Our Land, Our Survival: Communities Mobilizing Against Land Grabbing and Dispossession

Webinar Description

Across the globe, communities are confronting intensifying pressures, from climate disasters and speculative development to militarization and extractive investment, that threaten collective land, self-determination, and survival. In this context, alternative land tenure systems are not only policy tools, but acts of resistance.

The International Center for Community Land Trusts invites you to a conversation centered around Our Land, Our Survival, by Dr Line Algoed and published by Terra Nostra Press. Drawing on cases from Barbuda and Puerto Rico after the 2017 hurricanes, the book shows how communal land systems become powerful tools to resist land grabbing, community displacement, and disaster capitalism.

We are especially honored to welcome Leilani Farha, Global Director of The Shift and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, who will open the session with remarks on land as resistance in the face of the global land rush. Her presentation will frame the broader discussion on housing, land, and human rights.

Moderated by Amber Khan (University of Washington, US), the webinar will feature perspectives from:

• Line Algoed, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Postdoctoral Researcher (Belgium)
• Jackie Frank, Barbuda Land Rights and Resources Committee (Barbuda)
• Mariolga Juliá Pacheco, Caño Martín Peña CLT, Director of the Office of Participation Citizenship and Social Development; Community leader, (Puerto Rico)

Together, the speakers will explore how communities are implementing alternative land tenure systems to push back against dispossession and defend land as more than property. The webinar will be conducted with simultaneous interpretation in English and Spanish, with multilingual subtitles added to the recording when it is published on YouTube.

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The CLT Center convenes practitioners, researchers, and communities from different regions to share experiences and strengthen the CLT movement globally. This event is free and open to all. If you’re in a position to support our work, your contribution helps us continue offering free events, resources, and peer exchange opportunities across contexts.

Speakers

Line Algoed, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Postdoctoral Researcher (Belgium)

DR LINE ALGOED is a researcher and educator at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) whose work focuses on land governance, climate justice, and community-led resistance to displacement. Her research examines how communal and collective land systems function as tools of protection and self-determination in contexts marked by disaster, speculation, and extractive development.

Drawing on long-term engagement with communities in Puerto Rico and Barbuda, Dr Algoed explores how alternative land tenure systems can serve not only as mechanisms of housing provision, but as strategies of resistance against land grabbing, disaster capitalism, and colonial or imperial pressures. She works at the intersection of urban studies, political ecology, and human rights, with a particular interest in how land can be defended as a shared and living resource.

She is the author of Our Land, Our Survival, recently published by Terra Nostra Press, which documents community struggles to protect collective land in the wake of the 2017 hurricanes.

Leilani Farha, The Shift and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, Global Director (Canada)

LEILANI FARHA is the Global Director of The Shift, an international movement to secure the right to housing, and served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing from 2014 to 2020. A lawyer and global advocate, her work focuses on housing as a human right and on confronting the financialization of housing and land. During her UN mandate, Leilani investigated housing conditions across the world, examining how global capital, speculation, and extractive economic systems impact communities’ ability to remain in their homes. She has been a leading voice in reframing housing and land as social goods rather than commodities, calling for systemic reforms that center human rights, dignity, and community control.

Leilani is also the Executive Producer of the documentary Push, which highlights the global housing crisis and grassroots resistance movements. Through The Shift, she works with governments, cities, civil society organizations, and community leaders to advance rights-based housing policy and protect communities from displacement.

Jackie Frank, Barbuda Land Rights and Resources Committee (Barbuda)

JACKIE FRANK is a community leader and advocate from Barbuda dedicated to defending the island’s communal land system and advancing local self-determination. Following the devastation of Hurricane Irma in 2017, she became actively involved in efforts to protect Barbuda’s centuries-old system of collective land ownership from privatization and external development pressures.

As Barbuda has faced growing threats of land grabbing and large-scale speculative projects, Jackie has worked alongside community members to raise awareness of the importance of communal tenure as a foundation for cultural survival, economic resilience, and environmental stewardship. Her advocacy emphasizes land not as a commodity, but as a shared inheritance that sustains identity, livelihood, and collective rights. Through grassroots organizing and public engagement, she continues to support community-led resistance to displacement and to promote models of land governance rooted in accountability, participation, and long-term stewardship.

Amber Khan, University of Washington, Postdoctoral Scholar (US)

AMBER KHAN, PhD, MPH is an applied interdisciplinary disaster scholar focused on community-led solutions to the climate crisis, centering on community-led land use and policy, affordable housing, and preventing displacement and gentrification. In her current role as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington, she leads an international study with the International Center for CLTs on the application of CLTs in building climate and disaster resilience. In her role as a participatory action research fellow at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC), she designs and conducts research on climate displacement, migration, and resettlement with Indigenous-led organizations.

Mariolga Juliá Pacheco, Caño Martín Peña CLT, Director of the Office of Participation Citizenship and Social Development; Community leader, (Puerto Rico)

MARIOLGA JULIÁ PACHECO is a community leader with the Caño Martín Peña CLT in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She has been deeply involved in the community’s decades-long struggle to secure collective land tenure as a foundation for environmental restoration, housing stability, and self-determination.

Emerging from a grassroots movement led by residents of the Caño Martín Peña district, the CLT was established to prevent displacement and protect affordability while advancing large-scale ecological rehabilitation of the Martín Peña channel. Mariolga has played an important role in community organizing, resident leadership development, and advocacy to defend the CLT model as a tool for both climate resilience and social justice.

Her work highlights how collective land ownership can serve as a powerful mechanism to resist land speculation, strengthen community governance, and ensure that long-term redevelopment benefits existing residents rather than displacing them. Through her leadership, she continues to advance land as a shared resource rooted in dignity, participation, and collective survival.