Local people in South-east Asia are often cited as skilled forest managers. It is barely acknowledged that an essential part of this forest management does not concern natural forests, but forests that have been planted, often after the removal of pre-existing natural forests; forests that are cultivated not by professional foresters, but by sedentary or swidden farmers, on their farmlands; forests that are based not on exotic, fast-growing trees, but on local tree species, and harbour an incredible variety of plant and animal species.

This study adopts an institutional approach to analyze the way in which informal rules, in their interaction with formal rules, shape the use of forest resources by diverse types of smallholders and communities (i.e., indigenous people, agro-extractive and traditional communities) in Latin America. Attention is given to understanding the ‘working rules’, comprising both formal and informal rules, that individuals use in making their decisions for land and forest resources access and use, which in turn affect benefits generation and distribution from such resources use.

South Africa is often regarded to be at the forefront of water reform, based on Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) ideas. This paper explores how the idea of IWRM emerged in South Africa, its key debates and interpretations and how it has been translated. It maps out the history, main events, key people, and implementation efforts through a combination of reviews of available documents and in-depth semi-structured interviews with key actors.

This report consists of a series of individual country papers prepared for a study on devolution, community empowerment and power relations in community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) in the SADC region. Case studies were undertaken during 1999 in eight southeastern/eastern African countries; Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa (two separate studies) and Tanzania. These studies drew mainly on existing literature and the direct experiences of authors in CBNRM initiatives in their own countries.

This article examines the historical evolution of participatory water management in coastal Bangladesh. Three major shifts are identified: first, from indigenous local systems managed by landlords to centralized government agencies in the 1960s; second, from top-down engineering solutions to small-scale projects and people’s participation in the 1970s and 1980s; and third, towards depoliticized community-based water management since the 1990s.

Tamale is the capital city of Ghana’s Northern Region. As the regional capital, Tamale is growing rapidly – the population has almost tripled to over 370,000 in the past 30 years, and the areal extent has increased up to sevenfold in the same period. Urban agriculture is an integral part of the food system, linked to resource management and spatial planning. In general one can say that backyard farming flourishes, but more formally organised production is threatened by urbanisation.

Bulungan regency is the northern part of the province of East Kalimantan, Indonesia. In the course of the last decade, Kalimantan's or Borneo's hinterland has been the target of unprecedented non-timber forest products (NTFP) collecting activity. More intensive NTFP use has contributed to unsustainable extractive practices and environmental damage and to deep social and political disruption. This book examines northern East Kalimantan's trade networks. The historical scope extends from about 1880 to present and primarily focus on Long Pujungan and Malinau districts.

Remote sensing and GIS tools have broadly helped hydrogeologists to delineate the groundwater prospective zones for watershed development and management. The origin, movement and existence of groundwater depends on several factors such as slope, drainage density, land use, geology, lineament density and geomorphology. Based on these, the mapping and identification of groundwater potential zones were carried out in a part of Nalgonda district, Telangana, India.