The Human Rights Approach to Land: Promoting the Sustainable Use of Land Through the Affirmation of the Rights of Local Communities

The issues emerging from land grabbing and the recognition of interlinkages between land use and climate change have highlighted the difficulty of balancing economic development and sustainability. In this context, scholars, international organisations and NGOs have called for the adoption of a human rights (HR)-based approach to the governance of land and natural resources. The article aims to provide an overview of the human rights-based approach to land governance in the International Human Rights Law framework. The first part is aimed at framing the state of the art on the human rights-based approach to land. The analysis focusses on the principles of sovereignty over natural resources and self-determination, the protection of indigenous people’s collective property rights and a core of HR associated to the use of land. The second section attempts to review recent developments and future perspectives on the topic through the reference to three soft and hard law acts: the United Nations Declaration on the rights of peasants and other people working on the rural area; the General Comment on Land and the European Directive on Corporate Due Diligence. The work will be an exploration of the impact that recent developments have on the current use of the HR-based approach to land, to understand whether its evolution fosters the sustainable use of land through the affirmation of the rights of local communities, to the point of provoking a paradigm shift in land governance.