Agriculture is directly linked to the socio-economic development of every region. Agriculture impacts us all, whether we are seeking food security, better health or striving to conserve natural resources. Goal 2 of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) underlines the significance of agriculture as a means to achieve food security. United Nations in its recently published report titled “World Economic Situation and Prospects 2020”(UN, 2020) has declared agriculture as one of the global priorities for achieving high-quality health care and formal employment opportunities.

Coming two years after a political transition from post-war authoritarianism, this Shadow Report to the United Nations Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights is framed in the backdrop of two concurrent processes of ‘transformation’ currently underway in Sri Lanka. The first is the process of constitutional reform initiated by the Government that was elected on the platform of restoring democratic, inclusive and accountable governance.

In this report the authors aim to assess and evaluate historic and current changes in land use and forestry at the national and sub-national level in Sri Lanka. Different drivers, policies and data related to forest and land use are assessed to explore factors that have contributed to changes.

These are the main conclusions of the report:

Driving Dispossession: The Global Push to “Unlock the Economic Potential of Land,” sounds the alarm on the unprecedented wave of privatization of natural resources that is underway around the world. Through six case studies — Ukraine, Zambia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, and Brazil — the report details the myriad ways by which governments — willingly or under the pressure of financial institutions and Western donor agencies — are putting more land into so-called “productive use” in the name of development.

Over the past two decades, academics and development practitioners have written extensively about the harmful impact of corruption on economic development and social outcomes. From an economic perspective, corruption diverts resources away from their most productive uses, acting as a regressive tax that supports the lifestyles of the elite at everyone else’s expense. Corruption undermines the legitimacy of political systems by providing the elite with alternative ways of holding on to power, rather than through genuine democratic means.

Land administration in Sri Lanka is institutionally and functionally fragmented and geographically incomplete. The current situation is an impediment to spatial planning and land and natural resources management with direct impact to economic growth and social development. Sri Lanka should embark to an orchestrated and incremental improvement of policies, institutional arrangements and technical solutions to improve clarity, ownership and sustainability of the land administration system and services.

Land has been one of the major concerning factors in escalating disputes and conflicts between ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, including the violation of minority rights. This paper examines the impact of land policies and land-based development programs on the rights of ethnic minorities in eastern Sri Lanka by analyzing selected major policies and projects. The analysis is interpretive and descriptive in nature. Secondary literature was the primary source for the analysis.

National land information system (NLIS) is an essential part of the Mongolian land reform. NLIS is a web based and centralized system which covers administration of cadastral database all over the country among land departments. Current ongoing NLIS implementation is vital to improve the cadastral system in Mongolia. This study is intended to define existing problems in current Mongolian cadastral system and propose administrative institutional and systematic implementation through NLIS.

Innovation is an inevitable way to enhance regional competitiveness, promote urbanization and achieve sustainable development. The sci-tech park is one of the main land use types in the construction of a new town and the critical space carriers of urbanization. This study focuses on the correlation between higher education institutions (HEIs) innovation and sci-tech enterprises (STEs) development, and the Hangzhou West Hi-tech Corridor as a case study.

Astrotourism is considered to be a modern form of ecotourism. The main resource for astrotourism is a high-quality night sky, but this is very sensitive to natural as well as anthropogenic factors; for example, land utilization and expansion of urban areas often cause the negative effect of light pollution.

Due to industrial civilization, the decline of the countryside has become a global phenomenon. Spain is a good example that reflects this issue in the rural areas of the European Union because more than half of all municipalities in the country are at risk of extinction. This manuscript aims at combining social engagement and the application of sustainable development goals (SDGs) to propose a sustainable rural revitalization plan.

This paper considers the landscape as both a material and an ideological representation and starts from the assumption that spatial patterns arise as a result of the ideological imperative of the process that forms the landscape.