Looking through the lens of land: Improving interventions in land governance in conflict-affected settings.

Land, access to land and land governance are highly politicized issues that are affected by and part of the (post-) conflict dynamics in DR Congo’s eastern Kivu Provinces and South Sudan’s Greater Equatoria region, as well as wider societal processes. In these highly politicized contexts, intervening organizations and their local partners tend to resort to interventions of a technical nature to maintain neutrality, and work with policy models from other (nonconflictive) settings, which are not necessarily applicable. They invest in local level mediation, rather than to insist on proper implementation of existing regulation or on political reform. Intervening organizations rarely reflect on the political implications of their activities and on the consequences of working with one type of authority over the other.