Donors have flocked to support Tanzania’s pastoralist land rights movement. However, well-intentioned desires to promote democracy, indigenous rights, participatory development and community conservation have had perverse consequences. Leaders of pastoral non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have become less and less accountable to their communities. The pastoralist movement has lost momentum as its energies have been diverted into activities to please donors.

This paper examines the current wave of land tenure reform in eastern and southern Africa. It discusses how far tenure reform reflects a shift in powers over property from centre to periphery. A central question is whether tenure reform is designed to deliver to rural smallholders greater security of tenure and greater control over the regulation and transfer of these rights.Policy conclusions include:whilst diverse in initial objective, and uneven in delivery, tenure reforms address a remarkably common set of concerns.

This paper is about Untouchable ancestors' strong emotional attachment to their ancestral land. Ancestrors of Untouchables remain in their ancestral land at the margin of the village, whereas ancestors of high castes leave for the abode of ancestors, after expiating their sins by transferring them to Untouchables. Since land became a saleable commodity during the nineteenth century, many high caste people became the owners of marginal lands. This trend culminated in land reforms, which officially turned the "landless agricultural labourers" in to landowners.

Manual offers guidelines for using rapid appraisal methods to gather information on tenure and natural resource management. It translates the concepts elaborated in Community Forestry Note 5, rapid appraisal of tree and land tenure. The author defines rapid appraisal as "a family of methodologies designed to encourage the participation of local communities in the collection and use of information to improve their livelihood.

The paper tests two theoretical models that explain land productivity differentials between owner-tenants, owner-operators and owner-landlords, and between plots of land operated under different tenancy contracts by owner-tenants.The owner-tenants were richer in non-land resources than owner-operators and owner-landlords and the analysis showed that the land productivity followed the same pattern being highest for owner-tenants. This shows that the land rental market transfers land from less efficient to more efficient land users.

The need for large-scale land redistribution in Southern Africa is undisputed. In order to redress centuries of dispossession, this highly complex process has the potential to encourage economic growth and poverty reduction. Based on a 2004 conference in Cape Town, this publication details the major themes in the de-racialisation of land ownership in South Africa.The book covers the work of ten key voices on the issue of land reform both regionally and in South Africa. The first section of the book establishes a historical, theoretical and comparative context for the South African debate.

Land Management embraces systems of land administration, land use management, land information management, and land taxation. Land management is generally understood in South Africa as the manner in which land is controlled, managed, planned for, utilised and transacted.

This report summarise the research findings of a project to examine the current processes of land rights registration in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Mozambique and assess their outcomes for poor and vulnerable groups. It examines the design and process of registration, the governance of those processes and the equity of the outcomes.This research finds that land registration is not inherently anti-poor in its impacts and that the distributional consequences of land registration depend on the design of the process and on the institutions responsible for its management.

Drawing upon several sources of information and types of analysis, including literature reviews, field visits and rapid participatory assessments, this paper provides a critical assessment of land-related development policies and projects over the past two decades in Central America. Reflections on past land-related development policies and projects in Central America are based on their contributions to growth and poverty reduction.

Presents some preliminary results on the impact of the economic crisis on farmers’ livelihood and forest use, based on fieldwork in four provinces in Indonesia (Riau, West and East Kalimantan, Central Sulawesi). Stresses the great variation throughout the country, and the volatility of the situation. Price data reveal that some groups of export crops-oriented farmers enjoyed a short-term gain during the first 2-3 quarters of 1998. Soaring food prices and a stronger rupiah since October 1998 have, however, gradually made real prices move towards their pre-crisis levels.

Future Agricultures Working Paper 73Emmanuel Sulle and Fred NelsonDecember 2013

Following initial enthusiasm in the post-war period, land reform fell out of favour with donors from the early 1970s. Nonetheless, sporadic efforts to redistribute land continued: Ethiopia in 1975, Zimbabwe in 1980 and a renewed commitment to land reform in the Philippines in 1988. These reforms stemmed from shifts in the domestic balance of power between landowners and landless workers and peasants, which were quite independent of donor policies.