On 11 May 2012, the Committee on World Food Security endorsed the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (the Guidelines). By promoting secure tenure rights and equitable access to land, fisheries and forests, the Guidelines aim to contribute to the global and national efforts towards the eradication of hunger and poverty.

The first general principle of the Guidelines is for states to recognize and respect all legitimate tenure right holders and their rights. It calls on states to take reasonable measures to identify, record and respect legitimate tenure right holders and their rights, whether formally recorded or not. Recording tenure rights, such as through registration, cadastre and licensing systems, can be an important way to recognize and safeguard those rights.

This guide addresses the recording of tenure rights with the particular focus on creating a new system to record rights and recording rights in a system for the first time. While recording systems exist around the world, there are often cases where people are not currently served by systems to record their tenure rights. This guide addresses the cases where the most appropriate approach is to create a new system to record those rights, and it provides practical advice on how rights can be recorded for the first time.

This guide is accompanied by another guide that focuses on a different aspect of recording tenure rights: improving existing ways to record rights (Improving ways to record tenure rights). As these two guides cover different aspects of recording rights, they can be read as standalone documents, and as such, they have some text in common. However, some readers may benefit from reading both guides.These two guides on different aspects of recording rights are part of a series of technical guides that offer advice on various aspects of improving governance of tenure, consistent with the Guidelines.