Access to land is crucial for food systems to address the challenges caused by habitat and biodiversity loss, land and water degradation, and greenhouse gas emissions. Sustainable food production requires land security upstream for agricultural production. Land security emanates from the land law implemented in-country by government policy. In the span of a decade (2007–2017), three different land reforms have been adopted in Benin.

Disputes over farmland constitute an important challenge for tenure security, economic growth and social stability. Land titling is a theoretically promising policy instrument that can enhance tenure security and reduce the occurrence of farmland disputes in the developing world. However, the impact of land titling on the occurrence of disputes has been found to be highly conditional. Empirical evidence on this issue has been surprisingly limited and has often lacked the consideration of a specific context.

Land is the key asset in the agricultural sector and hence land policy is one of the key elements that determine whether SDGs are achieved in developing counties or not. In developing countries, land titling programs have been seen as a strategy for addressing SDGs. Even though the government of Ethiopia launched the rural land registration and certification program (LRCP) to secure the land rights of rural households in 1998, currently, there are limited empirical studies to examine the contribution of LRCP in addressing sustainable development goals (SDGs).

Since the global crises in the 2000s, many foreign and domestic actors have acquired large tracts of land for food and biofuel crop cultivation and other purposes in Africa, often leading to the displacement of the African people living on customary land. The weak customary land rights of ordinary African people have been viewed as one of the main factors making it possible for various land-grabbers to exploit customary land with different purposes.

With over 14 million hectares allocated, Vietnam’s forest and forestland allocation has been one of the largest natural resource decentralization programs in the developing world over the last three decades. Given this remarkable achievement, critics are concerned about the low rates of household tree planting investment and question the roles and effects of land institutions on investment.

Based on theoretical underpinnings and an empirical review of forest laws and regulations of selected countries throughout the Americas, we examine key components of natural forest management and how they are addressed in the legal frameworks of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay, and the U.S.

The REDD+ program provides a mechanism for providing financial rewards to forest owners and users who contribute to the reduction of carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. This paper determines the potential impact of the REDD+ program on poverty reduction by comparing income and poverty rate between two household groups that were willing to participate in this study, but that will not participate in the REDD+. The results showed that carbon payment from forests is a significant contributor to the increase in household income of poor people.

Land fragmentation and the small size of land parcels are still the major bottlenecks for agriculture sustainable development in rural China, and an efficient land rental market could consolidate land plots and realize agricultural management at a moderate scale. However, transaction cost is still the main obstacle of land transfer. It is, therefore, essential to reduce the excessive transaction costs in the process of transfer; the primary task is to identify the roots of transaction costs.

Existing literature about the impact of farmland titling on farmland transfer takes no account of farmland plot characteristics, which makes them unable to effectively identify the causal relationship between farmland titling and farmland transfer. After the theoretical analysis, based on land plot level micro-survey data, we adopt the instrumental variable (IV) and conditional mixed process (CMP) methods to ease the endogeneity problem in the model and conduct a quantitative analysis.

Most of the land reforms of recent decades have followed an approach of “formalization and capitalization” of individual land titles (de Soto 2000). However, within the privatization agenda, benefits of unimproved land (such as land rents and value capture) are reaped privately by well-organized actors, whereas the costs of valorization (e.g., infrastructure) or opportunity costs of land use changes are shifted onto poorly organized groups. Consequences of capitalization and formalization include rent seeking and land grabbing.

Facing widespread poverty and land degradation, Vietnam started a land reform in 1993 as part of its renovation policy package known as “Doi Moi”. This paper examines the impacts of improved land tenure security, via this land reform, on manure use by farm households. As manure potentially improves soil fertility by adding organic matter and nutrients to the soil surface, it might contribute to improving soil productive capacity and reversing land degradation.

While an increase in the size and number of conservation areas is expected as part of global environmental commitments, at the same time, Protected Area Downgrading, Downsizing, and Degazettement, or PADDD, is becoming more frequent worldwide. This paper analyzes the causal relationships between land claims and human settlements on the one hand and the downsizing process of a protective forest in southeastern Ecuador on the other.