Increased global demand for land underscores the need for well-designed, country-level land policies to protect long-held rights, facilitate land access, and address constraints to growth. However, reforms are often technically complex, politically sensitive, and time consuming.

Although Cambodia is one of Asia’s smallest and poorest economies—in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) only Burma’s per capita purchasing power is lower—changes in its environment for business and trade since the turn of the millennium have been rapid and dramatic.

Land deals are frequently agreed in secret between governments and investors.

We draw on empirical results from three case studies of property rights change across forest and fisheries ecosystems in central Vietnam to investigate the circumstances under which collective property rights may make sense.

Most of the land reforms of recent decades have followed an approach of “formalization and capitalization” of individual land titles (de Soto 2000).

Across the world, ‘green grabbing’ – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance.

ABSTRACTED FROM WEB INTRODUCTION AND EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: In order to inform Myanmar’s first multi-stakeholder national dialogue workshop on land tenure and user rights (held November 24th & 25th, 2012), Forest Trend’s Senior Law & Policy Advisor Rob Oberndorf was asked to conduct an in-depth analysis of recently enacted land legislation in the country, and suggest ways in which the legal

BACKGROUND: For agricultural systems to achieve climate-smart objectives, including improved food security and rural livelihoods as well as climate change adaptation and mitigation, they often need to be take a landscape approach; they must become ‘climate-smart landscapes’.

Over the past few years, agribusiness, investment funds and government agencies have been acquiring long-term rights over large areas of farmland in lower income countries.