This book is a challenge to those who see the drylands as naturally vulnerable to food insecurity and poverty. 

It argues that improving agricultural productivity in dryland environments is possible by working with climatic uncertainty rather than seeking to control it – a view that runs contrary to decade of development practice in arid and semi-arid lands.

Across China, Kenya and India – and most other dryland countries – family farmers and herders relate to the inherent variability of the drylands as a resource to be valued, rather than a problem to be avoided. 

Overview of the relationship between gender, poverty and water. The first section explores how, in every corner of the globe, women play a central role in managing water supply and distribution. It also examines how access to water and sanitation has implications for women’s health and economic activities.

Participatory mapping, commonly used in participatory development, plays an important role in helping marginalised groups by making visible the association between land and local communities, highlighting important social, historical and cultural knowledge as well as presenting geographical feature information.

Mineral wealth often detracts from, rather than enhances, the economic performance of developing countries, a phenomenon known as the “resource curse”. The need to finance basic government expenditure, as well as rent-seeking behaviour by individuals and interest groups, puts pressure on developing country governments to spend mineral revenues rather than reinvest them.

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is sparking renewed interest and debate on issues such as transparency of government – company contracts, reporting on revenues from natural resources by company and by project, and reporting on revenue expenditure.

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.

This paper initially highlights the general characteristics of rangelands and pastoral production systems of the Tibetan Plateau.The article finds that:given the realities of life in a heterogeneous and marginal environment, the issue of secure resource tenure, both customary and legal, is fundamental for effective rangeland managementa simple shift in tenure from the communal (traditional and subsistence) to individual household level (ranching and commercial) will not be enough to facilitate a change in behaviour toward "rational" livestock operationsmany institutional mechanisms must be

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.

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.