Poverty in the Near East and North Africa region (NENA) is mainly a rural phenomenon. Almost half (48%) the area’s population lives in rural areas. This report focuses on key rural poverty issues in 13 diverse countries in the region, without attempting to propose policy or programme actions at national or local levels. Overall, the rural poor still face traditional constraints such as water scarcity, inadequate rural infrastructure, inappropriate policies and institutions, weak local-level organisations and gender inequity.

Using the framework of the Land Use and Cover Change (LUCC) Science/Research Plan this study takes 152 studies of deforestation in different regions of varying size from around the tropics and analyses them to assess how important different causes of deforestation really are.

Improved agriculture in the Drought Prone Uplands (DPUs) depends critically on better water conservation and management. However, there is a high degree of uncertainty surrounding issues of water availability, allocation and local rights. Despite broad similarities in the goals of many programmes, there has been a lack of consistency and coherence among them. The focus of this paper is on the difficulties of developing a coherent analytical framework that would enable questions of technical and institutional choice to be addressed systematically.

Future Agricultures Working Paper 73Emmanuel Sulle and Fred NelsonDecember 2013

Following initial enthusiasm in the post-war period, land reform fell out of favour with donors from the early 1970s. Nonetheless, sporadic efforts to redistribute land continued: Ethiopia in 1975, Zimbabwe in 1980 and a renewed commitment to land reform in the Philippines in 1988. These reforms stemmed from shifts in the domestic balance of power between landowners and landless workers and peasants, which were quite independent of donor policies.

This case study deals with the South African government policies for restitution and redistribution of land to people in rural areas who were deprived of it due to racially discriminatory laws and practice. Its main focus is on how the interactions between civil society and the state in the several phases of land reform through the 1990s reflect some key issues of governance, eg.

Manual offers guidelines for using rapid appraisal methods to gather information on tenure and natural resource management. It translates the concepts elaborated in Community Forestry Note 5, rapid appraisal of tree and land tenure. The author defines rapid appraisal as "a family of methodologies designed to encourage the participation of local communities in the collection and use of information to improve their livelihood.

In Accra, as in other cities where rural-to- urban migration has added to the pressure on land, methods for the management and storage of land registry data are inadequate. How can land administration processes be automated through the introduction of information technology (IT) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)? What institutional changes must be put in place?

This paper estimates the poverty reducing impact of land access in rural Uganda. The paper firstly states that land acquired through markets or otherwise may play an important role for rural household welfare. Conversely, there are concerns that poverty reduction effect of access to land through the market may be inadequate, due to land markets that can increase land concentration among the rich and inefficient producers.

This article discusses the World Bank's efforts to reform land and real estate markets. It argues that World Bank supported efforts at land and real estate reform have had too narrow a technical focus, at the expense of institutional reform.

This study analyses the links between risk and the kinds of property rights that have evolved to provide the mobility needed to raise livestock where rainfall fluctuates, and it evaluates the impact of cooperation on resource management in these environments.Three interesting conclusions emerge from the analyses with respect to economic vulnerability and natural resource management in these environments.