What are the effects of trends away from legal pluralism towards more uniform approaches to the law? This paper analyses the effects of legal changes in property rights for people's welfare and development in India.

Over 2008 large-scale acquisitions of farmland in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia and Southeast Asia have increased. This report discusses key trends and drivers in land acquisitions, the contractual arrangements underpinning them and the way these are negotiated. It also analyses the early impacts on land access for rural people in recipient countries with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa.

Land and forestry-based activities could in principle play important roles as climate change mitigation strategies. In practice, however, several questions have been raised about their feasibility. Therefore, understanding the processes and determinants of land use changes is critical. This paper aims to contribute to such understanding in the larger part of a larger project on sustainable development and economic growth. It begins with a dynamic model of land use.

Forty per cent of sub-Saharan Africa's population live on less than a dollar a day and more than seventy per cent are currently without adequate shelter, so what has property got to do with it? This paper attempts to highlight the need for Africa to develop the necessary institutions to support the property and construction sectors, to facilitate infrastructure delivery and promote sustainable growth and development.The authors highlight the fact that Africa, whilst being well endowed with natural resources their capital markets remain underdeveloped.

This paper examines the marginalization of women's land rights by governmental institutions and rural women's movements in Brazil.

The advance of the agricultural frontier constitutes the biggest source of deforestation in Central America today. This conversion of tropical forests into agricultural land and pasture is the direct result of individual land use decisions. This paper presents a simple analytical model of household land use, followed by an econometric analysis of household survey data from the Río San Juan region of Nicaragua in order to test for consistency with the model.

Land tenure reform remains a key policy issue in Africa, given the large proportion of people relying on land and natural resources for their livelihoods. This paper addresses the exclusionary nature of many processes around land, which can lead to social divisions.

Population growth leads to growing land scarcity and landlessness in poor agrarian economies. Many of these also face severe climate risks that may increase in the future. Tenure security is important for food security in such countries and at the same time threatened by social instability that further accelerate rural-urban and international migration. Provision of secure property rights with low-cost methods that create investment incentives can lead to land use intensification and improved food security.

Malawi’ s smallholder agriculture is facing a crisis, particularly in the more populated south. There is an insidious combination of land shortage, continuous cultivation of maize, declining soil fertility, low yields, deforestation, poverty and high population growth rate. Smallholder farmers are doing what they can to maintain household livelihoods under these difficult circumstances, however many of their actions, which are necessary for short term survival, such as the cultivation of hillsides, are not sustainable in the long term.

The core thesis is that Western neoclassical economics and law (particularly Anglo-American) have a peculiar cultural history that biases Western-trained economists and lawyers against common property systems like those found among Africans and American Indians. This Western cultural bias is expressed through the recurrent focus on individuals as atomistic and independent of each other in contract and property law, as well as in economic theory.

Carrying capacity (CC) is a term often talked about in relation to livestock in the communal areas (CAs). It is the source of much confusion. This discussion paper will hopefully clarify some of the issues and make the implications for the policy debate clearer. It is based on the preliminary findings of field work carried out in Zvisharane District during 1986 and 1987.

This working paper reviews historical and current factors and patterns affecting land use, land tenure, resource access, human settlement, and conflicts over resource access and tenure in the districts around Mt. Elgon in Kenya and Uganda. The paper draws on a series of interviews conducted with government officials in the districts along with other support sources such as paper maps and existing GIS databases.Based on this approach, the common findings from this study in the current setting of land tenure and land management are: