In Latin America, government interventions in land grabbing processes provide some preliminary lessons on dealing with this phenomenon, while highlighting some serious threats.

During the 1990s, powerful development institutions like the World Bank came to see the social networks and norms of the rural poor in developing countries as 'assets' to be tapped for poverty alleviation. Defined by Robert Putnam (1995:67) as 'features of social organisation such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit', social capital was proclaimed the 'missing link' in development (Grooetaert 1997).

The main argument of this paper is that insecurity of land tenure is a socio-political condition that can be made and unmade. This discussion paper focuses on customary land rights, particularly in the African context. The paper reveals that:

Land governance and administration are critical for achieving economic growth and development in any country. It is within this context that the World Bank introduced the Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF) for identifying specific areas for land reform while also providing a means for monitoring.

Women’s land ownership and control have important connections with their empowerment in Pakistan’s agricultural context. However, the link between these has largely remained unexplored; and there has been negligible research to determine how many women own or control land in Pakistan. The Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) carried out a multiple pronged research in 2007-09 to fill this knowledge gap and to examine the causality behind women’s land ownership and empowerment.

There are no simple solutions for leveraging the project inputs required for the success of township development projects. In most cases, such projects require long planning and implementation periods, the involvement of numerous agencies, and ample persistence and skill. This paper will examines how the inputs for successful township development projects can be mobilised and managed through the course of a project.

Mediating Land Conflict in Burundi: A Documentation and Analysis Project was an assessment and evaluation project undertaken by ACCORD between July 2009 and February 2010. The purpose of the project was twofold. First, it explored how land conflict mediation addresses or relates to other more long-term challenges for peace in Burundi – principally, the utilisation of land and increasing access to sustainable livelihoods.

The scale and speed of coordinated land grabs over the past five years has created a new avenue through which people are being displaced and dispossessed of their lands.  This paper looks at what limits international and national law in addressing displacement and dispossession due to land grabs in Mozambique.

Current estimates of climate change state that the world’s average temperature is due to increase by at least 2oC to 2.4oC over the next 50?100 years. Furthermore it is expected that by the end of the century a range of additional impacts will be felt: sea levels will rise by an estimated 60cm, resulting in flooding and the salinisation of fresh water aquifers, and snow and ice cover will decrease. Simultaneously, precipitation patterns will change so that some areas will receive large increases whilst other areas will become hotter and drier.

It has emerged quite clearly from Urban LandMark’s work in South Africa – and increasingly in the region – that the emergence of more sophisticated property markets has taken place locally and in most larger cities in the region. While there might be a need to assist these markets to develop further, in particular the need to build market institutions and professions, these groupings tend to increase their own capacities as the markets develop, mostly with little assistance.

For the last 60 years, the Korean economy has achieved an astounding development that is called “the Miracle of the Han River.” Korea was one of the world’s poorest countries at the time of the national liberation in 1945 and it went through a three-year long Korean War from 1950. However, it grew into one of the world’s leading trading powers. Its per capita income, which was merely 255 USD in 1970, reached 22,000 USD as of 2012.

This case study, published in the journal Conservation and Society, examines the impact of forest reforms in Bolivia on the indigenous Yuracaré people.

The recent surge in the efforts to reform forest governance-both through decentralisation and tenure reforms has been coupled by an increase in empirical studies that assess the virtues and limitations of the new regimes. Despite an increasing body of literature, however, there is still limited knowledge about the effects of these reforms on the indigenous groups and their forest governance institutions.