A wave of commercial investments in the natural resource sectors has rekindled debates about the place of contracts in the interface between economic governance and control over natural resources.

The National Climate Change Response Strategy (NCCRS), also referred to as the ‘Strategy’, is the culmination of a year-long process to develop a comprehensive and concerted suite of strategies to respond to the challenges climate change is posing to Kenya’s socioeconomic development. The NCCRS is a significant step in the recognition that climate change is a threat to national development. It has presented evidence on climate change and associated impacts.

The Thai government has ambitious plan to further promote the use of biodiesel. However, there has been insufficient consideration on the environmental effects of oil palm expansion in Thailand. This paper focuses on the effects of oil palm expansion on land use. We analysed the direct land use change (dLUC) and indirect land use change (iLUC) caused by the oil palm expansion and its effects on ecosystem services supply. Our analysis shows that between 2000 and 2009 dLUC related to oil palm expansion was more prevalent than iLUC.

Environmental governance in the context of climate change and land use is examined with the aim of specifying the conditions under which the incorporation of effective public participation in the governance process can be achieved. This is done through an examination of the preferences of the actors involved, an analysis of the land use issues in climate change governance in Thailand, the extant institutional arrangements for public participation, the difficulties of implementing effective public participation, and possible ways of mitigating these challenges.

Up to 2.5 billion people hold and use the world’s community lands, yet the tenure rights of women—who comprise more than half the population of the world’s Indigenous Peoples and local communities—are seldom acknowledged or protected by national laws.

Cambodia has long had a difficult mix of resource wealth and weak land governance, a function of its legacy of enduring postwar conflict and neoliberal development policies of the 1990s. Since 2012, however, its government has undertaken a series of self-described ‘deep reforms’ aimed at overcoming the poverty, land conflict, and unequal rural landholdings created during the 2000s, when over 2 million hectares of economic land concessions were allocated to private companies.

ABSTRACTED FROM INTRODUCTION: This report was commissioned under CIFOR’s Global Comparative Study on REDD+, as part of a research module on multilevel governance and carbon management at the landscape scale. Its purpose is to describe the distribution of powers and responsibilities related to land use, forests, and ecosystem services and, by extension, to REDD+ among the dfferent levels and sectors of the Vietnamese government. To that end it reviews laws dealing explicitly with different sectors that affect land use and decentralization.

Land uses are changing rapidly in Vietnam’s upland northern borderlands. Regional development platforms such as the Greater Mekong Subregion, state-propelled market integration and reforestation programs, and lowland entrepreneurs and migrants are all impacting this frontier landscape. Drawing on a mixed methods approach using remote sensing data from 2000 to 2009 and ethnographic fieldwork, we examine how land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) has occurred across three borderland provinces—Lai Châu, Lào Cai and Hà Giang—with high proportions of ethnic minority semi-subsistence farmers.

In this paper we address the often sterile and circular debates over relationships between poverty and deforestation. These debates revolve around questions of whether forest loss causes poverty or poverty contributes to forest encroachment, and questions of whether it is loss of access to forests or dependence on forest-based livelihoods that cause poverty. We suggest that a way beyond the impasse is to set such debates within the context of agrarian change.

The concept of Community Forest Management (CFM) was officially recognized for the first time in Vietnam with the implementation of the Law on Forest Protection and Development (2004).

This paper argues that conflicts in the northern Thai highlands are a clear case of the politics of environmental discourse in the sense that conservation has played a role in lending legitimacy to both government agencies and ethnic communities in their struggle for the control of forest resources. Underlying such conflicts is the official line of negative thinking about ethnic minorities in the hills by associating them with various vices, namely as enemies of the forest, opium producers, and a threat to national security.

The Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT), was developed under the Committee on World Food Security as a result of collaboration among different groups of stakeholders – governments, civil society, private sector, academia. The VGGT is intended to provide a framework for responsible tenure governance that supports food security, poverty alleviation, sustainable resource use and environmental protection.