This study briefly summarizes the development experiences of special economic zones in China and Africa, the lessons that Africa can learn from China, and the preliminary results of the Chinese investments in special economic zones in Africa. The study makes recommendations on how to unleash the power of special economic zones and industrial zones in Africa through strategically leveraging the Chinese experiences.

Declining land productivity and
per capita
food availability poses challenges to overcoming land
degradation and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. There is a need to identify ways of improving land
productivity particularly among smallholders. This study investigated the contribution of integrated soil
fertility management (ISFM) practices to both technical and allocative efficiencies in the maize farming
system of Kenya. To determine efficiency gains from ISFM, we compared efficiencies of two groups of

The editors of Land would like to express their sincere gratitude to the following reviewers for assessing manuscripts in 2014:[...]

Many incidents of elephant killings have recently taken place in Tanzania as well as in other African countries. Such events are usually presented as results of the rising global demand for ivory. As we show in this case study, however, not all violence against elephants is driven by the ivory trade. This article presents an event that occurred in West Kilimanjaro in 2009 when numerous villagers chased a herd of elephants over a cliff, killing six of them. Using a ‘web of relations’ approach, we seek to uncover the underlying as well as the immediate factors that led to this incident.

The main aims of this study are to highlight the differences and the similarities between the European model of agricultural and rural development, and the state of play in the Romanian agricultural sector. Statistically speaking, the agricultural sector's indicators of the past two decades place Romania outside the family picture of the EU countries, with very slight resemblances, and very strong discrepancies between their economic, technical, and institutional characteristics.

In this paper, we present an analysis of the change in household land use following a conservation-driven process of indigenous land titling reform in a Cambodian protected area. In each of the two study villages, we investigated how household land use had changed and the extent of compliance with both legal boundaries of titled areas and community regulations created to govern land use within these areas. A comparison of current household land holdings in each village with those at the start of the tenure reform process indicated a significant increase in household land holdings.

The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) promotes a change of European water governance towards increased stakeholder participation and water management according to river basins. To implement the WFD, new institutional arrangements are needed. In Sweden, water councils have been established on the local level to meet the requirements of the WFD of a broad stakeholder involvement in water management. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge on institutional arrangements for meeting the WFD requirements on stakeholder participation in local water management.

This South African Agricultural Public Expenditure Review (AgPer) is one of a series of similar studies undertaken in several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa under the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) of the African Union’s (AU) New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) which encourages governments and development partners (DPs) to target public expenditure on the agriculture sector as the most effective way of stimulating growth.

Women for Women International has worked with over 84,000 marginalised women in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo and commissioned research to explore these women’s land rights. The study found that the women could not own land, even through inheritance, while men controlled the sales of the items that their wives farmed.

2014 went on record as the hottest year ever measured, a telling sign that climate change is already here. The agriculture sector is predicted to take the heaviest toll, with the hardest hit being smallholder farmers in developing countries, particularly in dry areas. With rising temperatures and greater stress on water resources, agricultural productivity is set to experience a substantial decline. Yet against these odds, we need to produce progressively more to feed a rapidly growing world population.