The Global Land Tool Network (GLTN), in partnership with the United Nations Human Settlement Programme (UN HABITAT), are pleased to announce that the next meeting of the GLTN Steering Committee will be held face-to-face in Oslo, Norway on 31 January 2020. This has been made possible by kind support from and collaboration with the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (NOFA), the Norwegian Mapping Authority (NMA) and Habitat Norway (HN). The formal Steering Committee Meeting will take place from 9 am to 1 pm, to be followed by a less formal cluster get-together in the afternoon.
We shall be making use of the opportunity to also hold a workshop on “Land and Property Rights for Sustainable Development”, to be held on 30th of January 2020, from 9 am to 4:30 pm. This event will mark the global partnership entry into the “SDG Action Decade towards 2030”. The workshop corresponds with the Network’s 15th anniversary. GLTN was initiated at an international conference in Vettre, Asker, in 2005, organized by NOFA. Since then, GLTN’s 82 diverse partners have collaborated with a common focus of improving land and tenure security of marginalized groups in both urban and rural contexts.
With more than 70% of the global population lacking legally recognized documentation for the land they live on or use for production, land and tenure insecurity presents a significant obstacle to efforts to create acceptable living conditions for all. Forced evictions and “land grabbing” take place on almost on all continents, resulting in the loss of safe and stable environments for children and youth to grow up in. Women’s rights are particularly vulnerable in these situations, and in contexts affected by human conflict and natural disasters. Guaranteed rights to land and property (secure tenure) will improve ordinary people’s opportunities to invest in and improve their housing situation. These are amongst the challenges and opportunities to be presented and deliberated upon during the workshop.
All the organizers of the workshop – NOFA, GLTN, NMA and HN – share the goal of promoting sustainable development with a focus on improving living conditions in the rural-urban continuum. The Sustainable Development Goals, the New Urban Agenda, the Sendai and the Paris Declarations on Disaster and Climate constitute a valuable normative frame for our partnership.
The workshop will highlight practical cases and approaches to addressing emerging challenges in the land ecosystem (conflict, displacement, climate change) to ensure tenure security for all within the framework of the SDGs, from technologically advanced information systems to concrete experiences and practice in the field.