The Challenge
More than 1.2 billion people currently live in self-built communities (also known as informal settlements) worldwide, with the greatest concentrations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. If current trends continue, this figure could reach 3 billion by 2050. These communities are often portrayed as problems to be solved, yet they are also places of strong social organization, collective self-management, economic activity, and community identity. Their residents deserve security, dignity, and the ability to remain in place as their communities improve.
As climate shocks, speculative investment, rapid urban expansion, and growing inequality intensify pressures on land and housing, communities across the Global South face increasing risks of displacement and dispossession. Community land trusts (CLTs) offer one promising pathway for protecting homes, strengthening tenure security, enabling upgrading of essential infrastructure, preserving affordability, and ensuring that development benefits existing residents rather than replacing them.
Conventional approaches to land regularization have frequently failed to deliver these outcomes. Individual titling programs often increase land values and attract speculative investment, resulting in the displacement of the very residents such programs were intended to protect. CLTs offer a fundamentally different approach. By separating ownership of land from ownership of buildings, CLTs permanently remove land from the speculative market while preserving individual ownership, collective governance, and long-term affordability. They make development without displacement possible.
About the Global South CLT Initiative
The Global South CLT Initiative (GSCLTI) was created to support this growing movement. The Initiative combines technical assistance, peer learning, movement-building, and knowledge production to help communities explore, adapt, and implement collective land stewardship models appropriate to their local contexts. Through regional partnerships, training programs, feasibility studies, peer exchanges, development of resource materials, and ongoing engagement, the Initiative creates opportunities for communities to learn from one another and develop locally rooted solutions.
The CLT Center launched the GSCLTI in 2023 to support this growing interest. Rather than promoting a single imported model, the Initiative creates spaces where communities can critically examine whether CLTs or other forms of collective stewardship can respond to their specific realities. The Initiative’s ultimate goal is development without displacement, on communities’ own terms.
Our Approach
The Initiative offers a modular, staged set of support. Groups receive the level of engagement appropriate to their stage and can progress deeper over time. The model is fundamentally a relationship that evolves — not a fixed pipeline or enrollment system. Two important design principles run through the whole model: first, that personal engagement matters more than formal curriculum; and second, that the Initiative must match our engagements to our capacity, being mindful that with additional funding we can build a larger team that can be hands-on with more people and organizations.
EDUCATION
- Drop-In Open-Format Learning Sessions: Monthly open-format sessions are the first substantive touchpoint for most new contacts. They function simultaneously as peer exchanges and informal office hours: spaces where participants can ask questions, surface challenges, and explore whether CLTs or related approaches might be relevant in their context. These sessions are intentionally loose and welcoming — not structured courses. Participants may attend once, or four times, or drift away and come back. That variability is by design.
- Structured Learning Sessions: When a group moves beyond the drop-in sessions and expresses deeper interest, Tarcyla initiates a more tailored engagement: a direct conversation about what the group needs, what they already know, and what the Initiative can offer. Based on that conversation, we make an individualized assessment of which tier is appropriate — considering the group’s existing CLT knowledge, the maturity of their organizing context, their legal environment, and the realistic next steps available to them.
TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE
- Pre-Feasibility Studies: Following initial education, and where a preliminary assessment determines that there is some potential for implementation of a CLT pilot project, the Initiative undertakes a pre-feasibility study in partnership with a local anchor organization. These pre-feasibility studies can range from “desk reviews” of written materials to clarify whether the legal, social and political context is favorable to the establishment of CLTs, to more comprehensive engagements requiring a significant investment of time on the part of both the CLT Center as well as the local anchor organization, legal experts, academics, and government officials.
- Feasibility Analysis and Pre-Implementation Support: After the pre-feasibility study, the Initiative works with the partner organization to move from analysis to action. This phase involves deeper engagement on the specific questions and challenges surfaced during pre-feasibility, drawing on expertise from other Global South contexts to design working methodologies adapted to local conditions rather than imported wholesale. It can include governance design, legal structuring, community organizing support, an advocacy plan, and preparation for pilot projects.
- Implementation Support: The scope, timeline, and specific supports required during implementation will be defined by what the feasibility study reveals. By necessity, this phase is heavily individualized — what is required in Cape Town will look different from what is required in Indonesia or Portugal, given differences in legal frameworks, land ownership structures, government relationships, community organizing capacity, and available funding. No single template applies. What can be said with confidence is that implementation is by far the longest phase of the journey — measured in multiples of years rather than months. It is the phase in which a CLT moves from legal concept and community aspiration to operational reality: land secured, governance structures established, residents organized, infrastructure upgraded, and long-term stewardship systems in place. The Initiative’s role throughout is to accompany the partner organization, provide technical expertise as needed, facilitate connections to peer practitioners who have navigated similar challenges, assist with the development of advocacy strategies, and help sustain the momentum and relationships necessary to see the work through.
PEER EXCHANGES
Peer exchanges are the Initiative’s most powerful tool for building the relationships, shared frameworks, and mutual accountability that a self-sustaining network requires. In-person exchanges produce changes in practice, new relationships, and shared commitments that virtual gatherings cannot replicate. The exchange is not a conference — it is a space designed to generate trust and solidarity through shared experience, including site visits, community encounters, and honest conversation about shared struggles. Its value comes from who is in the room and what they do together, not from the formality of the program.
Resources
ARTICLES & PUBLICATIONS
- International Center for CLTs: CLTs: An Innovative Approach to Secure Land Tenure and Enabling Participatory Upgrading in Informal Settlements
- Lincoln Institute of Land Policy: International Commentaries on Preserving Affordable Homeownership
- Radical Housing Journal: CLTs in the Context of Informality
- UN-Habitat: 2026 World Cities Report
- World Habitat: CLTs in Informal Settlements
- More resources coming soon!
