Property rights over natural resources became a distinct area of inquiry in environmental economics and policy in the last decades, but their role has not yet been investigated thoroughly. Transition countries represent an excellent material of analysis of various policies and institutional developments concerning the regime of use and management of natural resources. The processes of societal transformation had deep impacts on the forestry sector, entailing land reforms and subsequent changes to its institutional and organisational framework.

150 years ago in Russia bodies of local self-government named zemstvoes were formed. The special feature of the Russian zemstvo consisted in dual, dissimilar coexistence and comparison of crown (governmental) and zemstvo (public) bases, as some kind of unity and struggle of opposites, with in advance expected positive result for local governments owing to their greater identity to interests of the managing population. At the same time, the zemstvo idea had "an ethics-social" orientation, it was much wider than the service economic function, which was defined by authorities of zemstvoes.

The implementation of land reform has influenced the formation of property structure. The main procedures of land reform activities are stated in Estonian legislation. However, the provisions for determining the area and the boundaries for properties to be formed in the course of land reform are stated in legal acts in an unsystematic way. The aim of this study is to systematize the parcel area and the boundaries determination procedures that are used in the course of land reform for property formation.

New land reforms are again high on the policy agenda and low-cost, propoor reforms are being tested in poor countries. This article assesses the investment and productivity impacts of the recent low-cost land certification implemented in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, using a unique household and farm-plot-level panel data set, with data from before and up to eight years after the reform. Alternative econometric methods were used to test and control for endogeneity of certification and for unobserved household heterogeneity.

In this paper I explore a land grabbing resistance movement composed of unemployed coffee workers in Central Nicaragua. Between 1996 and 2000, a private agro-export conglomerate appropriated worker-owned coffee estates previously designated as the Area Propiedad del Los Trabajadores (APT), or the Worker's Property. Following mass protests between 2001 and 2004, worker representatives from the Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo (ATC) and government officials negotiated and signed the Las Tunas Accords which provided redistributed land from 18 of those coffee estates to 2500 families.

This paper re‐interrogates the positions on the agrarian question in India, to reach fresh conclusions about important agrarian policies of the Left, including that of land reforms. Internationally, the classical political economy approach to agrarian transitions has been challenged by positions arguing (a) that neoliberalism and the international corporate food regime have led to a new dominant contradiction between the peasantry and multinational agribusiness or (b) that the agrarian question for capital has been bypassed.

Urban land use has been a major driving force behind land use change in Estonia since regaining independence and land reform process in the 1990s. The study summarizes land use change, land management and planning practices in the urban fringe over a period of 20 years with the aim of introducing a sustainable land use policy in highly fragmented suburban land. The processes and dynamics of land use change are explored using cartographic and landscape metrics analysis.

This article examines Finnish consumer ethoses and the moral rules that include them. We argue that Finnish consumers legitimize their consumer and spending practices, and constitute themselves as moral agents through three culturally dominant and historically constructed consumer ethoses: agrarianism, economism and green consumerism. The material of the study consists of 53 consumer life stories collected between September 2006 and May 2007 using a writing competition.

Through an examination of interventions in the agrarian structures and rural society of the Ecuadorian Andes over the past 40 years, this article explores the gradual imposition of a particular line of action that separates rural development from the unresolved question of the concentration of land ownership and wealth among the very few. This imposition has been the consequence, it is argued, of the new development paradigms implemented in Andean peasant communities since the end of land reform in the 1970s.

Ownership of agricultural land is very fragmented in Turkey, as is the case in countries within central Europe. This prevents agricultural efficiency from reaching desired levels. Land consolidation involves redistributing land ownership so that individual farmers own fewer, larger, more compact and more contiguous land parcels. In Turkey, generally voluntary land consolidation projects are performed, while some financial limitations and political conditions prevent land consolidation reach to its desired level.

Upon request this paper is available from the author.