Adoptions of improved technologies and production practices are important drivers of agricultural development in low-income countries like Nepal. Adopting a broad class of such technologies and practices is often critical for meeting the multifaceted goals of efficiency, profitability, environmental sustainability, and climate resilience.

A vast array of trends and innovations, such as drones and person-to-person trust solutions, have been proposed to revolutionize the task of recording land and property rights. There is, however, a gap in current research regarding how to approach systematically the future(s) of cadastral systems. This paper introduces socio-technical transitions theory and multi-level perspective (MLP) framework in particular as a way to structure potential pathways for cadastral systems.

Cover crops are considered to be beneficial for multiple ecosystem services, and they have been widely promoted through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the EU and Farm Bill Conservation Title Programs, such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), in the USA. However, it can be difficult to decide whether the beneficial effects of cover crops on some ecosystem services are likely to outweigh their harmful effects on other services, and thus to decide whether they should be promoted by agricultural policy in specific situations.

In recent years conflicts of land expropriation in China have received a lot of concern. Recent systematic reviews highlight causes, types and resolution of land conflicts, yet very few of these studies have considered the spatial-temporal characteristics of the issue. Utilizing spatial statistical analysis and statistical software, this paper aims to build a contextual overview on Chinese land expropriation conflicts and explore spatial and temporal distribution of it during 2006–2016. Correlations of land conflict intensity with per capita GDP and urbanization rate have been studied.

In recent years, many attempts have been made in Poland to enable automatic data exchange between the system of the Cadastre, being the responsibility of local government units, and the system of Land and Mortgage Register, maintained by the judicial administration (supported by the state apparatus represented by the Ministry of Justice). Such exchange is necessary as it is dictated by the establishment of the Integrated Real Estate Information System.

Goals concerning reduced car traffic are found in most European cities, indicating a potential change in local transport policy and land use planning, which have traditionally been very car-centric. This paper analyses goals and measures to reduce car traffic in Swedish municipalities’ long-term transport and land use plans. Theoretically, the paper is based on an understanding of policies as parts of ‘problem representations’ that create particular ways of understanding car traffic as a policy problem, which in turn influence the measures seen as appropriate or inappropriate.

Housing land consolidation and relocation has been widely implemented in rural China as a policy tool to reduce the area of built-up land, reclaim agricultural land, and redistribute the use of land. Despite of the large scale of implementation, the impact of this policy on the daily life of rural people is not sufficiently evaluated. Our work aims to fill in this gap by examining the daily activity pattern of rural residents in consolidated and unconsolidated villages through mobile phone locational data, using the Chengdu city-region as the case.

Nature-based Solutions (NBS) are increasingly promoted to support sustainable and resilient urban planning. However, design and planning urban NBS targeted at the needs of the local context require knowledge about the causal relationships between NBS, ecosystem services (ES) and urban challenges (UC) This paper aims at contributing to this knowledge, by systematically identifying nexuses (i.e. qualitative links) between UC, ES and NBS, and describing plausible causal relationships.

Dachas (collective gardens with summer houses in post-Soviet countries) is one of the most common features of peri-urban landscapes within the region that is the erstwhile USSR, with dacha conglomerates constituting half of the areas in the exurbs of major cities. In Belarus, Russia and Ukraine dachas largely preserved their original form and function. Arguably, they are at the turning point now, and can be further transformed sustainably if appropriate incentive structures will be created within national governance systems.

As central policies for biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes in the European Union (EU), the Habitats Directive and Agri-environmental programmes (AEP) have largely failed to halt biodiversity loss. In response, the German federal state of Saxony combined the instrument of management plans with AEPs to support the implementation of the Habitat Directive. In this study, we investigate the determinants of a farmers’ decisions to adjust their farming practices.

In Northern, Eastern and Central European countries, peat soils drained for agriculture are a considerable source of greenhouse gas emissions. Since emissions from this source have high mitigation potential, they will likely be a focus of the European Union’s future climate goals. We describe and compare the similarities and differences in the socioeconomic and ecological business environment that policy makers, planners and farmers are confronted with when developing tailored proposals for low emission land use alternatives on peat land.

Many incidents of elephant killings have recently taken place in Tanzania as well as in other African countries. Such events are usually presented as results of the rising global demand for ivory. As we show in this case study, however, not all violence against elephants is driven by the ivory trade. This article presents an event that occurred in West Kilimanjaro in 2009 when numerous villagers chased a herd of elephants over a cliff, killing six of them. Using a ‘web of relations’ approach, we seek to uncover the underlying as well as the immediate factors that led to this incident.