Pastoralism is an ancient form of self-provisioning that is still in wide use today throughout the world. While many pastoral regions are the focus of current desertification studies, the long history of sustainability evidenced by these cultures is of great interest. Numerous studies suggesting a general trend of desertification intimate degradation is a recent phenomenon principally attributable to changes in land tenure, management, and treatment.

Degradation of common pool resource (CPR) in developing countries has often been traced to high rate attached by poor people in discounting future flow of benefits, market failure, pressure on carrying capacity or sometimes property right failure. However, the concept of poorly enforced property right and particularly risk of eviction as a measure of insecurity of land tenure has not been adequately examined in the context of degradation of CPR.

Large-scale transnational land acquisition of agricultural land in the global south by rich corporations or countries raises challenging normative questions. In this article, the author critically examines and advocates a human rights approach to these questions. Mutually reinforcing, policies, governance and practice promote equitable and secure land tenure that in turn, strengthens other human rights, such as to employment, livelihood and food.

The article provides with a description of sectorial and regional planning in the Republic of Belarus which consists of a hierarchically organized system of socio-economic development programs of the republic, its regions and districts as well as the complex of documents of regional planning. Being under development the land tenure schemes for administrative districts should be most closely linked to the Programs of socio-economic development of the districts. For the next five-year plan it’s proposed the standard structure of the document.

The lack of sufficient access to clean water is a common problem faced by communities, efforts to alleviate poverty and gender inequality and improve economic growth in developing countries. While reforms have been implemented to manage water resources, these have taken little notice of how people use and manage their water and have had limited effect at the ground level. On the other hand, regulations developed within communities are livelihood-oriented and provide incentives for collective action but they can also be hierarchal, enforcing power and gender inequalities.

Soybean production has become a significant force for economic development in Brazil. It has also received considerable attention from environmental and social non-governmental organizations as a driver of deforestation and land consolidation. While many researchers have examined the impacts of soybean production on human and environmental landscapes, there has been little investigation into the economic and institutional context of Brazilian soybean production or the relationship between soy yields and planted area.

This paper discusses the internal processes and decisions that characterized thetransition from collectively held group ranches to individualized property systems amongthe Maasai pastoralists of Kajiado district in Kenya. It addresses the question of whygroup ranch members would demand individualized property systems, but then turnagainst the outcome. In addressing this puzzle the paper discusses the process of landallocation and distribution during group ranch subdivision.

Agricultural crops and pasturelands cover 24–38% of the global land area, and thus the ecological services that agricultural systems provide are of utmost societal importance. An important determinant of ecosystem services provision from European farmland is the amount and spatial arrangement of trees, shrubs and woodlands that are integrated into the respective land-use systems.

A voluntary conservation approach may reveal environmentally minded landowners who are willing to protect their lands with a compensation that is lower than the market price based compensation. Consequently, voluntary conservation programs may induce lower costs than traditional obligatory programs, such as a land taking. We compared the costs accrued from land purchasing with those from temporal land leasing. The costs included both direct costs, such as fees of land acquisition and compensation payments in land leasing, and transaction costs.