This study contends that Zambia cannot develop if it neglects policy for the efficient utilization of its natural resources. One such area has been the absence of land policy for effective management of rural land.While failure in this area has been attributed to a number of factors, notably absence of credit and funding, this paper contends that the base factor is the absence of efficient land management for rural land.This paper attempts to show that rural land in Zambia remains undeveloped for a number of reasons:The absence of an institutional framework to guide land administration.

Tenure reform aims to secure people's land rights. In Southern Africa most so-called 'communal' land, reserved for Africans, is still held by the state. In these areas, land rights are increasingly insecure. Yet, the confirmation of the rights of those who have long occupied and used the land lags behind programmes that aim to transfer white-held land to Africans. Many colonial and apartheid land laws are still in force, particularly those relating to chiefs, who resist any reduction to their power.

What are the effects of trends away from legal pluralism towards more uniform approaches to the law? This paper analyses the effects of legal changes in property rights for people's welfare and development in India.

This paper argues that the focus in the community based natural resource management (CBNRM) literature on the devolution and decentralisation of state authority and responsibility over natural resources to communities does not pay sufficient attention to the role of the state in creating and maintaining a coherent institutional environment.

In a number of developing countries, partnerships between the private sector and local communities are becoming more and more common, especially as communities are increasingly gaining rights to wildlife and other valuable tourism assets on their land through national policy changes on land tenure.

Articles in this edition develop several areas and introduce specific experiences relating to land reform. The main thread running through the articles is that of change; how we can help to understand what change means and how it can be managed.

This paper considers the degree of environmental variability in an extensive pastoral area of Altay, northern Xinjiang (China); assesses the extent to which institutional arrangements are able to accommodate environmental variability, and discusses the implications of this for rangeland policy.The article finds that:there is some inter-temporal variation in rangeland productivity (in pasture zones), suggesting some applicability of new range ecologythere is less environmntal variation in summer pasture, suggesting that the concepts and tools of conventional rangeland management might be mor

The primary purpose of this paper is to make a contribution towards extending the coverage of this cropland tenure literature to China's extensive grasslands, which comprise some 40% of its territory.The article finds that:there are two unique characteristics of grassland tenure in this territory: group tenure arrangements and 'fuzzy' boundariesin conventional microeconomic analysis, both of these characteristics raise efficiency concernsthese concerns are only partly justified.

This article discusses the transhumant pastoralists of the Abruzzo highlands of central Italy. The article indicates that this system of production depended, and still depends, on the availability of communal grazing areas where access is open to all local residents and management is joint. The article discusses the relationship between herders, common property regimes and the State.The article concludes that:as a pastoral system increases in complexity, from being a self contained CPR to an outward-looking one, with moveable assets and flocks, transaction costs increase.

Dryland salinisation is a non-point and intertemporal stock externality which requires a dynamic modelling approach to study its long-term management. In this paper a simple dynamic optimisation model is developed and applied to find land-use strategies that maximise benefits from the viewpoints of both individual farmers and the catchment as a whole. Privately optimal land-use may result in an ever-increasing trend in salinity and a declining trend in productivity for the discharge zone of the catchment.

Summarises the 12 presentations made at the workshop, 8 of which concerned Mozambique, the remainder Sao Tome & Principe, Angola, Guinea Bissau and Cabo Verde. Topics include the work of the inter-ministerial Land Commission, the Technical Annex of the Land Law, DINAGECA, and a training video A Nossa Tera (available in Portuguese and English). Concludes with a summary of the seminar outcomes and a note on their transferability to Anglophone countries.