Globalization offers a mix of new trajectories for agriculture, livelihoods, resource use, and environmental conservation. The papers in this issue share elements that advance our understanding of these new trajectories.

Legislative changes during recent decades resulted in a massive shift away from livestock towards game ranching in southern Africa, resulting in significant increases in the abundance and distribution of many wildlife species. However, there are problems associated with game ranching from a conservation perspective, including persecution of predators, overstocking, introductions of exotic species and genetic manipulation of 'huntable' species.

The Government of Zambia is embarking on an ambitious program of legal and administrative reforms in land policy. Although the need to liberalize the land market is universally shared, the ideas on how to accomplish this transformation are not. Two decades of underinvestment in field research have resulted in the present situation of micro-level data on land tenure and farm-level production, consumption, and resource management inadequate to guide policy decisions.

A ‘pink tide’ swept over Latin America following Hugo Chávez's 1998 election to the presidency in Venezuela, bringing to power multiple left or center-left governments. What possibilities for and obstacles to social change were presented by their having attained power through the ballot box? This question is explored through an examination of Venezuela's agrarian reform and the promotion of agroecology within it.

When South Africa's land reform programme finally reached rural Umbumbulu, a potential for conflict over land emerged unexpectedly. Strategically located near a major urban centre, residents of this region have long relied on wages and social welfare grants. Land was valued primarily for residential security and as a symbolic representation of community membership, rather than for productive purposes. This emphasis on community membership, however, created the potential for conflict when a local chief challenged a civil society group over their authority to claim land.

Throughout the Philippines' agrarian history, various interventions have been made to improve the lives of smallholder farmers, but the majority failed to materialize. In 1988, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL) was passed, which sought to achieve more equitable land ownership, more empowered beneficiaries and improved livelihoods. This study aims to identify the factors affecting agrarian reform beneficiaries' (ARBs) perceptions of success or failure of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) in Malita, Davao del Sur.

Taking Krasnodar region as an example, the necessity of developing and implementing of the scientifically based system for preserving and raising the soil fertility is proven. The adaptation of agriculture to specific features of natural landscapes is needed for its introduction. Concrete designs must be performed taking into account specific features in agricultural organizations with various forms of ownership, dimensions and directions.

Using an analysis of aerial photographs from 1942, 1985 and 2004 we assessed the impact of changing land tenure and land-use regimes on the cover of thicket vegetation on the Grahamstown commonage. Land-use impacts were examined by comparing plant species composition within three vegetation types between sites incorporated into commonage for different lengths of time and sites outside the commonage. Results showed that thicket cover increased by 87% between 1942 and 1985 but declined by 11% between 1985 and 2004.

While community based resource management was practiced for centuries by many traditional societies of the world, these resources are continuously being eroded in the recent years. This paper uses a case study of the Khazans, the coastal wetlands of Goa, in order to study determinants of successful environmental regimes. Khazans are the low-lying coastal lands that have been reclaimed from marshy mangroves by the construction of embankments and sluice gates.

The income inequality implications of land reform are examined for the case of Georgia using regression-based inequality decomposition techniques. An egalitarian land redistribution is likely to equalize per-capita income among farm households, implying that continuing the land reform process in Georgia is likely to benefit poorer households, relatively speaking. However, land fragmentation was found to be disequalizing, and therefore land market developments that enable plot consolidation are not less important for inequality than the land redistribution itself.

Having done research on agricultural decollectivization and its consequences since 1992, Ilkka Alanen and his colleagues has accumulated a wealth of knowledge on the coping strategies people adopted in order to survive in the Baltic countries and elsewhere (See Alanen 1998, Alanen et al 2001 and Alanen 2004a). The problems turned out to be much more difficult than the reforms planers anticipated, and that some of the initial failures still overshadow people’s lives.

Critics of The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics (Lexington: 2010, University Press of Kentucky) have difficulties with its commitment to agrarian philosophy, and have also suggested that the program described there needs more elaboration of how sustainability might be pursued, especially in its social dimensions. The book draws upon agrarian philosophy to argue that habit and material practice are an appropriate and vital focus of ethics.