Communities & the State: Getting the Property Relationship Right for a Safer 21st Century

Liz Alden Wily will deliver the Third Al-Moumin Distinguished Lecture on Environmental Peacebuilding, entitled, "Communities & the State: Getting the Property Relationship Right for a Safer 21^st Century."

Several billion rural poor still lack secure land tenure. Their communal assets are most affected. But this is beginning to change. These changes can play a crucial role in limiting conflict in troubled agrarian regions. They can also help remove impediments to transition to fairer and more accountable forms of the modern agrarian state. This lecture–the Third Al Moumin Distinguished Lecture on Environmental Peacebuilding–reexamines the known fact that land grievances help trigger conflicts and war in the context of stumbling transformation and detectable innovations in the property sector. It argues that departure from classical trajectories of property rights development is timely, and in which new legal and institutional treatment of community land rights is key. Drawing principally upon African cases, it illustrates how positive paths to secure tenure and peace are being built.

Liz Alden Wily is an independent tenure specialist who combines practitioner and research roles for global and national initiatives. She is an Affiliated Fellow of Van Vollenhoven Institute of Law at Leiden University in The Netherlands, an Associate of Katiba Institute in Kenya, and an Honorary Fellow of the Rights & Resources Initiative based in Washingto