Many of the negative consequences of dam-related involuntary displacement of affected communities can be overcome by careful planning and by providing resettlers with adequate compensation. In this paper the resettlement scheme of the Kotmale Dam in Sri Lanka is revisited, focusing on resettlers' positive perceptions. Displaced communities expressed satisfaction when income levels and stability were higher in addition to their having access to land ownership titles, good irrigation infrastructure, water, and more opportunities for their children.

A variety of tools can be employed in support of environmental policy objectives, but achieving preferred outcomes also requires the cooperation of private landholders and others with vested interests in the land. The Land Stewardship project in the state of Victoria, Australia, is an initiative devoted to exploring the ways in which private landholders could be encouraged towards more sustainable land management.

The management of soils is an important issue for policy makers in Ethiopia. However, most of the interventions designed to conserve the soil resources have fallen short of the expectations, performing impressively in the short run, but proving unsustainable on a long-term basis. There are no simple explanations for the failure of these interventions to reverse soil degradation, but it has been evident for some time that there is an uneasy connection between 'objective' assessments of the state of the land and the way this information is used in the policy-making processes.

Agricultural water use in agrarian economies is often state subsidized for the enhancement of agricultural productivity while poverty alleviation is also targeted. The Indian agricultural dependent states offer representative examples of undervalued irrigation services mainly sourced by canal networks. However, the current inefficient operation of canal irrigation systems diverts water demand to private initiatives by significantly increasing economic value of agricultural water.

Water use and landholding factors are widely acknowledged as major determinants of agricultural development in agrarian regions of the Indo-Gangetic basin (IGB). High attention is mainly given to irrigation policy while land is often apprehended through soil productivity aspects. However, the nexus between land scale and water consumption in respect to the economic implications of agricultural development is poorly elaborated. To this aim, this paper examines the economic effects of water use and landholding scale to farming in agricultural communities of IGB area.

This article shows that credit market imperfections have important implications for the distribution of policy rents. In a model with land as fixed factor and credit market imperfections, when an area payment is given, land rents go up by more than the subsidy. On aggregate farms may lose from the subsidy. The results depend on the extent to which subsidies have direct and indirect effects on the credit constraints, on whether farms rent or own land, and on farm heterogeneity.

Against the backdrop of post-Apartheid neoliberal reform, South African landowners have gained the option to acquire full ownership over wild animals on their land. Corresponding with this, approximately one sixth of South Africa's total land has been ‘game-fenced’ and converted for wildlife-based production (i.e. hunting, ecotourism, live trade and venison production). This article analyzes the institutional process in which authority concerning access to wildlife is being restructured, and argues that the unfolding property regime leads to an intensified form of green grabbing.

Agroforestry systems have been re-evaluated with a renewed scientific interest as appropriate models for achieving sustainable production while maintaining planned and associated biodiversity and agroecosystem functioning. Traditional bamboo-tree gardens in West Java are known to play substantial ecological and socioeconomic roles. In this study, we attempted to elucidate the relationship between income generation and biodiversity by studying 83 bamboo-tree gardens that varied in species composition and degree of commercialization.

We investigated the relationships of land tenure, biological, cultural and spatial variables and their effect on the intensity of management of 20 edible plants used by the Santa Maria Tecomavaca community in Oaxaca State, Mexico. We developed a non-linear generalized model showing that land ownership, cultural importance and biological characteristics of a plant are the most significant factors influencing farmers' decisions to intensify management of plant resources.

In the Brazilian Amazon, insecure property rights are among the main causes of land conflicts and deforestation. Through an in-depth empirical case study in Maranhao in the Eastern Amazon, this research analyzes how distorted agrarian, forest and environmental policies, laws and regulations originated insecure property rights not only over land, but also over timber, which allied to social and political factors, such as uneven distribution of land and strong organization of landless peasants, led to land conflicts and deforestation.

A review of the four main wood energy sectors in the U.S. was conducted to explore historic trends and the impact of alternative energy prices and public policies on wood energy consumption. High oil prices have triggered the adoption of government regulation and financial incentives to promote greater use of wood energy over the last four decades. However, the amount of wood energy consumed in the U.S. industrial sector was driven mainly by the output of the pulp and paper products industry and not by energy prices or any particular public policy incentive.

Recent increases in farm real estate values in the United States have increased farm equity. By exploiting periods of high and low appreciation that caused various increases in wealth for farmers owning various shares of their farmland, we examine whether U.S. grain farmers expanded their acres harvested or acres owned in response to an increase in their land wealth. We find that land wealth had little effect on farm size. However, for similarly-sized farms, a larger ownership share (10 percentage points) led to an increase in the growth of land owned (2 percentage points).