Since 2002, the FAO Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia has been organising annual workshops to discuss instruments like land consolidation, land banking and land market development. This has created a European wide network of professionals from different countries and different organisations under FAO guidance. Professionals involved represent the government, the private sector, NGO’s, universities and other research institutes. Since 2010 the network is known as LANDNET. The LANDNET Board supports the FAO regional office in preparing workshops, monitoring of land related policies in Europe and defining future activities of the LANDNET.

The aim of the LANDNET is to stimulate proper and timely responses to (changing) needs of society regarding land use and land tenure in rural and peri-urban areas. By various activities like studies, collection of knowledge and experiences, exchange and capacity building, innovation of institutional frameworks and implementation approaches is stimulated.

The scope is the broad set of institutional requirements needed to facilitate, guide and complement rural land markets. This concerns both the ‘hard side’ of regulatory / legal frameworks for market functioning like laws of land ownership and leasing, taxation and the ‘soft side’ like promotional measures, mediation and solving of land use conflicts. Moreover it includes the range of public and public/private interventions to adjust the use and/or the ownership structure of land to the current economic, environmental and social reality. Interventions often take place as integrated territorial development projects serving different objectives at local, regional and national level, including instruments like land swapping, land consolidation (voluntary or statutory) and land banking. Approaches are ‘people oriented’ in the sense that they and carefully planned and implemented and contain sufficient opportunity for recourse. LANDNET activities are based on principles laid down in the “Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security”.