The paper critiques Vetter's (in this issue) assertion that commercialisation of smallholder agriculture holds dangers for sustainable rangeland management. The paper argues that a range of policy options are required, including commercialisation and subsistence farming, large-scale and smallholder farming, a range of land tenure options, rural and peri-urban farming, and part-time farming. The case of municipal commonage land is useful to show the effectiveness of a flexible range of policy options regarding land ownership, farming scale and the social nature of farming.

Stewardship is potentially a usefulconcept in modernizing management philosophies. Use ofthe term has increased markedly in recent years, yetthe term is used loosely and rarely defined in landmanagement literature. The connections between thispractical usage and the ethical basis of stewardshipare currently poorly developed.

Scholars of pastoralism often refer to changes of pastoral land tenure as ‘encroachment.’ The New Zealand case of pastoral land tenure reform suggests that this is incorrect for several reasons. First it takes the point of view of the pastoralist, which introduces unnecessary bias. Second, it assumes that all changes in land tenure are situations in which the state, or another powerful agent, takes land away from the less powerful pastoralists.

SUMMARYParticipatory forest management in China has been a dynamic and evolving process towards sustainable forest management, gradually integrating forest management with rural development by enhancing community participation and benefits derived from forest management. Participatory forest management has been increasingly supported by fiscal policy, land tenure reforms, management models and capacity building initiatives. It has also become an important discourse for sustainable forest management (SFM) in China.

We examined the effect of changes in land use and land tenure on bush encroachment and vegetation condition. An analysis of aerial photographs from three time steps (1949, 1985 and 2004) was used to document changes in woody plant density in different vegetation types on commonage and an adjacent commercial farm in Fort Beaufort, South Africa. Rangeland condition was assessed in different vegetation units of the area and woody plant density was related to distance from urban settlement.

The need to maintain or increase livestock mobility in arid Africa has been widely embraced by ecologists, social scientists, and more recently regional governments. These movements are seen to sustain livestock production under a highly variable and changing climate. At the same time, livestock mobility is threatened by the expansion of agriculture onto rangelands.

During the last decade, forest certification has gained momentum as a market-based conservation strategy in tropical forest countries. Certification has been promoted to enhance forest management in countries where governance capacities are insufficient to adequately manage natural resources and enforce pertinent regulations, given that certification relies largely on non-governmental organisations and private businesses. However, at present there are few tropical countries with large areas of certified forests.

China-Africa development cooperation in the rural sector has received an increased attention by researchers and policy-makers given the advantages and disadvantages of China’s contribution to the local economy. However, there is a lack of more reliable and nuanced findings to provide greater insights into the major issues concerning rural development and resource use. This paper aims to position land tenure and foreign investments linkages as a new research angle for understanding the role of land in sustainable resource use and investments.

Agricultural land values and cash rental rates in South Dakota, by region and by state, are primary topics of this report. The target audience are farmers and ranchers, landowners, ag professionals (lenders, rural appraisers, professional farm managers), and policy makers interested in ag land market trends. This report contains results of the 2011 Farm Real Estate Market Survey, the 21st annual SDSU survey developed to estimate ag land values and cash rental rates by land use in different regions of South Dakota.

Among the remaining tropical forests of lowland Latin America, many are inhabited by indigenous peoples, and the sustainability of their land uses is a point of heated debate in the conservation community. Numerous small-scale studies have documented changes in indigenous land use in individual communities in the context of expanding frontier settlements and markets, but few studies have included larger populations or multiple ethnic groups.