An Update from LEI

Madison Durham, who spent 3 months with us as an intern, heads back to complete her final year of her Bachelor of Law (Honours)/Bachelor Arts at the Australian National University – you can see what she got up to here.

We are in the swing of operations with consultancies and project teams in full implementation mode. Our work in Bangladesh on “enhancing access to land for renewable energy” is coming to a close with a final household survey. With this newsletter we share an update on this very topical nexus of issues of access to land, infrastructure, and investments.

A couple of weeks back on 20^th June, Kate Fairlie presented in an Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) webinar introducing the Land Records and Transaction System Assessment and Design Toolkit. The panel that followed took up practical issues of technology changes including planning for disruption and socialising the change both internally and externally. Watch this space for a second webinar coming later this year, where we collaborate with ESRI and MCC to see how we can take this important work further.

In January our Mekong Land Governance (MRLG) project team kicked off Phase 3, the 9^th year of providing support to smallholder farmers to improve their tenure security. Nine new workstreams are starting collaborations with over 30 partners in four Mekong countries. Despite significant covid delays and the 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar, the team can be proud of achieving and in some cases exceeding the project targets in Phase 2. More than 70,000 farmers directly benefited from project interventions with enhanced tenure security, while a further estimated 21.5 million indirectly benefitted from project supported policy improvements. Knowledge management is a core component of the project, and the team produced over 80 policy-oriented publications on customary tenure rights, responsible investments, and related topics.

Did you know? … the MRLG project team and partners are improving customary tenure recognition through the support to:

• An alliance of regional partners that worked to develop and have adopted the ASEAN Guidelines of the Recognition of Customary Tenure in Forested Landscapes. The guidelines were approved by the ASEAN Ministers of Agriculture and Forestry (AMAF) in 2022.
• The revision of the Lao PDR Land Law (2021) and Forestry Law (2021), as well as the drafting and final issuance of three Ministerial Instructions, based on the outcomes of pilot activities in Lao PDR, namely: 0672/MONRE on land registration certificate, No. 6377/MONRE on land surveying and mapping, and No. 0500/MONRE on the issuance of land titles. Inter-ministerial meetings hosted by MRLG produced high-level agreement for tenure security in state forest areas and several policy outputs clarifying tenure pathways in state forest areas. Successful pilots produced legal documentation of tenure rights for communities.
  • In Laos, Village Land Use Planning (LUP), Village Forest Management Plans (VFMPs) and land surveys were carried out in 7 pilot villages inside state forests, leading to the issuance of survey certificates for 2,320 plots under 1,238 households, and 7 VFMPs.
• VN Forest to publish the Guideline on Community Forest Management that specifies community rights and the process of forest allocation to communities, with confirmation also that MRLG’s recommendations were included in the draft Land Law in Vietnam.
• Community resource use mapping for zonation in the Chhaeb Wildlife Sanctuary approved at district and provincial level. A much larger proportion of the land remaining available for sustainable community use was achieved in comparison to other Protected Area zonation in Cambodia.

To improve agricultural investments for more responsible social, economic and environmental outcomes for investors, smallholder farmers and communities, MRLG supported:

• a sequence of meetings and presentations to the inter-ministerial Committee on Investment Promotion and Management (CIPM) resulting in a decision to develop a Prime Minister’s Decree on the Regulation of Contract Farming, that will be finalized in Phase 3 in Lao PDR. The team also supported the Ministry of Planning and Investment in Provincial dissemination on investment law and sub-legislation, including Instruction 0457 regulating investments in three languages (Lao, Vietnamese and Chinese), attended by local government, private sector and civil society representatives.
• the Party’s Central Committee’s Economics Commission requested inputs from MRLG for the preparation of the party Resolution on the Land Policy and other instruments in Vietnam.

LEI are delighted with the team and our partners’ achievements. There is huge passion to continue this support of smallholders and forest dwellers in the region as Phase 3 looks to scale and cement MRLG efforts through to the end of 2025. MRLG are publishing and sharing all the work of our team and partners through Facebook and the MRLG website (about to undergo a revamp). Please reach out to Leonard for any publications or topics you’d like to know more about.