Working on Improving Land Registration with Lesotho’s Community Councils

Sustainable land management involves maintaining the balance between environmental, economic and social needs, ensuring that land use is both productive and resilient. It is key to ensuring that future generations can also utilise and benefit from this crucial resource. By ensuring that land ownership, rights, and responsibilities are clearly defined and registered, a government is taking the first steps toward the goal of sustainable land management. When done properly, land administration systems help to provide tenure security and maintain and protect equal land rights. It can also enhance transparency and accountability, which reduces disputes and promotes fair access to resources.

Please note that the names of those quoted in the article have been changed.

If 2024 was a day out of the office, it would have been to a theme park. We took many rides (a couple too many) on the roller coaster with tender proposals and travel, and not enough time at the picnic tables to exchange and connect. The unpredictability and sometime rapid pace of work in our field is what we have come to know. Very fortunately at LEI, we have a strong team who embrace the demands that allow us to pivot quickly and progress effectively.  We aim to find a steady pace for impactful work in 2025 as we see our projects move into implementation, wrap up and roll-over phases.

Finance for nature-based solutions is on the upswing. The voluntary carbon market (VCM) and carbon investments have seen remarkable growth, particularly for projects that incentivize protection of forests and other landscapes in carbon-rich regions such as the Mekong, and is projected to mobilize up to US$5 billion annually in the next decade. Yet, like any credible market, the VCM must be inclusive, grounded in an enabling policy environment, and with mutual benefits for people, nature, and climate. But the price of carbon has taken a plunge in recent years (Forest Trends 2024, World Bank 2024) as a result of a host of issues and concerns that are summarized as a lack of environmental and social “integrity.” Though not all forest-based carbon projects have come under scrutiny, they currently command weaker prices than many other sectors, signaling a lack of market confidence.  

It has been a super productive and exciting time here at LEI over the past six months with tenders, international conferences and bigger still, project mobilisations. We won’t be enjoying long summer holidays like our northern partners but aiming for some crisp short winter-breaks down-under instead.

Why did three members of the LEI team travel to Lesotho in the last three months? Because we kicked off with our national and internationally staffed team, a five-year contract by the US-funded Millennium Challenge Corporation to support the modernisation of the Rural Land Registration System in Lesotho, with a particular emphasis on supporting the accessibility and inclusiveness of that system for women! Our contract is called the Land and Gender (L&G) consultancy.

Planning and governance challenges within Vanuatu’s urban population are significant. Port Vila City Council has never adopted a master or local plan to guide and control urban expansion or land use. Likewise, there is no clear government agency responsible for land identification and infrastructure development to meet Port Vila’s growing needs. In one respect Port Vila is in a strong position – there is land that is available for development. But the majority of development to date has been private sector-led, targeting high-income bracket earners, and even this development has been limited by regulatory uncertainty and outdated land administration processes. In the 25-year period between 1996-2020 only 4,100 new residential lots were approved in Greater Port Vila – an average of just 170 new lots per year. The majority of these have targeted high-income households, with varying levels of infrastructure (that is, roads, electricity, water) provided by developers. Affordable housing units for those on lower wages are largely absent on the private market.

The LEI team have managed, collaborated and innovated throughout the past year across multiple projects in locations including the Mekong, Nauru, Bangladesh and Indonesia. We have also delved deeply with various partners bidding on projects in Africa. These have been exciting and rapid knowledge-juggling periods.

With almost five years since the adoption of the ASEAN Guidelines, Renée Chartres recently travelled to Cambodia to examine their impact on the rubber sector.. She travelled with Asisah Man from Oxfam Cambodia to support Oxfam’s work under the Mekong Region Land Governance (MRLG) regional Responsible Agriculture Investment (RAI) activities focused on gender equality and RAI.. Below are her reflections on this experience.

We’ve developed a short clip detailing why continued efforts on spatial planning are needed, so please take a look. And read on below for some of the achievements and successes of this project.