In Papua New Guinea, the fate of forests is governed by forest-dwelling tribal societies. A rapidly increasing pace of logging compels us to ask why tribal communities prefer logging to conservation. In the absence of feasible development opportunities, remote communities become quickly enthusiastic about conservation projects, but once an area is opened up to logging few such projects survive. Direct payments to forest owners to cover the costs of missed opportunities for economic development are advocated here to make conservation competitive.

Land and agrarian reform has the potential to expand South Africa's rangeland commons and enhance their contribution to the livelihoods of the rural poor, yet to a large extent this has been an opportunity missed. Shifting policy agendas have prioritised private land rights and commercial land uses, seeking to dismantle the racial divide between the white commercial farming areas and the ex-Bantustans by allocating former white farms to black farmers. These agendas and planning models reflect class and gender bias and a poor understanding of common property.

The creation of local institutions with a mandate over land access and control is seen as a prerequisite for successful decentralisation of land tenure and effective local resource management in sub-Saharan Africa. However, with land tenure reform in South Africa currently at a state of legislative impasse, real uncertainty now exists over land rights and governance of rangeland in many communal areas.

Protected areas are intended to conserve biodiversity by restricting human activities within their boundaries. However, such restrictions are difficult to enforce fully in many tropical parks. Improving regulatory enforcement requires an understanding of prevailing challenges to detection and sanctioning activities. Drawing from empirical field research in 15 Colombian parks, I show that current enforcement efforts may be insufficient to deter most priority threats.

Most of the land reforms in developing countries in recent decades follow a blueprint that is based on the property rights theory. This blueprint was supported by Western government-backed development aid institutions and the World Bank and intends to achieve a capitalization of property rights on land by formalization and individualization. Its supporters expect higher efficiency of the land markets and higher tenure security. The focus of the article is not so much on the formalization efforts themselves, but on the capitalization of the use rights.

I show how abundant land and scarce labor shaped African institutions before colonial rule. I present a model in which exogenous suitability of the land for agriculture and endogenously evolving population determine the existence of land rights, slavery, and polygyny. I then use cross-sectional data on pre-colonial African societies to demonstrate that, consistent with the model, the existence of land rights, slavery, and polygyny occurred in those parts of Africa that were the most suitable for agriculture, and in which population density was greatest.

SUMMARYThis study identifies causes of forest-related conflicts in the Equatorial rainforest of South-East Cameroon, based on field studies in three villages where industrial logging concessions have been granted. Local access to forests has been severely reduced and customary rights restricted as an effect of the national forest zoning plan. Hence, local livelihoods have been negatively affected. Corruption is moreover rampant. This has resulted in a solid majority among local people expressing negative attitudes toward logging companies and the state.

Angola's four decades of civil war continue to have a profound effect on the country's recovery and development. While the end to the war in 2002 and the subsequent extraction of natural resources has fueled the country's economic recovery for a minority, for the majority recovery depends less on natural resource extraction than it does on acquiring and maintaining secure access to land and property upon which viable livelihoods can be rebuilt.

Understanding the complexity of agricultural systems requires insight into the human–environment interactions. In this paper we used survey data to analyze land system change and its relation to farmer’s attitudes in a typical agricultural region of Northeast China, focusing on land tenure, crop choice and intensification. Our survey shows that land transfer was fairly common across the study area: average farmland acreage per household almost doubled from 1.3ha by early 1980s to 2.6ha by early 2010s, especially due to urban migration of farmers.

This contribution analyses how indigenous land disputes have taken place within a political process and the political responses to land tenure disputes. It does so by analysing the case of the Comunidad Zona Lacandona (Lacandon Community; Chiapas, Mexico) and the land tenure disputes in which it has been involved during the period 1972–2012.

This article explores the gendered experience of monocrop oil-palm expansion in a Hibun Dayak community in Sanggau District, West Kalimantan (Indonesia). It shows how the expanding corporate plantation and contract farming system has undermined the position and livelihood of indigenous women in this already patriarchal community. The shifting of land tenure from the community to the state and the practice of the ‘family head’ system of smallholder plot registration has eroded women's rights to land, and women are becoming a class of plantation labour.

This paper seeks to unravel the political economy of large-scale land acquisitions in post-Soviet Russia. Russia falls neither in the normal category of ‘investor’ countries, nor in the category of ‘target’ countries. Russia has large ‘land reserves’, since in the 1990s much fertile land was abandoned. We analyse how particular Russia is with regards to the common argument in favour of land acquisitions, namely that land is available, unused or even unpopulated.