 My name is Yulia Panfill. I'm the Director of the Future of Property Rights Program at New America. New America is a think tank dedicated to renewing America by continuing the quest to realize our nation's highest ideals, honestly confronting the challenges caused by rapid technological and social change, and seizing the opportunities that these changes create. Thank you for joining us in the midst of a truly unusual and scary global situation. Hopefully this excellent program will provide you with some much needed distraction and also some inspiration. Before diving in, I'd like to extend a warm thanks to all of our panelists and also to our partners USAID who led the development of the Land and Resource Governance Research Agenda that you'll be hearing about a little more today and that agenda is now available live at landlinks.org. In particular, I'd like to thank Caleb Stevens who will be delivering our keynote. Caleb was the motivation behind what became a large and unique undertaking to understand the lay of the land, so to speak, when it comes to evidence in the Land and Resource Governance field, and to take a rigorous, systematic and evidence-based approach to understanding where the gaps are and setting USAID's research priorities based on those gaps. Without further ado, I will turn it over for opening remarks to Jeff Haney. Jeff is the Acting Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Bureau for Economic Growth, Education and Environment at USAID, where Jeff oversees the energy and infrastructure, forest and biodiversity, land and urban and global climate change offices. Dr. Haney was the Director for the Office of Energy and Infrastructure, which provides technical leadership and support to the agency several billion dollar annual infrastructure and energy portfolio before his current role. He has 15 years of experience working on energy sector development and prior to joining USAID, Dr. Haney was the Chief, I'm sorry, was an energy specialist on the Economic Policy Staff in the Bureau for African Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. Please welcome Dr. Haney. Well good afternoon everyone and thank you, thank you so much to the team and for everyone for your flexibility in these difficult times. You know I thought with all the schools closed perhaps some of you have the entire family gathered around the computer today and perhaps it's a great way to educate not only ourselves but our future generation about this critical issue. So perhaps we should give our remarks for a wide variety of audiences today. I certainly have my four-year role peeking in to see how things are going on a regular basis. As you really mentioned I had the pleasure to work with the technical offices in Washington that address some of the most pressing development issues of our time including environments, energy and infrastructure and increasingly we are seeing that effective responses to global environmental challenges require cross-sectoral solutions and land and resource governance is a perfect example of an issue that cuts across multiple development objectives. As many of you know USAID is not new to this issue. The agency has been a leader on LRG for over 30 years providing technical and thought leadership across the globe. Through this time we have learned a great deal about the nature of LRG and the foundational role it plays in almost all issues that we address. I'm really excited for today's event to hear some of the stories and highlight some of the most recent findings and understand some of the next steps on what we see to the most pressing issues facing the LRG sector. The problem of insecure land and resource governance is widespread in the developing world with far-reaching social environmental and economic consequences. According to new research 20% of people globally say their property rights are insecure and half of the world's population lacks property documents. This insecurity poses significant challenges for communities around the world. Research shows that when people's land and resource rights are insecure they are less likely to invest in their land, more likely to deforest, and less likely to diversify their incomes. For example women with weak land and resource rights have less of a say over household resources and that results in a worse food security, nutrition, and health outcomes for the whole family. Societies with weak property institutions see weaker economic growth and experience higher levels of conflict. We also know that strong land and resource governance is a key part of the journey to self-reliance. It is linked with strong economic growth. Strengthening land and resource governance can lead to substantial increases in on-farm investment and productivity. It can also reduce deforestation and protect the environment while also improving incomes and contributing to economic growth. Strengthening women's lands rights has a striking potential to positively impact women's empowerment. USAID is a leader in LRG with active programs in 12 countries that positively impact the lives of millions. As part of the White House's led Women's Global Development and Prosperity Initiative or WGDP, USAID is working with women in eight countries to economically empower them through law and policy reform, positive norm change within communities, recognizing their land and resource rights, and engaging with the private sector. Today we are so excited to hold this conversation that reflects on the findings from USAID's land and resource governance research agenda. This research agenda is a major contribution to the field. It synthesizes decades of global evidence to surface the links between land and resource governance and multiple development objectives and also to show where more research is needed to better understand these links. With the help of this research agenda, USAID is taking an evidence-based approach for determining its future land and resource governance priorities, which we will share with you today. In this way, we can design more effective programs for maximum impact. I sincerely appreciate your time and participation in today's events and look forward to a very productive conversation on the importance of land and resource governance in today's world. Thank you so much. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Jeff. And next, I'll turn it over to Caleb Stevens. Caleb is a land and resource governance advisor within the E3 Office of Land and Urban at USAID, where Caleb leads the office's monitoring and evaluation portfolio, which includes six ongoing impact evaluations. In addition, Caleb leads work on the intersection between tenure and democracy and governance, including transparency, compulsory displacement, and resettlement, as well as post-conflict and fragile states. His other focus areas include law and policy reform, tenure and global climate change, private sector engagement, and food security. Caleb will share with us a bit of the content of the research agenda over to you, Caleb. Thank you, Julia. And thank you, everyone, for being here with us today. I hope everyone is well and safe. So my remarks are on the future of land at USAID. And that seemingly grandiose and sweeping title is actually appropriate for a keynote on mere research. And that's because research means data and evidence. And evidence is the aquifer that feeds our programs and our decisions. Rigorous research should be the start of program design and funding decisions. And it's really this fact that motivated the land team at USAID to develop USAID's first research agenda on land and resource governance, which includes the first review of USAID's approach to research and evidence in more than 15 years. And it's actually the first time that the agency has undertaken a systematic assessment of the state of the evidence and offering our considered opinion on that evidence. But I do want to emphasize that this is a living document. It's released today, but this is really, I see it as our first effort. And it's by no means written in stone. We have every intention to revisit our research agenda as evidence gaps are filled, new gaps emerge, and priorities shift. And during my remarks, rather than go through the research agenda section by section with you, which in all honesty might be kind of dry for the participants, I would like to focus on my remarks on a few key points. Some of the most compelling, informative, and interesting findings from the research agenda, which I believe will inform future land and resource governance programs at USAID. However, I encourage you all to review it very carefully, because it really is a compelling document with lots of great information. Now some some acknowledgments. I can't emphasize enough, we really are standing on the shoulders of others. At least, we are synthesizing work that goes back to the 1960s with funding from USAID through the land tenure center with experts like John Bruce and others. And we also lean very heavily on the systematic reviews and meta analyses listed here. And many of the leading land experts globally were kind enough to provide input on earlier drafts. And so when I say we found something, I really mean we synthesized what these experts and their studies have found over the years. And as to structure, I'm going to first go through history with you very briefly, some key findings here, and then I'll get to the state of the evidence and finally focus on research priorities in the coming years. So as to history, what we found is from the agencies founding in 1961 until 2003, there was a great deal of programming on the nexus between land tenure and agricultural outcomes. By no means all of our programs on land tenure and property rights, but it was a significant part of our portfolio. However, in 2003, a retrospective assessment found only one study on impact, only one counterfactual longitudinal study in 40 years. Now, this remarkable finding, it's not unique to land tenure. This was part of a broader decline and evaluations across the agency in the 1990s. Now, fortunately, things have changed for the better, have much improved. And although the land and resource governance sector still trails other development sectors in terms of the number of impact evaluations, from 2000 to 2016, the sector produced 60 rigorous studies. Not all of those are impact evaluations, only a subset of those are impact evaluations. But nonetheless, the situation is improving significantly. The evidence base is being built out. Now, USAID has done its fair share. We have produced 16 evaluations, eight impact and eight performance. And then many others are also helping to fill the evidence gaps to build out the sometimes thin evidence base, including MCC, the World Bank, and many others. Now, as to the state of the evidence, I'd like to first focus your attention on this chart, which is pulled directly from the research agenda. And this derives from a wonderful systematic review done by Daniel Higgins and others, which as I mentioned, we lean heavily on as we synthesize the evidence. And you'll notice a few compelling findings. One is, look out in the evidence bases, generally speaking, regardless of the sectoral impact that we're concerned about. Oftentimes, we're dealing with rigorous studies in the low single digits. Only investment in environmental degradation has rigorous studies above 10, which is really quite remarkable and something that we simply can and must do better at. Now, land market participation is noteworthy. It's the only rigorous study identified that actually found negative impact. But it's only one study. We simply can do better and reduce conflict, only three studies, despite enormous amounts of donor attention on that issue. And finally, food security and nutrition, only three studies, despite the fact that the development access between land tenure and property rights or land and resource governance and agriculture outcomes has been a significant focus of the agency's funding. And it's speculative, but I speculate that that fact, a lot of donor attention on a particular development challenge, very few rigorous studies to support the theories of change that undergird those programs, has had ramifications. It has had implications for our program design, for our ability to have positive impact on people's lives. And we might be living with those repercussions still today. Now, for the first time, we have a better sense of the scale of the property rights challenge we are facing globally. The Property Rights Index, or PRNDEX, has produced the first globally comparable accessible and statistically valid data on land documentation and how secure people feel or not about their property rights. It's because of PRNDEX and related efforts, such as Sustainable Development Goals, specifically Goal 1, Indicator 1.4.2, that has allowed us to no longer rely on what I consider sometimes questionable self-serving statistics. Rather, PRNDEX and its valid method of deploying low-cost surveys globally has found, based on data from 93 countries, about 1.5 billion people feel insecure about their land and property rights. That's a significant number, and it's indicative of a significant global development challenge. But then the question is, how does this challenge relate to our development outcomes? If we address it, what does that mean for reduced deforestation, economic growth, improved food security, women's empowerment, and reduced conflict? And that's where a state of the evidence review of the evidence synthesis comes into play. So first the good news. We found generally a clear link between improved land and resource governance and improved economic growth, increased on-farm investment, reduced deforestation when indigenous peoples and customary communities are at issue, and women's empowerment. And just to give you a sense of the rigorous studies that we relied on in order to inform this generalized finding, in Nicaragua, women with individual or joint title to their land controlled over half of the income from crops. Whereas those women that did not possess title to the land controlled only 14% of their income. A significant disparity. And again, just to give you a sense, titling in Peru of indigenous lands decreased forest clearing by more than 75% and forest disturbance by approximately 66% over a two year period. And that was a counterfactual longitudinal impact study. Now the bad news, which I will unfortunately harp on somewhat and to the focus of my remarks, because that's really what the research agenda is about. It's not intended to excessively focus on, you know, what's good in the sector and what is generally well-established, but it's intended, you know, to really focus on those gaps, those evidence gaps, so that in the future, USAID's research and evaluations portfolio can help fill those gaps. Now the link between land rights and former access to credit is generally very weak globally and almost non-existent in sub-Saharan Africa. In other words, research shows that the idea that people can use their land as collateral for a formal loan from a bank is a myth. It has generally not materialized. This is not true in all circumstances, but it is generally true. And this insight is not new. The adage the more things change, the more they stay the same comes to mind because this insight was first proffered by the land tenure center in the 1980s with USAID funding, in fact, by experts like John Bruce and others. Nevertheless, access to credit should and does remain a key development objective, but we need to rethink access to credit. We need to explore alternative forms of credit access, innovative financial models, and really take a closer look at informal access to credit, which oftentimes is a very important outcome that we might overlook and our excessive attention to the formal credit access channel. And many donors are working on this issue. It's not just USAID, but DFID and many others. And we should continue to do so. Second, it's no surprise the twin aims of economic growth and reduced deforestation, achieving those twin aims is really challenging. And there's a fundamental tension between those two objectives to an extent. And this means we need a full range of policy responses. Secure land tenure property rights or improved land and resource governance is only one of those policies that we should pursue. Part of the larger package. In fact, no surprise to the land tenure experts participating in this webinar. We found that formalizing private land rights can actually increase deforestation if it's not combined with other interventions, other policies and programs, such as land use planning. And that cannot be overemphasized. Land use planning is absolutely critical if you intend to achieve both reduced deforestation and economic growth. And land use planning is an integral part of land and resource governance. We also found that although there is generally speaking a clear link between reducing deforestation and improving the land and resource rights of indigenous peoples and customary communities, that evidence base is highly skewed, which makes it somewhat weaker than we would like. It's heavily skewed towards Latin America. Less so Asia, but Africa is woefully underserved, unfortunately. And given that Africa is such a large focus of our programs on land and resource governance, we simply can and we must do better. We found that while there's plenty of research linking women's land rights from empowerment, there's almost no research somewhat shockingly on the link between improving women's land rights and poverty reduction. And this is a glaring gap and one that USAID intends to help fill in the coming years. In part, it's a function of short exposure periods. That is the time between when a program ends and when the research is done, the evidence and data is gathered. Oftentimes, we're dealing with exposure periods of six years or less, and you're simply not going to see longer-term impacts around poverty reduction in such a short amount of period, such a short period. And this will be a theme that you might hear me repeat throughout my remarks. It's that we need more sustained and patient research and evidence gathering. We simply need longer exposure periods. We need to start thinking of our research, our impact evaluations as 10-year endeavors that are not just baseline and inline, but successive data collection efforts so that we can better understand the causal chain and the relationship to the long-term impact we ultimately seek. Now, as I mentioned, there's good evidence on strengthening land and resource rights and increased on-farm investment. However, the other links in the chain are less clear. This is increased agricultural productivity, increased food security, and higher incomes. We found two meta-analyses, a remarkable brilliant work, which I encourage you all to read, a meta-analysis by Steve Lowry Enol in a systematic review by Daniel Higgins and all of which I mentioned. They came to somewhat opposite conclusions with respect to stronger land rights and productivity and income increases. In part, that's methodological differences as is often the case, but as again, I think a lot has to do with a function of short exposure periods generally. We're often dealing, as I said, with six years or even less of an exposure period, and you're just not going to see these longer-term outcomes with such a short timeframe. While we know that land and resource rights drive significant conflicts around the world, as I mentioned, there's just simply too few studies, too few rigorous studies on that important development outcome. Only three that were picked up by Higgins and all in their systematic review. Given these gaps, what are USAID's future research and evaluation priorities? What do we plan to do in the coming years with our research portfolios that we can have better design programs for maximum impact? As I mentioned, generally speaking, we just need longer time horizons, longer studies, more patient-sustained research evaluation and data gathering. Ten years minimum, I would suspect in many cases, not always, but in many cases, so that we can better understand the links to reduced poverty, food security, productivity, et cetera. The substantive sectoral list that I have before you here on the slide is simply a sample. There's a long list in the research agenda itself, and I encourage you all to take a very close look at that document. But just to give you a sense of what we plan to focus on, first, statutory recognition of customary tenure. Now, as many of you know, this is a hybrid policy response, which is fairly recent in sub-Saharan Africa, especially given the prevalence of customary tenure in that region, where African governments actually now, thanks to USAID's efforts and others, are in some cases adopting policies and laws and implementing those policies and laws in order to formally recognize customary tenure. This is a remarkable improvement and very different from the discourse in the post-colonial era in which many African governments saw customary tenure as backward or not modern, indeed an impediment to development. The situation has changed, but now we're in a situation where the evidence base is also quite thin on the impacts that these programs and policies will have. So we need more impact evaluation, impact evaluation is more data, more evidence on this important policy. We also need more research on intra-household bargaining power and decision making for women's property rights. Now, in theory, and as some evidence suggests, you improve women's property rights, you increase their bargaining power within the household. They tend to make better decisions as to the household's finances and income, which should, in theory, lead to reduced poverty. But as I mentioned, the evidence on that link is quite thin. It doesn't mean it's not there, it just means we haven't done a good enough job of gathering that research, that evidence, that data. Now, for women's empowerment, we also need to look beyond merely studies that examine titled or untitled or jointly titled, although that is a very important intervention, and that work is really critically important. But improving women's land rights and women's empowerment is a very nuanced challenge, and that requires a nuanced approach. Now, studies, for example, can look at different categories of women, rather than treating women as a modernist groups. We can also look at how women are empowered not only within their household, but within their community. An important, really nascent line of inquiry, especially when you're dealing with customary tenure, customary land and resource governance. There's also changing social norms on women's property rights, a woefully under-researched area, at least in a rigorous way. And that's important because you can have wonderful interventions in terms of joint titling, et cetera, but these programs often come up against deeply entrenched norms and biases with respect to women's land and property rights. How do we overcome those norms in any kind of meaningful, sustained way? Then there's cost effectiveness of climate change mitigation. So effectiveness of many policies and programs to mitigate climate change are well studied, including land and resource governance, at least when it comes to indigenous peoples and customary communities. But what about the effect in the side of the equation? Excuse me, the cost side of the equation. How much do those programs cost in terms of donor support, subsidies, and government support? We just need more evidence, more data on those costs, a more honest accounting of what it would take in terms of time and resources in order to mitigate climate change, which, believe me, I'm sure is well worth it in order to avoid the negative externalities of greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, et cetera. But we just need a clear understanding of cost and effectiveness. And then finally, sustainable intensification. Now, sustainable intensification promises to help avoid but not eliminate that trade-off that I mentioned between economic growth and reduced deforestation. It does so by allowing farmers to produce more on their existing plot of land rather than expanding onto other areas deforestation or converting landscapes to agricultural use. But in practice, who anyone will tell you that's an expert in this, this can be quite difficult because you've come up against enormous pressures, enormous incentives driven by poverty and economic opportunity. We just simply need a better understanding of when, where, how, and why sustainable intensification works. And I, you know, I could go on. The research agenda, as I mentioned, covers a litany of really valuable priorities based on our review of the evidence. And this includes emerging technologies, geospatial analysis, urbanization, climate change and migration, among many others. So I encourage you all to take a look at the document quite carefully. And in conclusion, I'd like to emphasize again that this really was a community of experts that helped contribute to this work. We really stood on the shoulders of a billion experts on land and resource governance who have been working on this very difficult challenge for more than 50 years. And I believe it will take a community to actually address some of the more glaring research and evidence gaps that we identified. And so I would like, you know, to call on other donors to collaborate with USAID to help fill some of these research gaps, these evidence gaps. And we can do that by data sharing, which, which is really important as more data becomes available. It's important that the Horde data but also make that data available to other researchers, other donors, governments, etc. But also technical engagement and even cost sharing in some cases, if our interests are aligned. It's in this way that we can have a concerted effort to ensure that for the next systematic review, we have ample studies to inform better design programs for maximum impact. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much, Caleb, for that excellent presentation. Before we hand it over to our panelists, I just wanted to go over a couple of quick housekeeping items. First, I believe I may have misspoken in my introductory remarks about the location of USAID's research agenda. It's located at landlinks.org and I've actually pasted the exact URL into the chat box to the left or to the right of your screens so you can access the research agenda there. Also, we will be taking about 20 minutes of Q&A after the panel so if you have any questions for Caleb or for the panelists, please just type them into the Q&A box on the bottom of your screen and we'll be collecting those questions and asking them. We're certainly not going to get through all of the questions. I can already see dozens and dozens of questions flooding in but please rest assured that these questions are being recorded and we'll have them and we'll find a way to come back to you either individually or in some other forum to make sure that your questions are answered. Without further ado, I will turn it over to our panel to discuss the land and resource governance as it's situated within the broader world of international development and security. We are really fortunate to have an A-list panel of experts from subjects, everything from indigenous rights to food security to diplomacy and development. I'll introduce our panel and we'll have about 45 minutes of panelist discussion. Our first panelist, I am thrilled to introduce Ann Marie Slaughter, the CEO of New America. From 2009 to 2011, prior to joining New America, Ann Marie served as director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department, the first woman to hold that position. Upon leaving the State Department, she received the Secretary's Distinguished Service Award for her work, leading the Quadronial Diplomacy and Development Review, as well as Meritorious Service Awards from USAID and the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe. Prior to her government service, Dr. Slaughter was the Dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 2002 to 2009, and the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International Foreign and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School from 1994 to 2002. Welcome, Dr. Slaughter. Next, I am thrilled to introduce Rob Bertram. Rob is the Chief Scientist at USAID's Bureau for Food Security, where he serves as a key advisor on a range of technical and program issues to advance global food security and nutrition. In this role, Rob leads USAID's evidence-based efforts to advance research technology and implementation in support of the U.S. government's global hunger and food security initiative, Feed the Future. Rob previously served as director of the Office of Agricultural Research and Policy in the Bureau for Food Security. His academic background in plant breeding and genetics includes degrees from the University of California Davis, the University of Minnesota, and University of Maryland. Welcome, Dr. Bertram. Next, it is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Mark Plotkin. He is the CEO and founder and president of Amazon Conservation Team. Dr. Plotkin is an ethnobotanist who has been focused on conservation and sustainable development in South America for over 30 years. Mark's most recent book titled The Amazon, What Everyone Needs to Know was published by Oxford University Press just last week. Among his many writings, Mark might be best known for his popular work titled The Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice. Welcome, Dr. Plotkin. I'm last but not least, I am thrilled to introduce Zoe Tabary. Zoe is an editor at the Thompson Reuters Foundation, where she runs a global team of journalists and freelancers reporting on land and property rights issues, including access to land, indigenous and forest rights, housing and homelessness. She's reported and conducted journalist trainings from Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal and Uganda, among other countries. A native French speaker, Zoe worked as an editor at Amnesty International and the Economist Group before joining Thompson Reuters Foundation. Welcome, everybody. And Zoe, we will start with you. We'll kick things off with a question to you. You run a global news platform focused on land and property rights. Can you provide us a macro view of where you're seeing the most acute land and resource rights related challenges coming up? In what context is this subject coming up in the news? Sure. Thanks so much, Julia, for the intro. Hello to the other panelists and to everyone online. Thank you so much for joining, and I hope you're all keeping safe at home. I can go on for hours about this topic, but I'll try to summarize with just a few trends we've seen in our reporting in the past few years. Certainly a lot more of the kind of reporting we're doing is focusing on conflicts over land and natural resources. It's kind of a mid-growing competition over resources worldwide, but also increases kind of hostility against certain groups of people, be it Indigenous people or farming communities. So much of that kind of tends to focus around illegal logging, environmental damage dropped by encroaching industries. We're also seeing a lot more in our reporting kind of trends of increased displacement, kind of be it internal or cross borders caused by disasters like extreme weather events, be it hurricanes like Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico a couple years ago, or worsening drought and wildfires in Australia on the US West Coast. And the link between those and kind of land but also homes is that they will first of all hit harvests, hit people's livelihoods, hit their homes. And also increasingly a thing we're seeing is that they do not discriminate in terms of geographical area or kind of focus. I think in many people's minds kind of land or resource issues tend to be focused in the developing world, but certainly with climate change and extreme weather events, we're seeing that kind of effect developed economies more and more as well. And then finally, a lot more of kind of what we're reporting. I think this one is as interesting if not more than the others are kind of more insidious forms of land rights challenges. One that we've reported on, for example, is the millions of Indigenous people in just northeastern state of Assam who could be basically denied land because of a new simple new definition of the term Indigenous. So Assam has a kind of long simmering movement against immigrants and it's land policy from I believe next last year, which is basically aimed at overhauling a kind of three decade old land law and seeks to allocate land to landless Indigenous people, but does not specify who is Indigenous. And to be included on the citizenship register, people have to give proof of residence going back decades, which they may not necessarily have. And then Caleb Burrier was talking about the kind of printx research, another kind of land rights related challenge, which I think is fascinating, is security of tenure and an absence of tidal deeds, without which of course that collateral you can be locked out of the chance to start a business, to open a bank account or even to claim for insurance after a disaster. What's particularly interesting with that is I think it disproportionately affects as well as climate change certain parts of the population, so women for example. And even looking at the printx research, which we also reported on kind of last year, it was really interesting to me for example to see that Britain where I live in London, which I think for the first time was kind of included as part of the index, Britain had as many as one in fact just over more than one in 10 people who feared losing their home, kind of mainly due to a lack of money or other resources, which some might attribute to uncertainty at the time surrounding Brexit or others. So very much seeing that this is not just a kind of developing country issue, but that's probably the main ones we're seeing at the moment. Wonderful, thank you so much for that overview Zoe. And now I'll turn it over to the other three panelists to ask a broad opening question. Could you tell us a bit about how you see land and resource governance positioned within your respective area of focus? So what do you see as the important connections to your respective specialties? And why don't we start with Mark and then move to Anne-Marie and finally to Rob. Rob, you play all very much in favor of better land tenure issues, resource better governance, but I think it was Caleb who made the point that we need to also think about land use planning because what we're seeing now in the Amazon where I work is essentially the equivalent of the range horse to sweat this country in the 19th century. Even when you turn over title of the land to people, whether they're peasants or indigenous peoples, this can enhance and increase violence rather than reduce it. The other flip side of the, you know, the unforeseen aspect of this is that as indigenous peoples gain title to their lands, they're also confronting modernity in a way that many of them haven't before, which pushes them into the world economy, which is a driving force in the other headlines the day, which is coronavirus. Now we know that SARS, Ebola, Virgo and Corona had their origin in wildlife. We know that this has jumped to our species life marketing. We know that many more tropical diseases are going to prevalent around the world in the face of climate change. So I just want to circle back to again a comment that I think Caleb made, which is that how do we enhance or demand or request or encourage these when we're helping new people attain rights to their rightfully deserved resources? So I would suggest that as part of it, we suggest and hence encourage at AID, ACT and everywhere else that people fight climate change by protecting the forest on their land or by reforesting that we insist that people stay out of the wildlife trade or stay away from wildlife marketing and trafficking and this benefits everybody. So again, we all agree here on what's needed, but we also have to realize the potential down to what have these people with land and resources. So I'll turn it over to another panel from there. Thank you, Rob. Anne-Marie, please. So let me also thank everyone for putting this together, specifically Yulia and Jeff and then our team at New America who have mastered the art of webinars in a very, very short, short period of time. So I just wanted to start with that. This is a subject that I think is hugely important as a foreign policy slash national security person, which is how I would have defined myself or traditionally have defined myself. And maybe the best way to start is national security, international relations, global security, diplomacy, all of that has at its heart the stopping of conflict. And we traditionally have thought about, you know, peace and security. We thought about peace and security between nations, but really since the end of the Cold War, we have seen a growing amount of conflict within nations that's always often been connected to conflict between nations. There's nothing new, but civil wars conflicts that are smaller than civil wars are now also problems for the world as a whole, even when they do not turn into international conflict. And land is really so often at the core of those conflicts. When we think about climate change, I always say to people, look, it's the oldest conflict known to humankind that someone's land is no good for whatever reason, and they have to move. And never in the history of mankind have people in neighboring land or said, you know, come on down, you know, come, we'll move over or very rarely. Now, obviously, many indigenous cultures have had more collective ownership. They've had collective stewardship. And when I was listening to Mark, I was and indeed Caleb, you know, we may have to rediscover some of these more collective modes of ownership. Sorry. Okay, I'll continue. So, but my overall point is, I do not think of this as a development issue or an environmental issue. And then think about the core of foreign policy and diplomacy and security in some other box, I see them as deeply interrelated. And again, some of that's very obvious to see when you think about just climate change impact on the planet as a whole. But I think of it much more specifically than that, that if we want healthy communities, those communities around the world have to have security in their ability to earn a living from their land. And this research agenda is extraordinarily important to find out what works, what doesn't work, what has unintended consequences. But also, and maybe this is the place I will stop, how does what is land security mean for everyone in the community? So not just traditional male property holders, but entire families, what does it mean for women for the sense of being able to have control over the disposition of land among your families? And I'll just say, as a lawyer and as somebody who focuses on gender equality, land tenure systems have been essential to how we set up societies. Primogeniture determined the structure of the British aristocracy, only one person could inherit the land and all the other sons went elsewhere and the daughters of course never had any say in it to begin with. But similarly, the Married Women's Property Act, first in Britain and the United States, had a huge impact on the ability of fully half the population to participate in the economy. So these are critical issues, they're intertwined with so many others, but I think of them as a USAID issue, but also a State Department issue and frankly, ultimately a Defense Department issue, but we hope it doesn't come to that. Thanks so much, Anne-Marie. Rob, over to you. Thank you, Yulia. Hello everyone. Well, I might start by just saying a bit about why agriculture matters to us in USAID and particularly in the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security. We just had a report come out last year from the World Bank called Harvesting Prosperity that confirms that agricultural growth is still four times as effective in the poorest countries in reducing extreme poverty and that's both in rural and urban areas and it turns out actually that hunger, extreme poverty and child stunting are concentrated in rural areas, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. So at the heart of our theory of change, if you will, is the idea of trying to increase upside productivity opportunities for small holder farmers and for people across the value chains and market systems that link to them, as well as on the other hand, reduced risk. And if you raise one thing and lower the other, we're going to drive investments. So that's at the heart of this. So tenure risk is a real risk. I mean, we think a lot about weather and locusts right now and other issues, but secure tenure is another factor that can help reduce risk and incentivize investment, which is at the end of the day what we're looking for. I want to just pick up on Caleb's point on sustainable intensification and comment that in a lot of our work, what we're seeing is that we want to see and farmers themselves want to diversify. You're not going to get out of poverty even if you do everything right by raising one crop of maize a year on a two-hectare pot. But if you get your maize yield up to the point where you can then diversify some into horticulture or poultry or other fodder or other higher value and often more nutritious commodities and activities, we can see people gradually step up from that extreme poverty, which is the driver at the end of the day of things like child stunting. So these changes that I'm talking about, things like fruits and vegetables and animals and such, they're much more information intensive. And of course, new tools come into play and we think a lot about new tools like digital weather forecasts, information about emerging pests and diseases or market prices. But we also know the digital tools are emerging in the area of land tenure and governance and so forth. So again, the information piece is critical there. And of course, what happens to that information in the larger legal and legal system is very important as well. But at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is capitalize under-capitalized systems. These are systems where people there often is in grid, they're often not roads, storage, all these things that are missing, including, for example, things like irrigation and other aspects of capital, land preparation and so forth. And I can say more about that later. Finally, I want to pick up on a couple other points that have been mentioned. Gender is a critical issue for us in many areas where we work. There's been feminization of agriculture. And generally speaking, we find much better outcome of both economically and certainly nutritionally when women are empowered in the ways that have been discussed in terms of decision making at all levels, including within the household. We do see challenges emerging in areas of rapid transformation. Rapid transformation can be a really good thing in terms of moving a region forward, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. But in those areas, we often see then a clash of traditional property rights with other property rights regiments. And that can be very challenging. And unfortunately, it can also potentially lead to elite capture in terms of the processes that are involved in trying to reconcile this kind of clash of systems, if you will. The last point I'd make is that in our work on resilience now, we are to some degree increasing our attention to some of these more remote areas. They're generally more extensively governed. So things around, extensively managed, excuse me. So things around governance, commons, user rights, all of these matter a great deal in those settings. They matter in other settings as well. But we certainly see them, I think, emerging significantly in those new efforts related to resilience in areas of recurrent crisis. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Rob. Mark, we're going to turn it back to you. You've just released a book called The Amazon, What Everyone Needs to Know. So what does everyone need to know about land and resource rights in the Amazon? And in particular, as you answer, if you could touch a little bit about the devastating Amazon forest fires that we saw over the summer and the fall, do you see land and resource governance as playing into that tragedy? And if so, how? Found over 74,000 fires in Brazil, primarily in the Amazon. Only because it also spilled over its neighboring Bolivia. It not only destroyed rainforest, it's spread into the dry forest. So I think, frankly, as bad as the story was, it's worse than the story you heard. And of course, I think it gets foolish to say things like, well, it can be one or lost in the Amazon, but I do think it's valid to say it can be lost. So given that forest destruction, which is aided and abetted by some local governments and who they are, I think we're facing a critical situation. Tom Lovejoy, who's the man of you, talks about a tipping point where the Amazon can no longer meet itself, which is a corn cycle. So there are reasons for alarm. And certainly, land tenure issues are at the heart of this. But again, it's too simplistic to say if we just got that straight, the rest of these problems would solve themselves. Because as we know in the history of conservation, here at the Amazon conservation team and elsewhere, just making a national park on a map in Bogotar, Quito is not enough, you need to have enforcement on the ground. So solving these tenure issues is an important step, maybe a first step, certainly an early step, but it can't be to be all an end all again. This goes back to what Caleb said about enforcement and management. And one of the things that we've done here at ACT is created an indigenous parkward force so that the people are earning a living by monitoring and protecting their lands. There are those who said, well, these lands are so remote in Amazonia, it's better not to just start mapping them. It's better not to just call attention to them. But as we all know, all lands everywhere are coveted by somebody. I wish that in Columbia last week, visiting the Kobi peoples with whom we've had a number of successful projects with including getting legal titles for their lands and some land grabbers showed up and were threatening people, challenging the title that the indigenous had. So again, I want to emphasize yet again that getting the title has to be part of the equation, part of the solution, but not all of it. And to answer the first part of your question, Julia, and then turn it over to the other panelists, is all of these issues are interlinked. Trafficking, wildlife trafficking, sex trafficking, wildlife trade, depora station, all of this has to do with exploitation by the richest and most powerful people of everybody below them. And so we need a multifaceted approach here because the story is the same in many other places and needs to be addressed in a multifaceted way. And I'll conclude with I think the best example. We all remember the 12 labors of Hercules and one of those labors speaks to me in terms of the coronavirus in terms of land tenure issues and that is this. When Hercules had to kill the Hydra, he grabbed the Hydra and cut its head off and two heads sprung up. So he realized the old approach wasn't going to work and eventually he burned all the heads as he cut them off. And that's the kind of approach we need to deal with an epidemic, a pandemic as we're now facing. It's a similar approach we need to use for drug resistant bacteria. It's a similar approach we need to use with these land tenure and human rights issues because we don't need a magic bullet. We need a shotgun blast that will address all these interconnected issues if we want to solve the issues of poverty, deforestation, climate change, pandemic, because they all tie into each other. Thanks so much, Mark. Ann Marie, I'm going to turn it back to you in your remarks in the earlier question you had touched on the Married Women's Property Act. And during his presentation, we heard Caleb devote a lot of time to speaking about the importance of land rights for women's empowerment and their ability to have a say in important household decisions and allocation of resources. You've been a champion of women's empowerment and have written extensively about the barriers that women face both in the U.S. and globally. How do you see property rights fitting into the picture? Sorry, everybody, and you're probably dizzy from me walking around trying to plug back in and get the camera at the right angle, but I'm back. I think just to echo what Mark said and really what Caleb said, there's no one path here. In other words, in the sense of women in different systems, to have different cultural norms, and obviously in some systems, women still are property, so you'd be focusing more on making sure that they're not the property of their families before you move on to property rights. But it's incredibly important for women who then marry, and this was true in the United States and in Britain. In the first place, if a woman doesn't, can you all hear me? Yulia, I'm looking at you. Yes, we can hear you. Okay, sorry. We can hear you. No, somebody needs to do something. All right. But women won't want to marry in the first place, and then if they're widowed, won't want to marry again, because their property then, of course, is not their own. But the flip side of that is when their property is their own, they become more attractive both in terms of marrying, but also in terms of investing in. And so in fact, the simple way to think about it is just that you're denying half the population, particularly the active population and the ability to participate in the economy. But I think equally important, where if you look at where women are involved on environmental issues, on rights issues, it's not that they are less greedy than men. I don't believe that. I do believe that they are very focused on their families. And so in that sense, when they have property rights and they're able then to harvest the results, they're also thinking about, you know, how does this work for my entire family and for my community? So to the extent we're also thinking about not just land rights, but land governance, getting women involved is very important. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Anne-Marie. Our next question is to Rob. Rob, USAID works with millions of smallholder farmers helping them become more efficient and prosperous and sustainable. And one of the biggest challenges that these farmers face is the ability to access finance, which they can in turn use to access technology and other critical inputs to grow their business. Can you talk about any trends that you're seeing in farmers' ability to access finance and how land tenure factors into the equation? So you may accuse Julia of dodging this a little bit because I'm going to tell you that we are very interested in finance and we are working on it and I'll say a bit more later. What is very exciting right now, I think, is the advent of service provision, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. It's been absolutely transformative in South Asia and Indo-Gatantanic plains. This is the idea that you can link, you can spread the risk of capital and still get it to people in smallholder friendly ways. And that can be land preparation, it can be irrigation, it can be all kinds of services harvesting, also employment generating, but it also offers the opportunity for aggregating input and output markets. So that's again very important from the standpoint of trying to drive investment, including from the private sector, to prioritize bringing their services and their market opportunities to the smaller poorer communities that we're focused on in our struggle to end under and under nutrition child stunting. So then in terms of, you know, more formal credit, yeah, we know that there's a huge gap. There have been studies done, some of them quite recent, that estimate in sub-Saharan Africa alone about a hundred billion dollar financing gap. So it's challenging to know exactly how to work on that, but we have the advent of a new development finance corporation, which is looking perhaps at some part of that spectrum, perhaps not the smallest part. But we've also got some cautionary things to think about. We know from the Cambodian experience that people's ability to link their land as collateral on loans has actually been a very mixed experience, and that many people, there has been predatory lending, and that many people in Cambodia, about 10 to 15 percent of the land actually has been lost due to failure to repay on loans. So, you know, I think there's probably others on the panel, and especially many in the audience who could be much more enlightening on this, and as we get to the discussion section, I hope those people come in. But we certainly recognize the opportunities. Again, these tools I mentioned earlier in terms of being able to measure things, but also the increasing commercialization of smallholders makes what they do more and more attractive as an opportunity for investment, including by those off on, across the goods and services that make up the whole food system. But I would say that our biggest efforts still at this point are in trying to reduce that risk in ways that kind of pushes the whole system, and especially in an inclusive way towards greater integration with all markets, including financial markets. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Rob. My next question is to Zoe. Zoe, you've written a lot about the emergence of new technologies like drones, and blockchain, and mobile mapping, and so forth, and their ability to help communities map and document and defend their rights. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're seeing and really about what is hype and what is real? Sure. Thanks, Julia. I guess the very short summary before I elaborate would be to say that it's in what we've seen at least a hugely powerful tool, but not a cure-all, so not effective in isolation. Some of the uses of technology we've reported on have been from Kenya to the Philippines, basically not just governments, but also practitioners, civil society, using anything from satellite imagery, drones, GPS navigation systems, but also AI, to map things like customary land, fixing boundaries, but also modernizing land records with blockchain, for example, to kind of both verify land ownership but also issue titles. And I think that that's a huge opportunity in that we've heard or kind of you'll see different stats being bandied around, but essentially huge swaths of land, especially in developing nations, are undocumented, which of course exposes huge parts of the world's population to both conflict and evictions. But I think a lot of the kind of people we're speaking to, and these include again kind of land rights practitioners as well as privacy experts, increasingly what they're telling us is that these technologies, while they can be hugely useful in kind of aiding development and granting titles, they can also be used to further marginalize vulnerable people or can almost be kind of weaponized against them. So we're writing more and more about, for example, the digital divide that still exists, which in many countries, for example, may exclude older people or women who may not have access to smartphones or may not be comfortable with kind of using those tools. And also I think what's really interesting is that, and this kind of extends beyond just the land community, is that a lot of these technologies that are used in collecting land data also tend to be the work of young, white and male developers. So that bias that exists in technology is very much there and applies to the use we make of it to solve land rights issues. So I think it's something that needs to be addressed. But a lot of what these people we're speaking to are saying is that the way around that is to essentially making communities aware of the risks and to involve them in the process. So technology, I think, especially when it comes to land rights and many people's minds might be this kind of fancy and really snazzy tool, but it actually does not need to be complex at all. So it can be really simple technologies like smartphones. And I know the Kadastra Foundation, for example, did great work on this and kind of getting communities themselves to register land and who owns what. And it doesn't even have to be technology based. So one story actually, which isn't out yet, but that we want to report from in Zanzibar is on how these kind of groups of volunteers are being trained to go around communities using tablets and also in some cases just kind of notebooks to essentially gather all testimonies from neighbors as some sort of evidence to then lobby authorities and prove that a specific person may have been living for decades where they say they've been living if they don't have a title deed. So in some cases it can be something as simple as just an interview, you know, a kind of signature or even a photo. I don't remember an event. In fact, I think that you guys at New America put on a few months ago, which our reporter Kerry went to, which was on kind of using alternative data or evidence like photos, for example, as evidence being used to claim for compensation for insurance after disaster strikes, for example. So it can be really simple tool, something as simple as interviews or photos. So yeah, to summarize, I'd say a potent tool, but definitely not a silver bullet. Wonderful. Thank you, Zoe. So I'm going to turn it back over to the entire panel and ask you to all weigh in on one last question before we open it up to Q&A. We have a lot of questions that I want to make sure that we address those. So you've all worked across multiple different topics within international development and security at a very high level. And you see how the pieces fit together. You know, and Mark, you alluded to this earlier, as did Ann Marie. I think everybody actually on the panel alluded to this fact that whether it's land tenure or education or agriculture, you can't fix larger security and development challenges by fixing only one area of focus. So what is your advice for this audience, for how to think about the bigger picture and think about how the pieces fit together and how to make these different pieces fit together in order to make broader progress? Why don't we start with Rob, then move to Ann Marie, Mark and Zoe. That's the risk of nodding your head while you're listening to the moderator. You get called on at first. Thanks, Julia. Well, I want to start by an adage that I think is almost always useful, but especially in the things we're talking about today. And that is to think globally and act locally. And I mean by that, that agriculture, we know it's one of the big challenges around, for example, the work that my colleague on the panel, Mark, is involved in. It is a real driver of deforestation, loss of biodiversity, degradation of watersheds. Yes, but on the other hand, agriculture also then has to be part of the solution. And I think spatially, thinking spatially here is very relevant. Now, in most of our work, we've tried to focus on the fairly resilient, well already cultivated areas, rather than those that border fragile zones, forests, kill sites, etc. We've really focused on the major agroecological zones where people are concentrated. And as I said earlier, also we're hungry and extreme poverty and child stunting are concentrated. So I think what you're talking to us about is using a systems approach. And it won't look the same everywhere. So for example, if we're working in an area that where there's greater risk to the environment, then absolutely, I think we have to think about much more going on in terms of governance, land use, policy, a range of tools, because left to their own devices for all kinds of reasons, people may make decisions that when added up globally are problematic. However, in the areas where we can sustainably intensify agriculture, that will help in the long term, at least reduce some of the pressure, certainly not all of them, but some of the pressure on the more fragile environments. One other thing I wanted to add is that the this whole idea of climate change, I think tenure is so critical for both sustainable intensification and climate adaptation because people need a longer horizon. People aren't going to plant trees if they don't have secure tenure rights on the land. They're not going to make other kinds of improvements. And what we see actually is that almost everything that farmers can do to adapt their agricultural systems to climate change also involves mitigation, biomass, carbon, soil carbon, amount of biomass being produced on farm trees or legumes or other other kinds of activities. And finally, one last point on that is that unfortunately, what we find is that most people won't make changes unless there's a productivity payoff. Now productivity just doesn't mean more food. It can also mean, you know, greater returns to land, labor and capital. So it could be time saving, it could be labor saving, it could be about resource use efficiency, such that they use less fertilizer to get an even greater outcome if the soil is more carbon and more diversification in the system. So I think these two things, at the end of the day, the global food security challenge and nutrition challenge and the environmental challenges, certainly land tenure is one of the key things that connects those two things, but they are inextricably bound everywhere. There are hot spots, absolutely, and we do need different approaches depending on context. Thank you very much, Rob. I second everything Rob just said. I think from my point of view, I want to emphasize something Caleb said at the end of his presentation about the research that hasn't been done and he said if their fund funders want to join us in matching donations or pulling together efforts, that's important. And from where I sit, as you know, the head of New America, I spend a tremendous amount of time fundraising, but also looking around over the landscape of resources and of course there's never enough, whether you're looking at government or you're looking at foundations or corporate support, but we would get so much more if we were simply to collaborate better in terms of a common research agenda and a common awareness of what has been done, what hasn't been done, how you pull these threads together and these are incredibly complicated problems and it's hard to collaborate. It's really hard. You need people who specialize in managing the collaboration. It doesn't go of its own. It's not as simple as being connected or having a website. You know, everybody says, oh, we'll create the database and that'll do it. No, that won't do it, but I'm not sure we can afford not to because these are issues that intersect so many things. In fact, I'm just thinking about USAID and the many different offices that you're part of, whether it's the science office or where land resources, LRG is a subset of another part of the agency and then of course state has its parts and even in the US government there are many different parts, but I do think as we are thinking about land as the physical and the legal core of a lot of naughty problems, or at least it's really central to a lot of naughty problems, then we need to be thinking about how to have a more integrated research agenda and funding for it. That doesn't mean just one big project. That's never going to happen. It means multiple projects, but aligned. I like to use the image of a flotilla, lots of boats sailing in the same direction and preferably sharing information. So I was struck when Caleb said, you know, look, we've done these assessments. We see all the research that still needs to be done. It is a central issue. So let's think about how we can actually pull more funding together and proceed in a aligned way, even if we have so many different participants in the project. Thank you, Anne-Marie. Over to you, Mark. One is when you're engaged in the titling process, to think about supporting issues that can undergird that and augment that and magnify the impact. One example is mapping. For example, we here at the Amazon conservation team have worked with about 55 tribes to teach them how to map their lands. In some cases, this helped them get titles. In some cases, it helped them fortify the case for titles which are still in the offing but haven't happened yet. The other thing is to refer to something I think Anne-Marie brought up was that of unintended consequences. When I mentioned how modernity is pressing in on these people, you can't be just a little bit into the industrialized world. It's kind of like being a little bit pregnant. And a concrete example of that is when people have cell phones, it's an addiction. You've got to feed that monster. You need money for that cell card. You need money to be able to charge it. One easy way to deal with this is solar charges, which is you're surprisingly rare in many parts of the Amazon given the prevalence of cell phones which are popped up everywhere. Another is how do you meet the financial needs to keep these phones going? And that again is an unintended consequence of people who said, well, we'll just bring technology to these people, these present people, these indigenous people, and everything will be better. Well, no, this has a real downside. So there's no easy solution here, but it goes back to the law of unintended consequences, which all of us do at AID or in the NGO community run into all the time. So we just need to keep our eyes and ears and hearts and while it's open to be able to deal with these things. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Mark and Zoe finally over to you. Sure. So I mean, as a journalist, I suppose I'm in, I'm not running a position to kind of advocate for X or Y solution on land rights, but in a personal capacity, I certainly echo the panel's views that, you know, the response has to be a holistic one. So even in the reporting I do myself, but also commissioned from our team, all of the issues that we write about as a panel's right, you said are interlinked. So climate change triggers extreme weather events, which might destroy homes and or kind of harvests and which might disproportionately affect women. That's another woman's right story and make them vulnerable to exploitation, like trafficking. That's a trafficking and modern slavery story. So looking at those kind of issues in a holistic manner and as opposed to kind of in not just in journalism, I think we're guilty of this, but also the development sector rather than in silos. And also at the foundation, although we largely and as we started kind of report on human rights abuses, we're increasingly seeing appetite for what we kind of call solution journalism. So celebrating best practices where they occur. But also I think taking stock of failures. So a lot of the stories that I find fascinating to tell are, you know, stories of either kind of policies or initiatives on the ground that haven't necessarily backfired, but haven't done as as well as expected and kind of why. And one I might finish with this one example of this, and which in a way might somewhat answer your question on solutions Julia, is that a lot of the land rights solutions we write about now are kind of about ensuring that these initiatives include poorer communities and bring them along as opposed to just a kind of top down approach. I was speaking the other day to Michael Berkowitz, who's the founding principle of resilient cities catalyst, the nonprofit consultancy. And he was talking about a concept which you've probably most of you heard of it and see more and more in the news of climate gentrification. So more insidious kind of hidden types of inequality where which have their kind of roots and longstanding social differences. So he was talking for example about New Orleans where you know historically rich neighborhoods were the ones that never flooded because they were built on higher ground and that kind of went back hundreds of years. And so I think that phenomenon where it's interesting is that it shows how you know pressures like rising sea levels, warming temperatures can increase the value of green spaces in cities, which then become less affordable to the poorest and inequality that's also been exacerbated by by green policies which only target certain areas. And one of the solutions he mentioned that was this idea is for example in Paris, Mary Dalgo has been revamping the Clichy-Batignolle area, former industrial kind of wasteland, which has morphed into the capital's first eco neighborhood. So where it's been built as a model of a sustainable development for the rest of the city. But that kind of sustainable effort also has a social aim, so to address the city's affordable housing crisis and ensuring that that green benefits reach the poor as well as the rich. So that would probably be my summary of kind of holistic solutions and also ensuring that they bring everyone along. Wonderful, thank you very much Zoe. Okay we're going to turn it over to Q&A. We do have a hard stop for the Q&A after 20 minutes. So I would ask the panelists to please let's make this a lightning round, keep your answer to a minute or so so that we can get through as many questions as possible. And to participants, if you have questions for the panelists, please use the chat function or the Q&A to send them our way and they will be asked. Okay, first question is to Caleb. Caleb, we know that customary recognition or I'm sorry statutory recognition of customary land does not always create tenure security for indigenous peoples and other communities. Is USAID conducting any research on approaches that could create tenure security, whether it's through formalization, land use plans, or any other means? Yes, yeah, great question. You know, statutory recognition in and of itself will not always produce improvements in tenure security. That's definitely true, although evidence suggests it can get you a long way there. And we have a few ongoing impact evaluations where we saw, at least in some cases, a market improvement and perceptions of tenure security as a result of the similar intervention or program to statutory recognition of customary tenure. We have one in Liberia that's looking at implementation of that country's new Land Rights Act, which is ongoing. We plan to collect data next year, I believe, or maybe the year after depending. We also have one in Tanzania, which is quite interesting. That's randomized control trial, which is also which is looking at household level effects because it's mapping and documenting lands held by households within a collective community, a customary community. And those are the two really prominent ones that come to mind. And I may be forgetting others, but those are the big ones that we hope to help fill the evidence gap. Wonderful. Thanks so much, Caleb. Next question is for Zoe. Zoe, what are the under-reported land tenure and property rights stories in the international media? And how do you feel that hard-hitting journalism can serve to reveal research gaps for institutions like USAID? Thanks, Julianne. Excellent question to whoever asked. I'll start maybe with the power of journalism, actually. I think where it can be hugely helpful is that, and you know, if we have some any journalists listening, I would say that your stories can be hugely helpful and kind of basically equipping people, be they the communities you write about, they can be policymakers or kind of activists to demand the change that is needed on the ground. So a lot of the stories we've done, for example, it can go from really anecdotal impact like, I don't know, someone fundraising for someone may have just lost their home as a result of your story, or it could also be something more kind of higher level like your story being used as evidence in a court case or something of the sort. Again, if we have journalists listening, one thing I would definitely advise you to do, and not just in terms of kind of getting the funding or the tools to do those stories, but also just in increasing their visibility, would be to apply for funding grants and awards. So a big one, for example, that I think is the deadline has been extended to the end of this month is the Lorenzo Natali prize on a kind of sustainable development, which rewards journalism writing specifically about these issues. So using those stories as case studies and information to affect change, applying for grants and for funding. And then to answer your first question on kind of underreported issues, it's a really interesting one on kind of land rights, because I feel that although, you know, other issues which we used to write about, say climate change, for example, we're now, and I'd say thankfully, seeing come come under the spotlight as climate change, for example, is no longer certainly an underreported issue. Land rights in many cases is, and especially when it comes to security of tenure. One thing that I think is really important and kind of useful is to shine lights on kind of the more hidden forms of those kind of lack of security of tenure. So we had a story, for example, which was, which came out a few weeks ago, which for me, shine a light on a phenomenon I had heard very little about, which was about homelessness among indigenous populations. So again, I think in people's psyche thinking very often of, you know, land rights as a very kind of rural or kind of remote issue, or even when you think of homelessness, thinking of it as a very as an urban one that just affects poor residents. But we're seeing more and more and especially in the stories we're doing on kind of climate change, driving migration and rural communities moving to cities, for example. We're seeing lots and lots of communities who live in this kind of legal limbo between rural areas and cities, without security of tenure, so without title deeds, who are, you know, more vulnerable to anything from the next extreme weather event, to violence, to also conflict. It's kind of shining a light on those. And then I'd say with, I mean, you know, with the current crisis of coronavirus, of course, it's, well, you know, I think really difficult to see any kind of, well, opportunity in this, but what we are trying to do in terms of journalism is use it to shine a light on these issues, which people may not talk about as much normally. So we've seen a number of stories, not just at TRF, but around the world, for example, on how the coronavirus site break might affect homeless populations more, or how it affects indigenous populations more, and that both of those communities don't necessarily have a safe place to self-isolate. It also shines a really, I think, useful light on kind of city planning, how in many cities kind of dense or kind of unguarded city planning can then facilitate and accelerate the spread of deadly viruses. So I think kind of looking at where those issues haven't been reported on before, and then shining a light on those and try to kind of broaden your reach by, as I said, kind of applying for these fans and awards that then gets those stories into the broader community. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Zoe. Next question is to Anne-Marie, and it's a question about the links between land tenure security and violent extremism. So the question asks you to weigh in on sort of the relationship between poor and insecure land rights and extremist violence, both on the front end in terms of poor land rights contributing to it, and then on the back end of to what extent are people's land and property rights impacted by extremist violence? That's a great question, and one for which there's no one answer, but I will give a couple of examples and some thoughts mostly on the front end, but I'll try to address the idea of the ways in which violent extremism also affects property rights. But so I don't think there are any examples where you can say exactly, okay, insecure land tenure contributed x to terrorism or violent extremism, but what you can say is that again, often involving climate, and it doesn't just have to be climate change, it could be something even is like when land gets degraded from mining or from certain kinds of agriculture, where there are not clear land tenure clear land tenure regimes, it's much easier to push people off the land. It's much, and for other people to take land that they need, that creates refugee flows. And sometimes it is nature. I mean, if you think about it in, in say something like Syria where you had this massive drought and you had millions of Syrians moving into the cities when the cities couldn't accommodate them. Now some of that, okay, their land's no good, they're going to have to move, but some of it would have been, well, was there a possibility of getting compensation in some ways? Because again, it's not just having the land, it's when you don't have the land, just as when your land is destroyed by a natural catastrophe, what are you eligible for? And if you don't have that, and you're essentially then an internally displaced person, those kinds of bigger trends then lead to situations where absolutely, first of all, there was more support for the Syrian, for the revolution against Assad, but that in turn had where people felt displaced were ready to, they're much more vulnerable to being recruited. And above all, the system's not working for them. And we're seeing that, you could see that in terms of violent extremism, you can also see it in terms of populism. And so land tenure is a piece of that, because it's a way of saying you have a secure position and even if your land, if there's something wrong with your land, we can compensate you, we can help you, or you can sell it for other purposes and help fund you. I would say also there are examples in Darfur, this is an older part of violent extremism, but if you look again at conflicts between herders and agricultural farmers, and again, some of that is how easy is it to drive farmers off their land. In terms of violent extremism affecting land tenure, I mean, I'm just thinking about, obviously, countries like Afghanistan, countries like Iraq, it's the violent extremism, but it's also the response to the violent extremism. And effectively, you're getting conflict. And when you have a civil war, that drives people off their land. I think part of, and this goes back actually to what Caleb was saying and Mark also, we need to be thinking about communities rooted or connected to their land in the same way we think about communities as people connected to one another. That's a mindset shift. It's a very important one. It's not just these individuals out there and what they want. It's individuals who are related to one another in webs of relationships. Those can support violent extremism or it can make it easier to track it down depending, but those webs of humanity are connected to specific places. And when we think about these problems, we have to take that into account. And what something Zoe said is very important here is that technology can help you map all that, right? Technology can help you see, oh yes, this person actually is connected to this land and to other people. If you use their cell phones, you can see where they live and who they're connected to. Technology is nothing, that won't do anything unless we change our mindset and our policies based on the maps we now see. Great. Thank you so much, Anne-Marie. This next question, I'm actually going to pose to Caleb, Rob and Mark, and I'll ask you to answer it in a bit of a different way. And it's related to land grabbing. So land grabbing was very prominently a focus of research at USAID. This is the question from the audience member until about 2015. And since then, there has not been as much research related to-