This paper identifies key issues and develops guidelines for conducting research on the relationships between property rights and technology adoption in smallholder agriculture.The topics addressed in the paper are: definition of scope and termskey issues pertaining to the relationships between technology adoption and property rights variables data collection and measurement issuesanalyses and interpretation of findings The primary target groups for this paper are researchers and policy analysts wishing to undertake or interpret empirical research

The paper examines how derived rights have evolved through settlement, loan, rental or purchase contracts and how these arrangements have developed as a result of national policy and socio-economic history. It goes on to examine how the unique circumstances of "established" and "pioneer" farming areas show differing patterns of change in arrangements over time.

This paper examines how, over the past 10 years, Kyrgyzstan has privatised most of its agricultural land and distributed it to individual households. These households either farm alone or join together and farm cooperatively. This research seeks to examine whether women have been adversely affected in the process of privatisation, asset ownership, or business development.

Since the early 1990s, the dominant consensus in the debate on land rights reform in sub-Saharan Africa has been that external interventions to privatise land rights are usually inappropriate and likely to remain so.

Indonesia's cocoa output, produced mainly by smallholders on the island of Sulawesi, increased a phenomenal 26 percent a year (average, compounded) between 1980 and 1994. The government's hands-off policy was an important factor in this rapid expansion of output.This case study of Sulawesi's cocoa market is a counterpoint to investigations of highly regulated markets --- agricultural and otherwise.

This paper examines the impact of land reform in Vietnam which gives households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their land-use rights. The authors expect this change to increase the incentives as well as the ability to undertake long-term investments on the part of households.

A growing recognition of the need to delimit the role of the government, to promote the market framework, and to rely on the private sector as the engine of growth, offers the prospect of a new beginning in rural development in Africa. Rural people must take a more dominant role, both in shaping their economic prospects and in assuming the responsibility for a high quality of stewardship of natural resources. To help to bring about such an empowerment of the people, governments and the donors will need to undertake some drastic reforms in the old systems and habits of governance.

It is estimated that up to 84% of Malawians earn their livelihoods directly from agriculture - it contributes over 90% to export earnings, 40% to GDP and accounts for 85% of total employment.

Rising poverty in rural Uganda is linked to increasing landlessness, as the latter drives land degradation and reduces agricultural productivity. This paper examines the complex relationship between owning land and poverty. It identifies effective strategies and land policy guidance to address this concern.

This paper examines the decline of common property resources in the arid zone of Rajasthan in India and the factors underlying the decline.The article concludes that:well-intentioned public programmes like land reformcan deprive a region of its comparative advantage in a key economic activity (in this case livestock farming)privatisation raises the cost of livestock raising and, hence, erodes the the region's comparative advantagethe continuing shrinkage and degradation of common property resources is likely to force further reduction in the size of livestock holdings and changes in their c

This article suggests that communual rangeland management policies in Botswana and Zimbabwe are based on incorrect technical assumptions about the stability of semiarid rangelands, the nature of rangeland degradation, and the benefits of destocking. Consequently, inappropriate policies, stressing the need to destock and stabilise the rangelands, are pursued.Acknowledgement of the great instability but intrinsic resilience of rangeland would encourage the Governments to more favourable regard the opportunistic stocking strategies of the agro-pastoralists of the Communual Areas.

This study assesses the determinants of forest land allocation to households in the forest tenure reforms in China in the period 1980-2005 using data from three provinces in Southern China; Fujian, Jiang Xi and Yunnan. Furthermore, it assesses the current level of tenure security on forest land and how this tenure security is affected by past and more recent policy changes.