Land Governance in Support of The Millennium Development Goals

This paper reports about a joint FIG/World Bank conference on Land Governance in support of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s), held in Washington DC, USA, 9-10 March 2009. After an observation on how the concepts of ‘land governance’ and ‘land professionals’ developed within FIG, the dedication of FIG towards sustainable development and to the Millennium Development Goals is described as well as the policy of FIG to work in cooperation with the UN agencies such as UN-HABITAT, UN-FAO, and the World Bank. The paper explains why FIG and the World Bank decided to team up in the organisation of this conference and what both organisations considered as their key goals. One important element concerned the development of a common declaration and a new agenda for land professionals. How this finally worked out, is extensively reported in this paper. The paper concludes that the goals were very successfully achieved. A full report of the conference is available as FIG publication No 45.