Improving Governance of Tenure in Policy and Practice: Monitoring in a Space for Multiple Views

Abstract

The dynamics of current global challenges—like food and nutrition security, environmental degradation, climate change, and emergencies—reduce the availability of and/or access to natural resources, and thereby underline the urgency of achieving transformational changes in the governance of tenure. This is increasingly required to bring the greatest good to the most people, in line with human rights. The globally applicable “Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security” (VGGT) were developed to promote responsible tenure governance. The importance of instituting effective monitoring for the implementation of the VGGT at the country level in order to ensure that they have an impact on the ground is well accepted. However, little progress has been made to date. This paper explores plural perspectives on monitoring by the different stakeholders involved because of the multi-dimensional nature of the VGGT implementation, and because tenure governance is a complex system. Allowing space for multiple views means leaving no one’s view behind. It is proposed to map the multiple pathways of change to achieve responsible tenure governance in a causal framework using the concept of theories of change. A pluralistic approach will entail different theories of change operating simultaneously, which will provide an inclusive and comprehensive tool for monitoring by showing the preferred pathways of progress on the ground, and by contributing to future trajectories.

How Can the Adoption of the Voluntary Guidelines Improve Public Policy and Women’s Access to Agricultural Land in Mexico, Guatemala, and Bolivia?

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Prospects and limitations of ‘Responsible Agricultural Investment’ for governing transboundary agri‐food systems in Mekong Southeast Asia: Implications for upland maize in the Lao‐Vietnamese borderlands

“…Despite the need to advance the reach of transboundary governance into the sphere of corporate investments to address transboundary impacts on livelihoods and the environment, the merging of often weak national legal frameworks (or enforcement thereof) with the similarly weak language and unclear targets of voluntary self‐regulation has tended to deliver poorly (Hirsch, 2020). Other perspectives highlight the advantages of soft laws in reducing barriers to agreement among diverse actors and in so doing influencing the long‐term direction of ‘hard’ laws, as Jansen (2020, p. 7) elaborates: ‘soft law is a helpful technique in situations where states want to act collectively, but at the same time do not want to restrain their freedom of action, and opt for the possibility to be part of something without committing to it’. The latter may be of particular interest in the context of ASEAN's prevailing ethos of non‐interference in sovereign affairs among member countries, which although often cited as causing regional agreements to ‘lack teeth’, is also considered central to the evolution of trust and cooperation (Boer, 2017; Hirsch, 2020; Kheng‐Lian & Karim, 2017).…”