Ensuring food security under changing
climate conditions is one of the major challenges of our
era. Agriculture must not only become increasingly
productive, but must also adapt to climate change while
reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Soil carbon
sequestration, the process by which atmospheric carbon
dioxide is taken up by plants through photosynthesis and
stored as carbon in biomass and soils, can support these

This study exploits a natural experiment
to investigate the impact of land reform on the fertility
outcomes of households in rural Ethiopia. Public policies
and customs created a situation where Ethiopian households
could influence their usufruct rights to land via a
demographic expansion of the family. The study evaluates the
impact of the abolishment of these pronatal property rights
on fertility outcomes. By matching aggregated census data

Albania's radical farmland
distribution is credited with averting an economic crisis
and social unrest during the transition. But many believe it
led to a holding structure too fragmented to be efficient,
and that public efforts to consolidate plots are needed to
lay the foundation for greater rural productivity. This
paper uses farm-level data from the 2005 Albania Living
Standards Measurement Survey to explore this quantitatively.

This report presents the results of a
novel study on land transparency in Vietnam; a study that
focuses on the actual provision of information related to
land. This study was produced as part of the Vietnam
Transparency Project, an effort to systematically measure
transparency, provide actionable advice on how to improve
transparency, and analyze the causes and effects of
transparency in Vietnam. If a country's political,

As in other societies in Southeast Asia
and the Pacific, customary social organization features
strongly in rural Timor-Leste. As well as providing avenues
for conflict resolution, the influence of customary systems
extends to land tenure. As the state, development partners,
private investors, non-governmental organizations (NGOs),
and others seek to promote rural development in Timor-Leste,
they will be forced to engage in some way with customary

This paper presents early evidence from
the first large-scale randomized-controlled trial of a land
formalization program. The study examines the links between
land demarcation and investment in rural Benin in light of a
model of agricultural production under insecure tenure. The
demarcation process involved communities in the mapping and
attribution of land rights; cornerstones marked parcel
boundaries and offered lasting landmarks. Consistent with

The policy reforms called for in the
transition from a socialist command economy to a developing
market economy bring both opportunities and risks to a
country's citizens. In poor economies, the initial
focus of reform efforts is naturally the rural sector, which
is where one finds the bulk of the population and almost all
the poor. Economic development will typically entail moving
many rural households out of farming into more remunerative

Evidence is mounting that secure
property rights have positive effects for poor people in
general and women in particular. The aim of this report is
to review what is known about women s access to and control
over land and real property in urban settings, identifying
approaches to strengthening property rights that enhance
women s agency, and sharing key lessons. Section two
synthesizes the evidence on urban women s priorities with

The present study reports on the
Government of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau's efforts
to develop a comprehensive strategy for enhancing land
rights security and achieving social and economic
development objectives. This report is divided into two main
parts. The first part summarizes the current state of
development of the government s land policy, as well as the
legal and traditional framework existing for land tenure

This paper analyzes the effects of land
market restrictions on structural change from agriculture to
non-farm in a rural economy. This paper develops a
theoretical model that focuses on higher migration costs due
to restrictions on alienability, and identifies the
possibility of a reverse structural change where the share
of nonagricultural employment declines. The reverse
structural change can occur under plausible conditions: if

This sourcebook is intended to be a
ready reference for practitioners (including World Bank
stakeholders, clients in borrowing countries, and World Bank
project leaders) seeking state-of-the-art information about
good land management approaches, innovations for
investments, and close monitoring for potential scaling up.
This sourcebook is divided into three parts: the first part
identifies the need and scope for sustainable land

Land tenure security is crucial for
women's empowerment and a prerequisite for building
secure and resilient communities. Tenure is affected by many
and often contradictory sets of rules, laws, customs,
traditions, and perceptions. For most rural women, land
tenure is complicated, with access and ownership often
layered with barriers present in their daily realities:
discriminatory social dynamics and strata, unresponsive