July 2015: The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) has released the July 2015 newsletter on the Voluntary Guidelines on Tenure Governance Initiative. This edition features country experiences from Cambodia, Liberia, Malawi, Myanmar, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone and South Africa in using the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (Voluntary Guidelines).

The newsletter highlights recent events that addressed implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines, notably: a FAO workshop on mainstreaming the Voluntary Guidelines held in Bogota, Colombia, from 12-13 June 2015; the ‘Conference on Property Valuation and Taxation for Fiscal Sustainability and Improved Governance in Europe and Central Asia,’ held in Vilnius, Lithuania, from 3-16 June 2015; the FAO gender and land learning programme for Mongolia that took place in May and June 2015; the Global Land Forum on land governance for inclusive development, justice and sustainability that convened in Dakar, Senegal, from 12-16 May 2015; an online discussion titled ‘Why Land Still Matters: Three Years of the Voluntary Guidelines – Where We Are and Where We Are Going?’ facilitated by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in May 2015; and the Global Soil Week in Berlin, Germany, from 19-23 April 2015.

The newsletter also features new partnerships, as well as initiatives to raise awareness and build capacity for implementing the Voluntary Guidelines. It concludes with an announcement of the latest edition of the Land Tenure Journal, which focuses on land tenure issues within the Disaster Risk Management (DRM) framework of pre-disaster prevention, mitigation and preparedness, emergency response, post-disaster recovery and reconstruction. [FAO Voluntary Guidelines on Tenure Newsletter, July 2015]