Publication

03 July 2014

Unfinished business: Kenya’s efforts to address displacement and land issues in Coast Region

Unfinished business: Kenya’s efforts to address displacement and land issues in Coast Region

The report analyses displacement in Coast region and identifies tensions over land tenure and poor land governance as key triggers, and obstacles to durable solutions. It provides examples of land issues underlying displacement caused by generalised violence, disasters and human rights violations, and establishes a close link between tenure insecurity and forced evictions. Disputes arise from competing land claims and incompatibility between formal and informal tenure systems. Disasters meanwhile increase competition for limited resources, including land, and contribute to violence between herders and farmers.

The report acknowledges the government’s significant steps to fulfil its national responsibility to prevent, mitigate and resolve internal displacement, particularly from a law & policy perspective. The failure, however, to adopt or implement relevant legal and policy frameworks on land and internal displacement, poses significant challenges, which this report also discusses. These include a lack of adequate stakeholder awareness about the instruments in question, delays in the establishment of the bodies mandated to oversee their implementation, funding shortages and weak land governance at various