A growing recognition of the need to delimit the role of the government, to promote the market framework, and to rely on the private sector as the engine of growth, offers the prospect of a new beginning in rural development in Africa. Rural people must take a more dominant role, both in shaping their economic prospects and in assuming the responsibility for a high quality of stewardship of natural resources. To help to bring about such an empowerment of the people, governments and the donors will need to undertake some drastic reforms in the old systems and habits of governance.

It is estimated that up to 84% of Malawians earn their livelihoods directly from agriculture - it contributes over 90% to export earnings, 40% to GDP and accounts for 85% of total employment.

The triple challenge of rapid population growth, declining agricultural productivity, and natural resource degradation are not isolated from one another; they are intimately related. However, strategic planning and development programming tend to focus on individual sectors such as the environment, agriculture, and population; they do not explicitly take into account the compatibilities and inconsistencies among them. Farm households and their livelihood strategies are at the core of the intersectoral linkages approach advocated in this chapter.

Local entrepreneurs drive development in deprived neighbourhoods. Small-scale actions – rather than abstract urban planning by officials – are most effective. Planners should start observing street life and begin to understand that everyday practice and local enterprises can, with a little outside help, be scaled up to improve poor urban people’s lives.

Developers study the property market carefully and then, based on the property cycle, and risk and profit calculations, they acquire land and develop it, with a specific product in mind. Municipalities play a governance role, and are mandated to ensure that the development is in line with government policies and development plans for the area.

The restructuring of local government in South Africa began in the mid-1990s. A number of smaller local councils in the greater Durban area were amalgamated into a single metropolitan municipality, and the boundaries of the city were expanded to incorporate a number of new areas. The department responsible for economic development at the time started to look for a suitable location for a focused, municipality-led intervention in the newly incorporated areas. The political violence of the 1980s had been particularly intense in the northern areas.

Private (especially foreign) investors find Viet Nam's legal framework the most serious impediment to investment. Policy changes to reverse the former command system may be enough to initiate the transition. But without an appropriate legal framework, they will be insufficient for long-term development.A major objective of Viet Nam's transition to a market economy has been to reactivate the private sector in a mixed economy.

This article explores the issues and concerns of grassroots stakeholders with regards to REDD+ policy and program development.

A useful debate is developing over carrying capacity and the degradation of communal rangelands in sub-Saharan Africa. With a few lonely exceptions, scientists and policy-makers have in the past claimed that degradation is universal and livestock productivity lowered because of overstocking on communal range. This position has been mainly dogmatic. More recent research has not supported dogmatists; hence the debate, which impinges on livestock development policy in Botswana.A new livestock development policy is being promoted by the Government of Botswana (Ministry of Agriculture 1991).

Paper defines a strategy for forest sector development, and translates it for practical application. In response to the causes of deforestation and desertification, which are rooted in a complex web of socio-economic factors (both inside and, mainly, outside the forests) these guidelines are centred on the needs of people living in and making a living from forests. Sustainable forest management is based on economic, environmental, social and cultural criteria and indicators.

Structural adjustment, liberalisation and the pressures of technological change are having major impact on the institutional organisation of the agro-industrial sector. In industrialised countries, the private sector is positioned to play the vanguard role in the next generation of agricultural technologies. Thus, the ability to promote and sustain new patterns of co-operation in research and development between the private and the public sectors will be a key determinant of future patterns of competitiveness.

Regularly published index to journal articles on Tanzania