emotionally important land or property is at issue, chances of conflict and violence increase significantly. It should also be kept in mind that competition over access to land is often, at its core, about power, both socio-economic and political.
- Land often lacks adequate legal or institutional protections. Without those protections, land quickly becomes a valuable and symbolically powerful commodity easily subjected to manipulation and abuse. Weak legal, institutional and traditional/customary protections also feed heavily into the gender dimension of the land-and-conflict picture.
- Violation of insufficiently protected land tenure rights can lead to conflict and violence. Conditions influencing tenure insecurity include rights that are: overly limited in breadth and scope; too short in duration to recoup investments; conflicting, such as: claims that are grounded in formal state law versus informal or customary claims, or where overlapping rights were granted to parties under different legal regimes, or where overlapping and competitive rights have been granted to different parties for the same land; and inadequate or unenforceable rights.
- Some degree of conflict typically characterizes a situation involving competing claims to the ownership or use of the same piece of land. Parties will compete over the same land use or for vastly different uses; for example, pastoralists versus farmers. Competition can also play out between distinct ethnic groups or communities or even between generational factions and socio-economic groups. In some cases, government involvement that supports (or is perceived to support) one side over another can significantly increase tensions.
- The likelihood of violent conflict increases substantially when gross inequities characterize land-holding patterns, particularly when a large landless or land-poor population has limited livelihood opportunities. The stakes are even higher when a marginalized population literally depends on a small piece of land for subsistence and survival. Frustrations are usually directed toward those people who are seen as having an undeserved but profitable lock on landholdings, often going back generations.
- In many countries, government sponsored resettlement schemes have led to conflict among the ‘settled’ as well as between the settled population and the original inhabitants. Tension and violence often accompany the initial displacement and can also be part of the dynamic when displaced people return to their place of origin, especially when others have since taken up occupancy.
- As countries emerge from armed conflict, they face a number of land-related challenges associated with post-conflict reconstruction and peace consolidation. The importance of land issues to post-conflict development is often not recognized early enough, and, even when it is recognized, it is often politically or practically unfeasible to effectively address those issues in the immediate post-conflict period. Nevertheless, Disputes typically appear when other individuals or groups are found occupying the properties of a returning population (e.g., Rwanda and Burundi). In such cases, the returning population may be forced to occupy alternative properties that are not actually theirs, which can instigate another set of disputes and related secondary complications.
