In developing countries, forests play an important role in supplying goods and services. These ecosystems are under many stresses due to unsustainable management practices, lack of clarity on tenure and access rights, and persistent pressure for land-use change. Climate change is exacerbating the impact of these stresses on both forest ecosystems and forest dependent people. What are the current forest coping strategies of different livelihoods? What is the role of forest ecosystems in increasing the resilience of rural communities?

Guaranteeing households’ equal access to land has long been advocated as paramount to implement development policies in Rural China. Given the chronic land scarcity in densely populated regions of China, finding a compromise between private and collective land rights has been important to protect livelihood safety nets and to address poverty issues in rural areas, especially in the initial stages of reform.

Farmers' access to and rights over seeds are the very pillars of agriculture, and thus represent an essential component of food sovereignty. Three decades after the term farmers' rights was first coined, there now exists a broad consensus that this new category of rights is historically grounded and imperative in the current context of the expansion of intellectual property rights (IPRs) over plant varieties.

This article presents a system dynamics (SD) method to examine the problem of forest degradation. The model developed takes a system-oriented view of forest management, embracing both social and biophysical factors affecting deforestation. Social factors examined are socio-economic variables or elements that influence behaviour and decision-making choices at the household level. Biophysical factors are four sub-components that are considered major land uses namely, the paddy field component, rattan plantations, coffee plantations and forest stands.

This study examined access of rural women to forest resources and its impact on rural household welfare in North Central Nigeria. Three states out of 6 states in the study area were purposively selected to cover 3 ethnic groups. A state was selected to cover at least one ethnic group. 4 villages were randomly selected in each state to make a total of 12 sample villages. Primary data were collected through structured questionnaire from 20 randomly selected rural women in each sample village to make a total of 240 respondents.

This study assessed the socioecological resilience of family farms in three land reform settlements in Mato Grosso, Brazil, located in the ecologically threatened Cerrado biome. Using focus groups, a household survey, and analysis of soil samples we characterized farming systems and quantified indicators of resilience, which we contextualized with a qualitative analysis of distributions of power and access to rights and resources.

Previous studies have shown that collective property rights offer higher flexibility than individual property and improve sustainable community-based forest management. Our case study, carried out in the Beni department of Bolivia, does not contradict this assertion, but shows that collective rights have been granted in areas where ecological contexts and market facilities were less favourable to intensive land use. Previous experiences suggest investigating political processes in order to understand the criteria according to which access rights were distributed.

Land ownership in the United States is understood as a bundle of sticks representing rights to sell, lease, bequeath, mine, subdivide, develop, and so forth. The right of exclusion allows owners to prevent others from exercising a right of access. Historically, access and then exclusion contributed to a sense of self-determination and personal freedom in the American landscape. Governing agencies reserve four rights for their use: condemnation, regulation, taxation, and escheat.

Land policy and the proposed land tenure reforms of Government have important implications for the development of the agriculture sector in Zambia. The purpose of this report is to ‘identify the critical issues that will need to be assessed further if DFID decides to offer support to the agricultural sector.’

This paper is published in Conservation and Society, Volume 4, No. 1, March 2006 which mainly examine the detailed variations of CPR use across different agro-climatic zones and critically analyzing the implications of such variations in understanding of the commons.

Since September 1993, ILCA and IFPRI have been engaged in a discussion about the most important, researchable, issues in the area of property rights. A concept note has been developed for collaborative research on the evolution of resource use and property institutions under risk. The starting point or framework was the Boserup, McIntire (and others) model of gradual intensification. This model has been used in documents such as the Winrock Assessment of Animal Agriculture to predict paths of future development and recommend research to facilitate that development.