Housing and Land

Land and Human Rights: Standards and Applications

This comprehensive resource from the UN's Human Rights Office of the High Commission can help you to better understand land and human rights standards and identify the ones applicable to your work. It provides a brief overview of the main international law standards relevant to land and human rights, as well as a range of concise, user-friendly summary sheets on key international legal standards for those working on land issues. These sheets illustrate the links between international human rights standards and land issues, along with examples of the concrete application of the standard by human rights mechanisms and references to relevant international standards and guidelines.

Land Acquisition and Involuntary Resettlement: Good Practice Handbook

This expansive guide from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) can help you to implement resettlement and livelihood restoration processes in a wide range of land acquisition circumstances. It explains the risks inherent in involuntary resettlement and the opportunities it can provide to improve the living conditions and livelihoods of those affected. It also outlines a framework and methodology for planning, conducting socioeconomic studies for, designing, implementing, and monitoring the entire resettlement and livelihood-restoration process to achieve positive, long-term sustainable outcomes.

The Global Land Tool Network

The Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) has created a wide range of resources to support access to land and tenure security for all - especially for marginalised and vulnerable peoples. Their resources include primers, toolkits, and guides on the topics of land administration and information; land management and legislation; land-based financing; land policy and planning; and more. They have also produced a broad range of publications, including legislative and administrative land and property rights frameworks for different countries.

The Land Portal Foundation

The Land Portal Foundation was established to create, curate, and disseminate land governance information. They have created primers and webinars on key land-related issues, as have compiled a broad range of land data sets. They have also built a comprehensive library featuring thousands of reports, journal articles, policies, conference papers, training resources (and more) on a wide range of issues and concepts.

How to Ensure Better Outcomes for Women in Resettlement: A Toolkit

This resource from the World Bank can help you to support resettlement outcomes for women. It explains the gender gaps in resettlement and provides a comprehensive range of recommendations for implementing effective and equitable compensation, resettlement, and livelihood restoration plans. The guide also provides questionnaires to identify gaps in the integration of gender-specific elements in the resettlement process and to guide the development of appropriate action plans to improve a project’s performance in gender mainstreaming.

LandMark: Global Platform of Indigenous & Community Lands

This interactive platform can help you to close internal information gaps on Indigenous Peoples' and local communities' land rights. It provides precise, in-depth maps, data, and other information on lands that are collectively held and used, including legal status and key threats. It also includes analysis tools that calculate factors such as forest cover loss and carbon stock.

The Human Rights Opportunity

This guide from Shift can help you to understand how companies are supporting land rights. It features case studies of companies (De Beers, PepsiCo, and Total) respecting land-related human rights across different areas of business activity, such as stakeholder engagement, advancing in participatory and inclusive land-use planning and development, and supporting proactive dialogue with Indigenous populations.

Uneven Ground: Research findings from the land inequality initiative

Land inequality is central to many other forms of inequality related to wealth, power, gender, health, and environment, and is fundamentally linked to contemporary global crises of democratic decline, climate change, global health security and pandemics, mass migration, unemployment, and intergenerational injustice. This synthesis report from the International Land Coalition and the Land Inequality Initiative can help you to understand the scale and scope of the issue of land inequality and to better support action that advances land equality.

The report unpacks the issue of land inequality and explains why it matters; explores the multidimensional aspects of land inequality, including its centrality, causes, and impacts; explains the state of land inequality in the world, including the scale and speed at which this inequality is growing; highlights land inequality solutions for creating resilient, sustainable, equitable societies; and highlights the urgent need to take action now.