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 presents an overview of pastoral systems and addresses rights issues around access and control of resources in the context of climate change.

This article, a summary of the book sharing the same title, examines issues around the allocation of land and education within families.

The analysis of land investment and tenure security usually assumes land scarcity. However, some developing countries have communities with land abundance. This article therefore examines the effects of land abundance for investment and tenure security. The author finds that in contrast to the literature, area farmed is a determinant of investment and tenure security. However, no link exists between investment and tenure security.

This study focuses on mining related conflicts in Tanzania, a relatively new mining country. It argues that unclear land and mining rights, and conceptual differences in how land and mining rights are perceived, contribute to conflict in the country and to a feeling among both local people and human rights advocacy groups that the government has betrayed ordinary people.The study finds that there have been seven recorded conflicts related to mining companies in the country, six of them taking place over the last seven years.

Improving women’s ability to securely access land is recognised as an effective means to increase gender equality and advance other key social and economic development goals. Despite progressive laws in many African countries, gender disparities commonly persist in women’s access and ownership of land.

This document presents a framework for identifying and asserting tenure and human rights associated with forests and land use in the context of climate change policies and measures. It argues that clearly defined land rights can help identify which actors are necessary to address drivers of deforestation and can determine shares in benefits from reduced deforestation. Local resource management may even improve forest outcomes.

This document reports on a workshop held in South Africa in June 2003 to address continuing insecurity of women's land rights. It brought together a broad group of participants covering NGO, grassroots, government, UN agency staff, researchers, activists, lawyers, and women living with HIV/AIDS.

Series of country papers on HIV/AIDS and land in Lesotho, Kenya, South Africa, Malawi, Tanzania, with concluding paper on methodological and conceptual issues. The key questions addressed include: The impact on and changes in land tenure systems (including patterns of ownership, access, and rights) as a consequence of HIV/AIDS with a focus on vulnerable groups. The ways that HIV/AIDS affected households are coping in terms of land use, management and access, e.g. abandoning land due to fear of losing land, renting out due to inability to utilise land, distress sale of land, etc.

The main argument of this paper is that insecurity of land tenure is a socio-political condition that can be made and unmade. This discussion paper focuses on customary land rights, particularly in the African context. The paper reveals that:

Examining the assumption that private property rights create incentives for the management of resources, this paper argues that private property rights and current wildlife conservation and management laws and policies in Kenya fail to provide the solution to wildlife biodiversity erosion.

Attempts at settling or sedentarizing nomadic herders in semi-arid and arid regions have been largely unsuccessful, partly on account of the difficulty of restricting the movements of domestic livestock in areas where low and irregular rainfall lead to scant and unreliable sources of water and grazing. But for the herders in sub-humid regions, where both water and vegetation resources are much more reliable and substantial, there appear to be different possibilities.