This paper argues that REDD+ will not stop forest destruction developing countries and the underlying causes of deforestation remain untouched. The paper suggests that because REDD+ is embedded in the logic that environmental destruction in one location can be ‘compensated’ in another, it acts to reinforce the underlying drivers of deforestation and climate change. It also gives forest destroyers a way to legitimise their actions as environmentally ‘friendly’ or ‘carbon neutral’.

A University of Leeds collaborative study has probed links between environmental change and famine – two problems perceived to lie at the heart of Africa’s current crisis – in the context of another all too often linked to the continent - warfare and civil unrest. Land hunger and environmental depletion in the aftermath of war are often cited as causes of famine that in turn will lead to further conflict. Is such a chain reaction really at work? Is there an inevitable causal link between environmental degradation and violent conflict?

The current framework of economic growth and development includes a general trend towards the privatization of land rights and a collapse of collective structures in agriculture as well as a move towards reliance on land markets as the means of peasant access to participation in the development process. Despite the removal of land reform as an explicit part of the policy agenda, it is clear that the situations which led to the activation of land reforms in past decades are still in place.

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.

The ultimately disappointing results of past redistributive reforms caused contemporary policy-makers in Latin America to search for alternatives. In recent years, the issue of transforming tenure structure through the market mechanism has moved into the spotlight. This paper argues that it is extremely helpful to approach the topic from an institutional perspective. The institution of property rights is central to the discussion. New questions emerge: How are transactions actually being carried out in the rural setting?

Understanding land accumulation dynamics is relevant for policymakers interested in the economic effects of land inequality in developing country agriculture. This Working Paper explores and simultaneously tests the leading theories of microlevel land accumulation dynamics using unique panel data from Paraguay. The results suggest that farm growth varies systematically with farm size – a formal rejection of stochastic growth theories (that is, Gibrat's Law) – and that titled land area may have considerable infuence on land accumulation.

The primary purpose of this paper is to make a contribution towards extending the coverage of this cropland tenure literature to China's extensive grasslands, which comprise some 40% of its territory.The article finds that:there are two unique characteristics of grassland tenure in this territory: group tenure arrangements and 'fuzzy' boundariesin conventional microeconomic analysis, both of these characteristics raise efficiency concernsthese concerns are only partly justified.

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).

This report analyses the current status of the land-use sector under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol, and formulates options for how various incentives and systems could be harmonised under a future climate treaty. It argues that the land-use sector serves key environmental and social functions and supports the livelihoods of around a half of the world’s population. However, it is argued that the climate regime fails to formulate a coherent vision or set of incentives for mitigation and adaptation from the sector.

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:

Manual for researchers in Southeast Asia involved in the economic evaluation of tropical forest land use options. It was developed initially to serve as an aid to Cambodian researchers in the execution of an EEPSEA-financed study of non-timber forest values in Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia. The aim of the manual is to provide non-specialists with a basic theoretical background to economic valuation of the environment and with a practical methodology for an economic evaluation of alternative tropical forest land uses.

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.