This book gives an overview of the concept of “biocultural rights” and the tools that indigenous and local communities can use to protect their ways of life and their rights to land, territories and resources.

This book examines the relationship between capitalism and the commons. Table readers may be particularly interested in the book’s discussion of agricultural land ownership and squatting, agroecological networks in Colombia, and women’s access to land in Africa.

This report from the International Land Coalition finds that inequality in ownership and control of land is greater than previously thought and increasing rapidly, with many smallholders, indigenous people and rural communities being squeezed onto smaller pieces of land. The report finds that 70% of the world’s farmland is controlled by the largest 1% of farms, generally acting as part of the “corporate food system”.

This report from the US nonprofit Institute for Multi-Stakeholder Initiative Integrity looks at 40 multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) - voluntary standards set by civil society organisations and industry, such as Fairtrade International, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and the Marine Stewardship Council - and concludes that MSIs are not effective at holding corporations accountable for abuses or protecting human rights.

This book chapter questions the validity of viewing food primarily as a tradable commodity, noting that doing so encouraging policies based on markets, corporate profit and the private enclosure of resources that were previously freely available to all. The authors propose, instead, that food should be viewed as a commons, i.e. a shared resource. 

The Scottish Land Commission (a public body set up by the Scottish Government) reports that highly concentrated land ownership in some parts of Scotland hampers economic development and can be harmful to local communities.

Bolsonaro, the new far-right president of Brazil, has given the Agriculture Ministry responsibility for “identification, delimitation, demarcation and registration of lands traditionally occupied by indigenous people”, according to Reuters. Environmentalists are concerned that the Amazon rainforest will be opened to greater commercial exploitation.

This paper describes eight examples where open-access property regimes do not lead to the well-known “tragedy of the commons” - i.e. overexploitation of the public resource - and outlines conditions that contribute to sustainable use of common-pool resources.

The report “Missing pathways to 1.5°C: The role of the land sector in ambitious climate action”, by the Climate Land Ambition and Rights Alliance, assesses greenhouse gas mitigation pathways that use “low-risk” land-based solutions that protect natural ecosystems and respect human rights. The report aims to provide an alternative to the IPCC’s mitigation pathways, many of which rely on mitigation approaches such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).