Private Sector Development - Land and Real Estate Development Agricultural Knowledge & Information Systems Rural Development Knowledge & Information Systems Urban Development - Municipal Housing and Land Communities and Human Settlements - Real Estate Development Rural Development Agriculture

Public Sector Economics Public Sector Management and Reform Banks and Banking Reform Urban Development - Municipal Housing and Land Rural Development - Common Property Resource Development Finance and Financial Sector Development Public Sector Development

Increased global demand for land posits the need for well-designed country-level land policies to protect long-held rights, facilitate land access and address any constraints that land policy may pose for broader growth. While the implementation of land reforms can be a lengthy process, the need to swiftly identify key land policy challenges and devise responses that allow the monitoring of progress, in a way that minimizes conflicts and supports broader development goals, is clear.

Fit-for-purpose land administration (FFPLA) concept is widely applied in the emerging land administration systems (LASs). This paper aims to contribute to the development of evaluation of the spatial aspect of FFPLA. A review of evaluation models for LASs is made in relation with rationale of FFPLA to identify gaps related to evaluation of a FFPLA and to build up milestones and measurement criteria.

We examine collaborations between the state and civil society in the context of land grabbing in Argentina. Land grabbing provokes many governance challenges, which generate new social arrangements. The incentives for, limitations to, and contradictions inherent in these collaborations are examined. We particularly explore how the collaborations between the provincial government of Santiago del Estero and non-government organizations (NGOs) played out. This province has experienced many land grabs, especially for agriculture and livestock production.

There is increasing recognition of the need for society to adapt to the impacts of climate change, especially in the water sector. Adaptation to climatic impacts involves both infrastructural adjustments, such as reinforcing dykes or creating water storage capacity, and broader processes of societal change, such as adjusting land use planning, more efficient water use or agricultural transitions. The aim of this special issue is not to ‘assess’ the current state of play for adaptation strategies and policies in Europe.

By law, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Ethiopia are severely restricted in their activities towards policy development. In this study we explore to what extent these restrictions have affected NGOs in Natural Resource Management in the Oromia regional state of Ethiopia.

This study investigates the role of the different institutional actors involved in the development and implementation of land use policies in the Ethiopian Rift Valley. The work is based on interviews with key informants from different administrative levels and these results are compared to the relevant policy documents. While the constitution prescribes a participatory policy development process, our results show that in reality policies are made at the highest level and implemented in a top-down approach from the higher to the lower administrative levels.

Due to current crises, large-scale land acquisition is becoming a topic of growing concern. Public data from the ‘Land Matrix Global Observatory’ project demonstrates that since 2000, 1,622 large-scale land transactions in low- and middle-income countries were reported, covering an area of nearly 69 million hectares. The majority of these land deals, also referred to as ‘land grabs’, took place between 2008 and 2010, peaking in 2009.

The upward land grabbing trend in Eastern Europe has remained understudied, as well as its strong interlinkages with political narratives - more specifically with the ones proposed by Euroskepticism and populism. The current paper looks at how land grabbing has emerged as a topic that fits the Euroskeptic populist discourse in Romania, despite the high levels of trust in the European Union that has characterized the country ever since its EU accession in 2007.

Civil war and violence often force large numbers of people to leave their lands. Multiple waves of displacement and (partial) return generate complex overlapping claims that are not easily solved. As people return to their regions of origin-sometimes after decades-they tend to find their land occupied by other settlers, some of whom hold legal entitlements. In the places of arrival, displaced people affect other people's access as they seek to turn their temporary entitlements into more definite claims.