Joint Ventures (JVs) between ‘agribusiness’ investors and ‘small farmers’ or ‘customary landowners’ are being promoted in South Africa’s land and agrarian reform programme as a way to include land reform beneficiaries in the country’s competitive agricultural sector. This paper undertakes an in-depth comparative analysis of two JV dairy farms located on irrigation schemes in the former ‘homeland’ of the Ciskei, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. The community, through government investment, brings the fixed assets to the business: land, irrigation infrastructure and milking parlours.

India promotes the production of biodiesel from tree-borne oilseeds. This is seen as an option for substituting fossil fuels, reducing CO2 emissions, afforesting wastelands, and generating rural employment. Critics, however, claim that it may lead to food scarcity and seizure of common lands by corporate investors. This report shows that biodiesel production in India has mainly positive effects. As it is promoted on the basis of non-edible oil seeds on marginal lands, the risks of driving up prices for edible oil or crowding out food production are relatively low.

Urban agriculture has been theorized by social scientists, and even some urban growers, as a means of reclaiming the commons. But what does “reclaiming the commons” entail? A longue-durée genealogy reveals distinct socio-legal imaginations of the commons and visions of how it might be reclaimed. Social thinkers and reformers have split over how to address the key problem of private property identified by John Locke: landless people who can’t find paid employment.

Opportunistic land encroachment, resulting from costly and incomplete enforcement of common land boundaries, is a problem in many less-developed countries. A multi-period model of such encroachment is presented in this paper. The model accounts explicitly for the cumulative effects of non-compliance of regulations designed to protect a finite, non-renewable resource - in this case common land - from private expropriation. Gradual evolution of property rights from common to private - the consequence of encroachment - is demonstrated to be an equilibrium.

Land is an imperative and crucial factor in the social, cultural and economic identity of the people in Sri Lanka due to the importance it has been given throughout our history. Moreover, the rights and interests over land are unequivocally and legally secured without any discrimination on the basis of gender, caste, religious or ethnic lines for its peaceful enjoyment and for the economic development of the people and the country.

Given its seemingly beneficial aspects to socioeconomic development and environmental well-being, the legislative reforms initiated under the Land Act of Bhutan, 2007 have raised so much consternation as well as hope in the minds of the Bhutanese people who either depend on livestock husbandry or leasing out such rights to others with livestock and compensated with payment in cash or kind in the form of livestock products.

Au Mali, au début des années 1990, la décentralisation fut d’abord un acte politique permettant de proposer une solution viable au problème de la rébellion touarègue.Ensuite, les aspirations aux idées occidentales démocratiques (pluralisme politique,liberté de la presse, etc.) d’une partie des élites urbaines ont rencontré les plans des occidentaux pour le développement de l’Afrique pour donner un système de décentralisation territoriale à la française, mais où la commune est composée d’un ensemble

Translation of the Customary

Over the course of their existence, peasant cooperatives known as ejidos and comunidades have significantly reconfigured the property relations, landscapes, and settlements of rural Mexico. These cooperatives remain relevant today, even though most of Mexico’s rural population now makes its living from activities other than agriculture. New uses, meanings, and values have attached themselves to the deagrarianized lands. Perhaps the most innovative resignification has been promoted by inhabitants who resist land commodification through a discourse of rights to Indigenous territory.

712 550 km², si on inclut les 226 000 km² du Sahara occidental. Organisé dans un axe général sudouest/nord-est, avec l’Océan atlantique comme frontière ouest, la Méditerranée pour celle du Nord. Dans la moitié nord se situe un axe montagneux, dans la même orientation que l’axe général du pays, incluant du sud au nord, l’Anti-Atlas, le Haut Atlas (point culminant à 4 167 m), le Moyen Atlas, et le Rif. La partie sud du pays est désertique (sableuse et pierreuse).

Les Fiches « Analyse des cadres juridiques et institutionnels » du CTFD fournissent par pays, un état des lieux des dispositifs organisant le foncier et l’accès aux ressources naturelles (renouvelables ou non), et en étudient les liens avec les processus de décentralisation à l’œuvre dans les différents États. Elles proposent une analyse institutionnelle et juridique, tout en portant un regard éclairé sur les pratiques et les dynamiques politiques.