Aid workers know how to conjure up tent cities and drinking water in the most inhospitable hotspots, but they're not so good at paying attention to all the issues around land that often spark wars in the first place and frequently cause disputes after crises, land experts say.

If relief workers asked more key questions about land issues - what a particular conflict has to do with land; how land laws work in cities and in the countryside; how people prove ownership of land in societies where many don't read or are at odds with the government that sets the laws - they'd be better able to plan for where displaced people are likely to end up.

And it would help aid agencies tread wisely when faced with the choice of backing one group or another.

"(Without) understanding why humanitarian crises happen, and why they take the form that they do, we will be handicapped in our responses," Africa expert Alex de Waal said at a conference in London this month.

Many, if not most, conflicts have something to do with land. They're fought over national territory, over not having enough land to live on, over unequally distributed land. Or land is involved because it's the site of a battlefield or the space where one group is trying to eradicate another.

What's more, land is often fundamental to people's autonomy and self-sufficiency, so de Waal argues that any humanitarians who are motivated by wanting to help poor and marginalised people should know how important communal land can be.

And aid agencies need to think how their actions might contribute to people losing their access to land, he says.

Humanitarians are on the scene in that crucial moment immediately after war or disaster, the prime time for land-grabbing that can sow seeds for new conflicts a little further down the line.

But the experts at this conference organised by the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) of British think tank Overseas Development Institute said aid agencies rarely think about land when they first get involved.

PROVING OWNERSHIP

One of the reasons the subject is so hard to get to grips with is that the facts are rarely clearly established on paper. Ownership documents are rare in many rural communities. Often there's a clash between what the law says - if it exists at all - and the reality on the ground.

In lots of places, people live under a whole variety of systems - national law, for example, alongside traditional ways of inheriting land or using it communally.

When the government is weak or the state is fragile, it's especially hard to work out who has the last word in resolving land disputes, whether they're between neighbouring families or rival villages. There's often a whole array of places where people can go to try to get someone to mediate - chiefs, warlords, religious leaders, and even aid agencies can get cast in the role.

Sometimes local customs for settling disagreements - known as customary law - work better, are more respected, and in any case, are probably quicker and cheaper than trying to go through the formal legal system.

"Land dispute is normal," land expert Liz Alden Wily says. It's how disputes are solved that's the issue, and most people prefer peaceful ways whenever possible.

After a war, violence is one way of resolving disagreements. Jon Unrah of Montreal's McGill University says: "There are always AK-47s around, wrapped in plastic and buried."

Some of the biggest problems come when customary law clashes with the law on the statute books.

In Uganda and Liberia, traditional decision-making has been made illegal because it's seen as discriminating against women.

But one of the most common scenarios is a clash between a community and a government that's trying to nationalise land that no one can prove is theirs, usually motivated by the desire to sell it on to businesses and investors who are often outsiders.

Communally owned land is frequently at the heart of this kind of dispute, and the international relief world is already heavily involved in major decisions about communal land rights after conflicts.

For example, in Afghanistan, Alden Wily says, there's been an irreconcilable gulf between those - like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Asian Development Bank - who want to nationalise pasture land, and those like the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, who want to protect community rights.

In Liberia, some say the forests should be kept in the hands of the government so it can issue logging concessions. Others - like Alden Wily - say no way, the forests should be the private property of the communities who live in and by them.

That would be to the country's benefit too, she argues, since communities could make a lot of money exploiting their precious resources, which would enrich the government in the form of taxes.

ODI researcher Sara Pantuliano complains that most aid agencies' strategies - if they have any - focus on returning land to its pre-war owners. Sounds logical, but it can be problematic, since it starts from a bias in favour of people who've been displaced. "(That) tends to overlook the rights of the wider community," she says.

It can also create new tensions and feed resentment from people in other ethnic groups, or those who never left.

'LUBRICATING DISPOSSESSION

Whether they like it or not, humanitarians aren't bystanders, says Alex De Waal, co-director of British-based research and advocacy organisation Justice Africa.

In camps and squatter settlements, power often shifts from those who have traditionally held it - like elders, for example - to those who control relief. So new forms of authority emerge because of aid agencies' presence.

In fact, De Waal, says: "Humanitarians tend to lubricate dispossession." He says that when agencies give insufficient rations, guided by their fear that the displaced might become dependent on handouts, people end up having to work. And their new employers know they don't have to pay full rate because the meagre wages will get topped up by aid supplies.

So relief agencies inadvertently turn people into an agricultural proletariat earning subsistence wages, often on land they formerly called their own.

De Waal suggests aid agencies could help people register land so they could use it as collateral to get credit. But other experts say this would be a risky strategy that could generate new disputes over land, or even wars, if outsiders inadvertently ended up handing out rights to land already claimed by someone else.

The consequences of humanitarians neglecting land issues can be serious, Liz Alden Wily stresses. One of the reasons East Timor's problems have multiplied since the end of its freedom struggle with Indonesia, she says, is that no one paid enough attention to land issues during the path to peace.

And in Afghanistan, she says, it took the humanitarian community two years of assisting several million displaced Afghans to go home before they realised that up to 60 percent had never owned land before the war. And aid agencies failed completely to predict the country's rapid urbanisation.

"How many times do we have to see the post-conflict capital double or triple in size before we say we need to prepare for that?" she asks.

De Waal points out that increased urbanisation plus global warming mean that big cities are the most likely sites for the crises of the future. Most scenarios for climate change involve well-populated parts of the planet becoming uninhabitable, especially along the coasts.

"The implications of the evacuation of a city such as Lagos stretch the imagination," De Waal says. "We will need to consider what this means for humanitarian action."

The papers from this conference on "Uncharted Territory: Land, conflict and Humanitarian Action" aren't available online yet, since they're being turned into a book, but in the meantime HPG has some interesting resources on land.

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