The purpose of this guide is to provide support to those who are assessing and designing appropriate responses to food insecurity and rural development situations. This guide aims to show where and why land tenure is an important issue in food security and sustainable rural livelihoods. The main objective of these guidelines is to provide detailed suggestions for consideration of land tenure issues in rural development policy.

This report highlights key developments and recent sustainability trends in agriculture, rural development, land, desertification and drought, five of the six themes being considered by the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) at its 16th and 17th sessions (2008-2009).

This report offers a detailed analysis of the different challenges of land reform in both Zimbabwe and South Africa. The report looks at the history of land ownership and policy in both countries.For Zimbabwe, it offers practical policy suggestions for ways forward by identifying the contours of a post-Mugabe land approach.

This document investigates the concept of land reform in South Africa and argues that there is a need to redefine 'land reform' to take account of the realities of an urbanising, modernising, economy. It analyses recent political developments on land issues and sheds light on the current process of land reform as well as agro-climatic, economic, budgetary constraints that impinge on the process.

This case study deals with the South African government policies for restitution and redistribution of land to people in rural areas who were deprived of it due to racially discriminatory laws and practice. Its main focus is on how the interactions between civil society and the state in the several phases of land reform through the 1990s reflect some key issues of governance, eg.

Poverty in the Near East and North Africa region (NENA) is mainly a rural phenomenon. Almost half (48%) the area’s population lives in rural areas. This report focuses on key rural poverty issues in 13 diverse countries in the region, without attempting to propose policy or programme actions at national or local levels. Overall, the rural poor still face traditional constraints such as water scarcity, inadequate rural infrastructure, inappropriate policies and institutions, weak local-level organisations and gender inequity.

This draft paper outlines a strategy for World Bank involvement in land policies. It focuses on property rights to land, land transactions, and socially optimal use of land.

This paper examines the challenges of institutional, organisational and policy reform around land in Southern Africa. It analyses the land situation in South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and identifies key issues for further research in each of these countries.
Findings include:

This paper looks at the case of Mdudwa village in the Eastern Cape to explore the processes and impacts of democratic decentralisation.

This report details the findings of a round table discussion on land reform and agricultural development in South Africa convened by The Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) in October 2007.

This document presents the results of an evaluation of an IFAD project aimed at preventing land degradation in Nepal. The project is based on leasehold forestry, an innovative approach introduced by IFAD in the early 1990s. It works by providing forty-year leases to groups of households and giving them user rights over plots of degraded forest land.

This CMI working paper provides an overview of rural-urban linkages in sub-Saharan Africa outlining the major strands of contemporary academic debates on this issue. There author identifies two interrelated debates for discussion. The first is about the historiography of migrancy, predominantly in Southern and Eastern Africa; the other one is about the relationship between research on labour migration and the policy prescriptions that ostensibly follow.The author goes on to draw some tentative conclusions about what might be the implications of these debates for urban workers in Kenya.