While academics have largely shifted their focus from ‘women in development’ to addressing women and men as
part of broader ‘gendered’ social relations, this shift is yet to be fully translated into development practice. This
requires development practitioners to be sensitive to local contexts and to the various inequalities they contain
with regards to land rights and land use (based on class, gender, age, migration status etc.).

The Mekong region – Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam – is in the midst of profound social and environmental change. Despite rapid urbanization, the region remains predominantly rural. More than 60 per cent of its population live in rural areas, and the vast majority of these people are engaged in agriculture. Due to rapid growth of its agricultural sector, the Mekong region has become a global centre of production and trade for commodities such as rubber, rice, cassava, wood, sugar cane, and palm oil.

Up to 2.5 billion people depend on indigenous and community lands, which make up over 50 percent of the land on the planet; they legally own just one-fifth. The remaining land remains unprotected and vulnerable to land grabs from more powerful entities like governments and corporations. There is growing evidence of the vital role played by full legal ownership of land by indigenous peoples and local communities in preserving cultural diversity and in combating poverty and hunger, political instability and climate change.

This report suggests that a new and explicit goal of sustainable development to be agreed as a result of Rio+20 should be the reduction of the rate of land degradation to achieve land degradation neutrality, which we refer to as “Zero Net Land Degradation” or ZNLD.

Land restoration has tremendous potential to help the world limit climate change and achieve its aims for sustainable development. In its latest study, the International Resource Panel finds positive spin-offs to support all 17 Sustainable Development Goals agreed to by the world’s nations as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. While other reports have focused on a subset of the SDGs, this report has intentionally considered all of them, and has done so by inviting a large number of diverse authors to participate in the process.

Although there is global consensus that women’s land rights are fundamental for the realization of food security and rural development, accurate and reliable statistics to monitor the attainment and realisation of these rights are still lacking. Indeed, the lack of clear and accurate statistics on landownership and land management– that are disaggregated by sex - is problematic for developing clear policy responses to, and for monitoring of, inequalities faced by women and men in rural areas.

The eradication of hunger and poverty largely depend on how people, communities and others gain access to land. The livelihoods of many, particularly the rural poor including women, are based on secure and equitable access to and control over land and other natural resources. Land is a source of food and shelter; the basis for social, cultural and religious practices; and a central factor in economic growth.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its Climate Change and Land: An IPCC Special Report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems in 2019 (www.ipcc.ch/srccl). We refer to the IPCC’s report in short here as the Special Report on Climate Change and Land. The Special Report was a response to proposals from governments and observer organisations to the IPCC.

Large-scale land acquisitions often take place in developing countries which are also known for their corruption-friendliness caused by weak institutional frameworks. We hypothesize that corruption indeed leads to more land deals. We argue that corrupt elites exploit poor institutional setups (characterized by corruption) to strike deals with domestic and international investors at the expense of the local population. Using panel data for 156 countries from 2000-2011, we provide evidence that large-scale land deals indeed occur more often in countries with higher levels of corruption.

The Coase theorem emphasizes the role transactions costs play in efficient market outcomes. We document inefficient outcomes, in the presence of a transactions cost, in southern California land markets and the corresponding transition to efficient outcomes after the transactions cost is eliminated. In the late 1800s, Palm Springs, CA was evenly divided, in a checkerboard fashion, and property rights assigned in alternating blocks to the Agua Caliente tribe and a non-Indian landowner by the US Federal government.

This paper establishes that the Caloric Suitability Index (CSI) dominates the commonly used measure of agricultural suitability in the examination of the effect of land productivity on comparative economic development. The analysis demonstrates that the agricultural suitability index does not capture the large variation in the potential caloric yield across equally suitable land, reflecting the fact that land suitable for agriculture is not necessarily suitable for the most caloric-intensive crops.

Increasing diversity of urban activity attracts many people to try their fate in urban areas so as to heighten the flow of urbanization. This resulted in a large demand for land supply to accommodate the increasing number of city dwellers. On the other hand, land is a very limited resource and cannot be created or renewed, so the problem that often arises is the proliferation of slum and squatter areas in urban areas. The solution to the problem is to produce a land use website.