This paper relays that the renewed outbreak of violence in North Kivu in the second half of 2008 saw the long running insecurity in Eastern DR Congo become the top global news story for two weeks as another humanitarian crisis unfolded before the world. The intense media scrutiny resulted in a plethora of stakeholders working, as the authors assert, to portray the conflict in ways that best fitted their own agendas; in particular, the region’s mineral wealth was implicated as contributing in the violence.

Recent arguments have stated that the new livestock development policy will carry a high social cost, that the reality of range degradation in Botswana has been ignored, and that there is no basis for assuming that de-stocking would decrease the productivity of rangeland.

UK aid money is creating an "oil curse" for developing economies, according to this new report published by Friends of the Earth, Plan B and Platform Research. Pumping Poverty accuses DFID of an aid policy that is incoherent, fails the people it is design

This paper draws out the key links between land tenure and poverty eradication. The author argues that in countries where land distribution remains highly inequitable, effectively designed and targeted, it could be a key component of anti-poverty strategies, but significant complementary measures, notably agrarian support services, are also required to achieve real impacts, together with investments in employment and economic diversification.

Thinking about forest management has undergone important changes over the last two decades. These changes have inspired attention to the reform of forest laws on a range of subjects, from forest planning and utilization to governance and trade. From its traditional narrow focus on government control and management of forests, modern forest law has expanded to encompass attention to environmental and social goals and to accommodating the interests of multiple stakeholders in forest management.

This paper examines the impact of land reform in Vietnam which gives households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their land-use rights. The authors expect this change to increase the incentives as well as the ability to undertake long-term investments on the part of households.

It is estimated that up to 84% of Malawians earn their livelihoods directly from agriculture - it contributes over 90% to export earnings, 40% to GDP and accounts for 85% of total employment.

A growing recognition of the need to delimit the role of the government, to promote the market framework, and to rely on the private sector as the engine of growth, offers the prospect of a new beginning in rural development in Africa. Rural people must take a more dominant role, both in shaping their economic prospects and in assuming the responsibility for a high quality of stewardship of natural resources. To help to bring about such an empowerment of the people, governments and the donors will need to undertake some drastic reforms in the old systems and habits of governance.

Local entrepreneurs drive development in deprived neighbourhoods. Small-scale actions – rather than abstract urban planning by officials – are most effective. Planners should start observing street life and begin to understand that everyday practice and local enterprises can, with a little outside help, be scaled up to improve poor urban people’s lives.

Developers study the property market carefully and then, based on the property cycle, and risk and profit calculations, they acquire land and develop it, with a specific product in mind. Municipalities play a governance role, and are mandated to ensure that the development is in line with government policies and development plans for the area.

The restructuring of local government in South Africa began in the mid-1990s. A number of smaller local councils in the greater Durban area were amalgamated into a single metropolitan municipality, and the boundaries of the city were expanded to incorporate a number of new areas. The department responsible for economic development at the time started to look for a suitable location for a focused, municipality-led intervention in the newly incorporated areas. The political violence of the 1980s had been particularly intense in the northern areas.

The triple challenge of rapid population growth, declining agricultural productivity, and natural resource degradation are not isolated from one another; they are intimately related. However, strategic planning and development programming tend to focus on individual sectors such as the environment, agriculture, and population; they do not explicitly take into account the compatibilities and inconsistencies among them. Farm households and their livelihood strategies are at the core of the intersectoral linkages approach advocated in this chapter.