An animation created by Alexandra Huchet www.alexandrahuchet.com and the voice of Alejandro De Mesa www.alejandrodemesa.com to raise awareness on the endangered culture of the Bataks of Palawan and their practice of shifting cultivation. Special thanks go to the Coalition against Land Grabbing (CALG) - Philippines and to the the Batak Federation (Bayaan it Batak kat Palawan – BBKP) for enthusiastically proposing and supporting this project. A particular acknowledgment goes to Dario Novellino for providing the video shootings, photographic material, text and other inputs on which the animation is based. Sincere appreciation goes to Eric Luong and Helene Deborde from 32 Art Studio, as well as to Sophie Grig (Survival International), for their comments and valuable advice.

This video describes and compares community concessions on state land, individual land ownership and communal ownership of territory. The video is especially for communities whose land rights have not yet been recognised, to help them think through what type of rights they want.

The Misak are an indigenous people whose territory is located in Cauca, Colombia. As with many indigenous peoples in Latin America, the Misak lost large parts of their territory during colonial rule. In the 1980s, they started a process of land reclamation and were eventually successful in gaining formal land rights recognition. Since then, the Misak have developed their Life Plan as a tool for self-determined development to ensure their gains would be preserved for future generations.

Secure tenure rights are crucial for forest conservation. Since 2007 the government of Indonesia has allocated 14 million hectares of forests to community management through various schemes. However, such formal schemes do not offer full ownership rights to the forest, as do customary systems, such as that in Malaku province. As a result, forest reforms launched in 2009 have not taken hold there. Research undertaken as part of the Global Comparative Study (GCS) on Land Tenure Reform, led by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), examined ways that tenure reform might combine the formal and customary system in Malaku to provide communities with secure forest tenure, to benefit them and the forests.

The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and the Wiyasiwewin Mikiwahp Native Law Centre of the University of Saskatchewan College of Law recently released a collection of short essays — titled UNDRIP Implementation: Braiding International, Domestic and Indigenous Laws — that discusses how international law, domestic constitutional law and Indigenous law can support full implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. In this video, the collection’s contributors provide an overview of how the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian government has changed since first contact. The effort to bring harmony to these diverse stands of law — international, domestic and Indigenous — amid reconciliation comes with both risk and opportunity. For media inquiries, usage rights or other questions please contact CIGI: https://www.cigionline.org/contact/

This lesson is part of an International Human Rights free online course. You may follow it in Udemy http://www.udemy.com/introduction-to-human-rights/ or in our Youtube channel http://youtube.com/moocchile (If you want a virtual certificate, you should follow the complete course in Udemy) You may find the transcript of this lesson, as well as a glossary and additional material in our Google Drive folder https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B2wfmjSRnra0XzZ1azRNODdXekE Also, you may follow us on: Twitter http://twitter.com/moocchile Facebook http://facebook.com/moocchilecom Google Plus http://plus.google.com/+Moocchilecom Resources used in this video: Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Concerto for Flute, Harp, and Orchestra in C major, K. 299/297c, Andantino

'Our Ancestral Lands' is a short animated film providing an introduction to UNDRIP, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. "We must defend our Rights!" Produced by AIPP: http://www.aippnet.org/home/

Speaker: Steven Lawry, Research Director, Forests & Governance, CIFOR. Date: 27 January 2015 Location: CIFOR Headquarters, Bogor, Indonesia. Secure and predictable access to land as a productive resource is key to the livelihoods of millions of farmers around the world. Existing evidence on the effects of land property rights interventions is mixed and to a considerable degree dependent upon the initial land rights conditions. We conduct a systematic review of current quantitative and qualitative evidence on the effects of land property rights interventions. The quantitative results are based on a corpus of 20 studies. Studies on freehold titling provide evidence mostly consistent with conventional economic theories of property rights: land tenure interventions substantially improve productivity and consumption expenditure or income, with long-term investment and increases in perceived tenure security as plausible mechanisms (a credit-collateral channel finds no support). The quantitative evidence base has very little to say about consequences of such policies for social outcomes like displacement, conflict, or gender equality. Thus, while tenure recognition appears to improve land productivity and the material welfare of those who have access to registered land, we do not have a clear sense of the dynamics that follow from such policies in terms of overall access to land. We also have no quantitative evidence on policies that certify communal property rights, one of the forms of property rights enhancement that motivated our interest in this review. The qualitative side of the review analyzed nine studies that catalogued a broad spectrum of both positive and negative experiences with land tenure interventions, confirming that social impacts can be significant, unpredictable and in some instances negative, such as displacement or diminished property rights for women. The study results draw attention particularly to the significant gains in productivity and investment in agriculture in the Latin American and Asian cases due to tenure formalization, and the comparatively weak productivity effects attributable to formalization in Africa. This may be explained by the fact that most farms in sub-Saharan Africa are held under customary tenure arrangements, which generally provide long-term tenure security to qualified members of land-holding families, groups or communities. Hence, tenure insecurity may not have been the constraining factor it was presumed to be prior to formalization. Modest productivity gains in Africa may also be explained by lower levels of wealth and income of African farming families and lower levels of public investment in rural infrastructure. Understanding the relevance and the relative weight of each of these effects merits further research.