Despite progressive provisions on gender equality in Tanzania’s land laws, women have little representation in land allocation decisions. Mainstreaming gender in local regulations can help address this problem. The Tanzania Women Lawyers Association, in partnership with the World Resources Institute and Lawyers’ Environmental Action Team, developed model by-laws to improve women’s participation in local-level decision-making on village land management. This took place in Kidugalo and Vilabwa villages in Kisarawe district.

Large-scale agricultural investments impact upon men and women in different ways, yet women’s voices and interests are not always heard in decisions about land.

Land and decentralisation policies in Senegal have been closely linked since independence in 1960. Public lands are currently managed by the local governments of municipalities and rural communities, with the latter responsible for the land and natural resources in unprotected parts of their territory, and the former empowered to issue building permits.

Includes the drivers of change; changes in ‘customary’ land management institutions – evidence from West Africa; changes in intra-family relations; changes in land transfer mechanisms – evidence from West Africa; case study of changes in ‘customary’ resource tenure systems in the inner Niger Delta, Mali. Concludes with implications for policy and practice.

The reform of land tenure institutions is now back on the national and global policy agendas. While at a certain level of generality the principle of gender equality in access to resources, including land, has been endorsed by a diverse range of policy actors, there are many tensions and ambiguities likely to obstruct women’s effective access to land and its contribution to decent livelihoods. There are important questions about liberalisation policies vis-a-vis land, given the well documented difficulties that low-income women in particular face in accessing land through markets.

Contains 6 chapters: introduction, accountability issues in urban land management, transparency and accountability in communal land management, corruption and land reform programmes, accountability issues in large scale land deals, gender, youths and land corruption. The findings show that land governance is fragmented creating opportunities for corruption in and across institutions.

Land is consistently ranked among the sectors where people most often report having to pay bribes to access services, according to Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer. The Land Portal has summarised the latest available (dated 2013) global data here, which shows that the incidence of bribes paid for land services can be over 50% in countries such as Cambodia, India and Pakistan.

Agricultural productivity in the highlands of Ethiopia is threatened by severe land degradation, resulting in significant reductions in agricultural GDP. In order to mitigate ongoing erosion and soil nutrient loss in the productive agricultural highlands of the country, the government of Ethiopia initiated a Sustainable Land Management Program (SLMP) targeting 209 woredas (districts) in six regions of the country. This study evaluates the impact of SLMP on the value of agricultural production in select woredas by using a panel survey from 2010 to 2014.

Agricultural productivity in Ethiopia’s highlands, the country’s breadbasket, is threatened by severe land degradation. To mitigate ongoing soil erosion and soil nutrient loss, the government of Ethiopia initiated the Sustainable Land Management Program (SLMP). We evaluated the program’s impact on the value of agricultural production in select kebeles (administrative sub-districts) in which it was implemented using a two-round survey of farm households.

Existing approaches and methodologies that investigate effects of land degradation on food security vary greatly. Although a relatively rich body of literature that investigates localized experiences, geophysical and socioeconomic drivers of land degradation, and the costs and benefits of avoiding land degradation already exists, less rigorously explored are the global effects of restoring degraded landscapes.

In addition to global events and food policy changes, 2015 also saw important developments with potentially wide repercussions in individual countries and regions. This chapter offers perspectives on major food policy developments across the major regions: Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, East Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.