This bi-annual addition of id21 Natural Resources Highlights looks specifically at rural livelihoods. It contains the following three articles:

New thinking needed to tackle the rural employment crisis

A further 106 million people will have joined the rural labour force in the developing world by 2015. This article asks whether enough jobs can be created in rural areas to meet this demand, or whether further urban migration is the only answer.

How can small-scale producers compete globally?

Starting with a discussion of the scientific versus the traditional methods of land evaluation and perception, the authors formulate a methodological framework to integrate both perspectives into a geographic-information/expert-system environment aimed at sustainable development of a rural community, and present a case study in Central Mexico.

This paper examines the experiences of implementation of land reform policies in the Eastern Cape through a series of case studies.It looks at how attempts at redistribution, restitution and land tenure reform have resulted in a variety of models and approaches.

This document contains a collection of critical comments by experts working in the field of pastoralism with regard to several PDN papers.

The injustices of the land issue in South Africa under apartheid are well documented. A programme of land reform since then has had varied success. The authors argue that there is a great deal of empirical evidence to show that the private sector and markets make major contributions to South Africa’s development in general and to land reform in particular. It is in this light that this report looks at the contribution made by the private sector to land reform, both through organised land reform initiatives and in the ordinary course of their business.

This paper is concerned with understanding cattle production in Zimbabwe's Communal Lands, in so-called communal farming systems. Although commercial offtake from Zimbabwe's communal cattle herd is low, communal farmers are productive and rational in their cattle herd management. The economic rationale for cattle ownership is firstly to provide draught power and manure for tillage and secondly to provide milk and meat for local consumption, although the role of livestock in the farming system varies significantly from one part of Zimbabwe to another.

What are the effects of trends away from legal pluralism towards more uniform approaches to the law? This paper analyses the effects of legal changes in property rights for people's welfare and development in India.

The Land Policy in Tanzania is an example of citizens engaging in a protracted struggle for effective participation in the policy process, despite the long exclusion they have experienced in policy making. This paper looks at the evolution of the policy, and the interactions between civil society and the state in its development.The paper concludes that this was the first serious and systematic civic organizations' challenge to the state command model of policy process.

The Praedial Property Registration system has been presented as an alternative system to traditional registries for the formalization of immovable property. Much of the earlier design and pilot work for the Praedial Property Registration system was done by the Peruvian private organization, Instituto Libertad y Democracia (ILD). They claim that in Peru they "have formalized over 150,000 properties much more quickly, and at dramatically less costs, than traditional titling and registration programs" in three-and-a-half years during the early 1990s.

The series of studies discussed in this overview pull together updated information about large-scale land acquisitions in the region, with the aim of identifying trends, common threats, divergences and possible solutions. As well as summarising trends in investment, trade, crop development and land tenure arrangements, the studies focus on the land tenure and human rights challenges.

This paper examines the marginalization of women's land rights by governmental institutions and rural women's movements in Brazil.

The advance of the agricultural frontier constitutes the biggest source of deforestation in Central America today. This conversion of tropical forests into agricultural land and pasture is the direct result of individual land use decisions. This paper presents a simple analytical model of household land use, followed by an econometric analysis of household survey data from the Río San Juan region of Nicaragua in order to test for consistency with the model.