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 examines the challenges of institutional, organisational and policy reform around land in Southern Africa. It analyses the land situation in South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and identifies key issues for further research in each of these countries.
Findings include:

Since 1994, the South African government has embarked on an ambitious land reform programme to redistribute and return land to previously disenfranchised communities. However, many black people lack the knowledge, skills and experience needed to manage their land.

This PhD study focuses on the land tenure systems in the highlands of Eritrea with a particular emphasis on land rental markets, land contract choice, and on the implications of land tenure systems for farm household’s resource allocation behaviour and efficiency outcomes.The author hopes that the theoretical and empirical analysis of these issues will also contribute to the debate on land tenure and economic development in general and the land policy issue in Eritrea in particular.The study empirically analyses four issues of land tenure in the highlands of Eritrea, namely:factor market im

This paper examines the impact of recent changes in the relationship between landowners and tenants in Egypt.

This report details the findings of a round table discussion on land reform and agricultural development in South Africa convened by The Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) in October 2007.

This paper examines the cost of implementing redistributive land reform in the Philippines. Land redistribution has become the core feature of land reform in the country since 1972 with the approval of PD 27. The coverage of the program was expanded to all agricultural lands under RA 6657 or CARL of 1988. Consequently, funding for land reform increased significantly as government chose to fully subsidize land acquisition, distribution, and transfers. From 1972 to 2008, the cost to implement the program has been rising in real terms both in absolute and relative values.

How do the spatial dynamics of the socialist city compare with those of the market city? What happens to a city when all investment decisions are made without land markets? What are the outcomes when the forces described by familiar urban models are not allowed to work?Bertaud and Renaud describe the structure of Russian cities after 70 years of Soviet development.

The main argument of this paper is that insecurity of land tenure is a socio-political condition that can be made and unmade. This discussion paper focuses on customary land rights, particularly in the African context. The paper reveals that:

This study examines the land acquisition and distribution process of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) by analyzing the nature and extent of participation of the various government agencies. Attempts are also made in identifying the areas where land reform can be hastened. While there are opportunities for change, the paper concludes that the overall impact of these changes on land reform may not be as large in terms of area coverage.

Women’s land ownership and control have important connections with their empowerment in Pakistan’s agricultural context. However, the link between these has largely remained unexplored; and there has been negligible research to determine how many women own or control land in Pakistan. The Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) carried out a multiple pronged research in 2007-09 to fill this knowledge gap and to examine the causality behind women’s land ownership and empowerment.

The current framework of economic growth and development includes a general trend towards the privatization of land rights and a collapse of collective structures in agriculture as well as a move towards reliance on land markets as the means of peasant access to participation in the development process. Despite the removal of land reform as an explicit part of the policy agenda, it is clear that the situations which led to the activation of land reforms in past decades are still in place.