This story is part of our end-of-year campaign celebrating how the CLT Centeris working to serve the global CLT movement. This week, we’re highlighting the:
Global South CLT Initiative
The most significant experience of CLTs in informal settlements begins in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with the Caño Martín Peña CLT (the “Caño”) established in 2004, the first of its kind in Latin America. Born from residents’ decades-long fight to protect their neighborhood from eviction and gentrification, the Caño demonstrated that communities could safeguard tenure, rebuild with dignity, and remain in place — together.
That example resonated far beyond Puerto Rico. In Rio de Janeiro, Catalytic Communities (CatComm) drew direct inspiration from the Caño, adapting the model to Brazilian realities and the country’s constitutional “social function of property.” By rooting the CLT idea in local legal and cultural frameworks, they reimagined what collective land stewardship could look like in favelas, and, in doing so, opened space for other communities across the Global South to follow.
As conversations deepened, it became clear that the lessons emerging from informal settlements spoke to a much broader reality. Across the Global South, communities share parallel stories of displacement, informality, and collective resilience. Despite the many challenges they face, they constantly invent solutions to address local problems through community-led initiatives and solidarity networks. The Global South CLT Initiative was created to connect those stories and the people behind them. At its core, the Initiative is about listening and sharing: learning from the knowledge communities already hold, and accompanying them as they chart their own paths toward collective land stewardship.
In June 2023, the CLT Center, the Caño, and CatComm launched the initiative with support from the re:arc institute, creating a platform for exchange, training, and visibility for global communities exploring alternative forms of land ownership. A year later, as the work expanded, partners refined their focus: Caño Martín Peña CLT, together with El Enjambre Colectivo, continues to advise and lead engagement across Latin America and the Caribbean, while CatComm, led by Tarcyla Fidalgo, now steers activities in other regions in collaboration with the CLT Center. Though the initial re:arc funding has concluded, the CLT Center will continue maintaining and growing the initiative in partnership with CatComm, deepening partnerships and seeking new support to ensure that this work continues.
A Platform for Practice
The Global South CLT Initiative brings together community groups and international allies around a shared goal: exchanging knowledge about CLTs and other approaches to collective land ownership in contexts marked by informality, displacement, and climate risk.
At the beginning of 2025, the Initiative teamed up with urbaMonde and CoHabitat Network to host a multilingual training session on CLTs in informal settlements, where María E. Hernández Torrales, lead attorney in drafting the regulations for the Caño Martín Peña CLT in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Tarcyla Fidalgo shared lessons from these two pioneering experiences.
Following that event’s success, we cultivated a cohort of participants who continued meeting in monthly training sessions, giving local communities around the world space to discuss their contexts, share their experiences, and ask questions. Along the way, the Initiative has produced a suite of open-access resources to support these groups while identifying, together, new possibilities for learning, and for what the CLT model itself might add to these local processes of collective ownership.
These resources include:
- A slide deck introducing the CLT model in informal settlements;
- A four-page overview of CLTs in informal settlements;
- Recorded trainings in English and Spanish exploring dimensions of CLTs in informal contexts;
- Tools in progress, including a feasibility template and a methodology booklet for starting CLTs in informal settlements.
From Exchange to Action
As a result of these monthly sessions and continued outreach, the Initiative has engaged with local communities in 20 countries, deepening collaboration and collective problem-solving. Each exchange adds to a growing catalogue of real-world examples, proof that CLTs and other forms of collective land ownership can adapt to diverse geographies while staying rooted in the same principle: land held in common, for the common good. Highlights include:
- In South Africa, the Development Action Group (DAG) and the CLT Center are developing a pilot CLT proposal in Cape Town.
- In Argentina, the Public Defender’s Office of Buenos Aires invited Tarcyla Fidalgo to meet with public officials and explored legal pathways for a CLTs in the local context.
- In Bangladesh, a legal study was conducted to see how CLTs could formalize tenure for vulnerable settlements.
- In Portugal, the Initiative continues to accompany residents of Cova da Moura, supporting their transition from feasibility study to community engagement.
Looking Ahead
As 2025 draws to a close, the Initiative is looking ahead on two parallel fronts: policy and practice.
In collaboration with several multilateral entities, the CLT Center is developing two policy briefs: one on CLTs as tools for collective land ownership in informal settlements, and another on CLTs as mechanisms for permanent affordability in housing. These briefs aim to bring community-led land strategies into national and international policy conversations, positioning CLTs as essential to a just urban future. Both are expected to be published in the first half of 2026.
Stay tuned for more exciting news to come!