Waiting For Law: Land, Custom and Legal Regulation in East Timor

In stark contrast to previous recommendations for tenure formalisation and individualisation, the World Bank's new land policy supports legal recognition of group-based customary tenure whenever it promotes security and natural resource management. How can this new approach be put into effect? What are its implications in terms of legal options for recognising customary tenure? What ethnographic information is necessary to develop and evaluate these options? Led by a lawyer and an anthropologist the project applies these questions to East Timor, where there is a unique opportunity to help develop best practice regulations in relation to customary tenure.