Empirical evidence has shown that farmers can adapt to climate change by using sustainable land and water management (SLWM) practices that provide local mitigation benefits, reducing or offsetting the negative effects of climate change at the level of the plot, farm, or even landscape. However, adaptation to climate change using SLWM practices in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remains low. This study was conducted to examine the impact of government policies on adaptation to climate change.

This study compares the impacts of integrated soil fertility management (ISFM) on crop production with use of either mineral fertilizer or organic manure alone. We also investigate the conditions under which .ISFM technology has greater beneficial effects on yields and the factors constraining its uptake. To answer these questions, the study uses a cross-sectional, plot-level data set collected in Nigeria by the International Food Policy Research Institute and the World Bank in 2009.

The focus in the 2011 Cambodia Human Development Report is on climate change and rural live-lihoods. While this captures only part of the picture of climate change in Cambodia, it is an essential starting point. Even though Cambodia is changing rapidly and the distinctions between rural and urban are becoming less clear, most people continue to depend on a rural economy and natural resources. Although numerous transformations have occurred in this area in recent years, the rural economy remains the cornerstone of national development.

Common-pool resource management is a critical element in the interlocked challenges of food security, nutrition, poverty reduction, and environmental sustainability. This paper examines strategic policy choices and governance challenges facing Cambodia’s forests and fisheries, the most economically important subsectors of agriculture that rely on common-pool resources. It then outlines policy priorities for institutional development to achieve improvements in implementing these goals.

This report from EIA highlights an illegal trade in banned timber from Laos into Vietnam, where it supplies a booming furniture industry. The report suggests that this is the result of weak law enforcement and poor governance in Laos. A number of recommendations are made to address this situation, including improved cooperation between the two countries. The findings are based on undercover operations conducted in 2010 and 2011.

It has proved much easier to observe the stark divide between the ‘professional optimists’ in the development industry and the ‘professional pessimists’ in academic development studies than it has to disrupt these roles or to explain them in ways that prevent them remaining entrenched. This paper will present and discuss the “Geographies of Evasion” hypothesis which claims to explain how and why rights-based development interventions in particular fail.

Environment and poverty nexus is still a polemical issue. Some schools of thought claim that it is poverty that has the major effect on the environment, while another perspective suggests that the environment has more impact on the poor than vice-versa because the poor have no power to exploit the environment. In the context of Cambodia, there is a general consensus that the poor, particularly those living in rural areas, are heavily dependent on the environment i.e. common property resources.

This document presents selected analyses of key issues in CFM in Vietnam. It brings together contributions by leading analysts and thinkers and is organized in three main parts: Part 1 discusses issues related to the transfer of forest rights to local people through FLA. It starts with an overview of FLA policy and its outcomes by Nguyen Quang Tan and Thomas Sikor. A case study by Nguyen Dinh Tien, Tran Duc Vien and Nguyen Thanh Lam alerts readers to the fact that too much emphasis on conservation objectives may endanger the food security of the local people.

Cooperatives, associations, partnerships, non-profit organizations (NPOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are core elements of the Social Economy. Social Economy as an economic and societal development approach could support the sustainable rural and environmental management in South East Asian countries. Examples for Social Economy enterprises are microlending institutions, fishing and rice cooperatives in Vietnam and Thailand, pepper and pottery associations in Cambodia or rural and small scale industry commodities and service associations.

Swidden (also called shifting cultivation) has long been the dominant farming system in Montane Mainland Southeast Asia (MMSEA). Today the ecological bounty of this region is threatened by the expansion of settled agriculture, including the proliferation of rubber plantations. In the current conception of REDD+, landscapes involving swidden qualify almost automatically for replacement by other land-use systems because swiddens are perceived to be degraded and inefficient with regard to carbon sequestration.