Governance and Tenure of Land and Natural Resources in Latin America

This study characterizes the trends of good governance of tenure systems for natural resources in Latin America, emphasizing the land issue. Along with sizing the status of this issue at the level of macro policies, we will try to synthesize the debate on tenure of land and natural resources in general and have been analyzed new approaches and public and private experiences applied in market development, technical assistance, social control and national parks management. The final goal was to analyze the scope this issue can bring to FAO’s action.

By analyzing how the countries have solved the problem of access to the land, we have identified three big situations: countries with actives agrarian reforms, countries that have had agrarian reforms in the past and where the land issue is still subject of public debate and countries post-agrarian reform, where, in general, the policies of access to land are not included in the public policies device. This shows that in the region we must apply strategies that combine the approach to structural (access to land) and functional (tenure security, competitiveness improvement) issues, establishing a trade off that will depend on the reality of each country. The experiences with lands funds, for other side, show its usefulness to solve social conflicts, although in all the cases there are low coverage and a limited impact.