Communities hold roughly half the world's land by custom but only about a tenth by law. The finale ties the series together through that security gap, the twenty-first-century land rush, women's land rights, and the pressure of carbon markets and conservation. It closes on the series' diagnostic: to understand a society, ask what rules it wrote for the ground under its feet.
Timeline
- 2007-2008Food price spikes and financial crisis send capital hunting for farmland abroad
- May 2012Committee on World Food Security endorses the Voluntary Guidelines on tenure governance
- 2015Rights and Resources Initiative baseline finds communities legally own about 10 percent of land
- 2021Land Matrix logs 1,865 transnational deals totaling about 33 million hectares
- 2023RRI's second edition puts customary holdings at least 50 percent and legal community ownership above 11 percent
Still debated
The customary-land share is an estimate with real methodological disagreement, and no genuinely current global figure exists. Whether titling protects people, whether carbon and conservation deals help or harm tenure, and whether soft law changed outcomes are also contested.