Poverty in rural households have deepened in the past two years through world events: unprecedented rises in food and fuel prices were followed by global economic meltdown, all amidst growing climate uncertainty. Balancing water availability within and across growing seasons, water harvesting helps to buffer households against drought. Research on water harvesting in South Africa has focused on rural household livelihoods. Innovative results on appropriate water harvesting technologies and food security facilitation techniques are now being implemented in villages across South Africa.

More than 70 percent of the world's poor live in rural areas.The World Bank's approach to rural development is holistic and multisectoral, focused on improving the wellbeing of rural people by building their productive, social, and environmental assets. The author of this article explores what this means in the longer term horizon of beyond 2015.

Water is scarce in India's semiarid zones of Rajasthan. Climate change is putting additional pressure on the rare resources. Irregular or no rainfall forces many small farmers to abandon their fields, at least temporarily, and seek work in the towns. Participative water management projects as practiced in Bhipur village, growing crops with low water requirements and more sustainable farming practices are adaptation strategies that allow farmers to continue their activities despite climate risks.

Agricultural value chains link urban consumption with rural production. Changing demand, as a consequence of urbanization, emergence of «modern» consumption patterns or new trends in international trade, impacts on rural areas along value chains and spills over to marketing and production systems.These rural urban linkages bear challenges but also mutual benefits for producers and consumers and can be promising entry points for development interventions.This is illustrated with the case of the Kenyan potato value chain.

Until 1978, the Afghan state was weak but stable. In contrast, rural regulatory structures that complemented the state have always been strong. It was only the attempt to establish a strong state on the basis of foreign ideologies and military over the heads of the rural population that ultimately led to chaos and collapse.Whereas the central state sometimes broke down, many state
institutions in the provinces demonstrated remarkable resilience, leading to a definite nation-state consciousness throughout large sections of the population.

Although «urban» and «rural» development are often considered as in opposition to each other and seen as competing with each other for investment and support, many urban centres owe much of their economic base to agriculture. Ironically, one of the best tests of whether rural development is working is whether local urban centres are booming - as increasing agricultural output is served by markets and producer services there, and as real increases in income for a wide range of rural households are reflected in increased demand for goods and services provided by urban-based enterprises.

Rural livelihoods are far more multi-locational than is often assumed with many rural people spending a part of the year outside the village working in non-farm occupations. Contrary to early theory, persistent circular or seasonal migration within countries or between neighbouring countries is emerging as the migration pattern of the poor. Nowhere is this more evident than in Asia.

The relationship between urban and rural areas has undergone great change in recent years. It is now often difficult to clearly define the borders between the two; instead we find a continuum ranging from agricultural zones to suburbs, informal settlements and urban centers. But do countries and development cooperation policies have the instruments needed to promote a dynamic and balanced development of urban and rural areas and open up opportunities for the people who live there?

For the first time in the recent history of rural development there is a possibility of creating an infrastructure that dramatically reduces the isolation of rural life. Although ICTs may seem a fragile basis on which to build far-reaching change, a meeting organized by CTA showed that they can speed up the exchange of knowledge and ideas between urban centres and rural communities. In countries struggling to maintain basic amenities, it is the towns that interface most closely with global society.

This conference paper examines how the ideology and programmatic set of policies coined in the term ‘neoliberal modernization’ applies to agriculture and practices in the Mekong region.

This country level analysis addresses land governance in Laos in two ways. First, it summarises what the existing body of knowledge tells us about power and configurations that shape access to and exclusion from land, particularly among smallholders, the rural poor, ethnic minorities and women. Second, it draws upon existing literature and expert assessment to provide a preliminary analysis of the openings for and obstacles to land governance reform afforded by the political economic structures and dynamics in the country.

The poster presents an overview of land, livelihoods and customary practices in Man-hsat Village, Northern Shan State, Myanmar. This poster is one of a five village case studies produced by partner organizations during field-based training on how to document customary tenure systems, supported by MRLG.