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This open access book presents a legal geography of property rights in land through the lenses of landscape and critical spatial justice. It seeks to reassert the importance of landscape and place in property as an alternative to abstract concepts of property which dominate contemporary thinking. It investigates property’s origins and uptake in the common law through the lenses of landscape and spatial justice, providing a genealogy of property, from its early origins in pre-feudal Scandinavia to its development as a cornerstone concept in English common law. It offers a new perspective and analytical tools to reconsider many accepted approaches to land in the law today. This book also contributes both to the decolonization of property law and critiques of property’s unsustainability, as well as the examination of the role of law itself in facilitating large scale land changes that destroy place, and the ramifications of this process. As such, it should be of interest to inter-disciplinary scholars working in the socio-legal, environmental and property law fields

Zugang zu Land ist begehrt und umkämpft. Das verdeutlichen Konflikte, die weltweit im Zusammenhang mit land grabbing auftreten. Wie aber lassen sich Entstehung und Verlauf dieser Konflikte erklären? Dieser Frage nähert sich Sarah Kirst in einer Fallstudie zu zwei Konflikten um Zugang zu Land im Kontext der Umsetzung agrarindustrieller Vorhaben in Ghana. Aus machtkritischer Perspektive beleuchtet sie die Rolle traditioneller Autoritäten, die zentrale Akteur*innen in diesen Konflikten sind. Ihre Analyse entschlüsselt die Bedeutung unterschiedlicher Machtformen für Konfliktentstehung und -verlauf und zeigt soziale Ungleichheitsverhältnisse im Kontext von land grabbing auf.

These farmers have been working this land for generations. But they have no papers. So the government may clear this land for a project. People fear they will be chased away.” Such stories can be heard every day in Africa, Asia and Latin America. They demonstrate the insecurity of rural smallholders who are threatened with eviction without proper compensation. The ‘project’ may be large-scale agriculture, industry, bio fuels, forest conservation, urban sprawl, or transnational land-grabbing by countries insecure in food and energy resources. Can such peasants be empowered with ‘papers’? Five legal experts who believe in adaptation to local conditions share their experiences and work with local people, take their needs seriously, respect their ways of managing land, make good use of the legal system and opt for simple but robust registration systems.

Millions of people live and work on land that they do not legally own in accordance with enforceable state law. The absence of state recognition for local property rights affects people's tenure security and impedes development. Efforts to legalise extra-legal land tenure have traditionally emphasised individual titling and registration. Disappointment with such approaches have led to a search for 'a third way' in land tenure regulation that will reconcile state perspectives with local land rights. This book contributes to the quest for a new pluralistic approach. It combines the description of land tenure regimes in Africa, Latin America and Asia with an analysis of designs, objectives, and actual implementation of specific legalisation programmes.

Most of the world's estimated 1.4 billion poorest people are still rural. Yet the majority lack ownership (or any secure rights) to the land that is their principal source of livelihood. Although land law and related reforms have transformed the lives of millions of families by providing secure land rights, not all such efforts have succeeded. Over the years, the conventional wisdom concerning law and land tenure reform-what is needed, what is possible, and how such reform contributes to pro-poor development-has changed, sometimes in striking ways. Lawyers at the Rural Development Institute and the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle have spent more than four decades advising on, helping formulate and assessing the results of land tenure reform efforts around the world. The present volume distills key lessons from that work and parallel work by others.