The injustices of the land issue in South Africa under apartheid are well documented. A programme of land reform since then has had varied success. The authors argue that there is a great deal of empirical evidence to show that the private sector and markets make major contributions to South Africa’s development in general and to land reform in particular. It is in this light that this report looks at the contribution made by the private sector to land reform, both through organised land reform initiatives and in the ordinary course of their business.

Introduction and background.

This paper presents the preliminary results of two hypothetical futures for Vietnam, a High Climate Impact and a High Economic Growth Scenario.

This booklet provides information to forestry and land-use audiences, principally in developing countries, who want to find out more about the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and how it affects their activities.

Literature review, focusing on recent and contemporary tenancy structures in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Tenancy for purposes of this review is broadly defined to include different leasing arrangements such sharecropping, labor tenancy, fixed cash rentals, and reverse leasing. Authors have limited our discussion to private leasing of agricultural land, thereby ignoring issues pertaining to leasing of public, forest, and other noncrop lands.

This paper develops a theoretical model of land leasing that includes transaction costs, risk pooling motives and non-tradable productive inputs. It investigates the empirical implications of land contracts using data collected from four villages in Ethiopia.The paper shows that sharecropping is the dominant contract if transaction costs are negligible, but that a rental contract may arise if transaction costs decrease with increasing the tenant’s share of output.

The Land Policy in Tanzania is an example of citizens engaging in a protracted struggle for effective participation in the policy process, despite the long exclusion they have experienced in policy making. This paper looks at the evolution of the policy, and the interactions between civil society and the state in its development.The paper concludes that this was the first serious and systematic civic organizations' challenge to the state command model of policy process.

Summarizes recent research (to 1991) on rural land markets in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region and on the relationship between this research and broader land tenure issues. The purpose of the project that prompted this paper was to carry out cross-country and longitudinal research on land tenure issues in the LAC region so as to provide an instructive and informative analysis of how tenure patterns affect economic, rural development, and environmental issues.

Is land reform compatible with wildlife management? Zimbabwe is seeking to combine the redistribution of large, 'under-utilised' landholdings to smallholders, with wildlife management, which needs extensive land holdings to be viable. Whilst one stresses direct redistribution, equity and land for crops, the other emphasises maximising foreign exchange earnings, encouraging public-private partnerships and relies on trickle down.

As decentralisation and tenure reform sweeps through the Sahel, doubts remain whether communities can look after commonly owned land. Is privatisation or state control the best means of preventing the degradation of resources? Can local communities forge institutional mechanisms to regulate competing claims on common resources?

Greater investment in agriculture is needed to reduce rural poverty and improve food security; but how investment is made, its context and conditions, is at least as important as how much is invested.

Assesses the process to establish a system of land registration and improve land tenure security, and its outcomes for poor and marginalised groups in Amhara, Ethiopia .The registration process is found to be generating conflict at the local level, due to illegal land grabbing, encroachments into common lands and land sales.