ABSTRACTED FROM THE CONCLUSION: LMAP has had considerable success in several areas, including the number of titles adjudicated in rural areas, development of legal framework for land management and administration, and the increased institutional capacity of the Ministry of Land. Unfortunately these successes are overshadowed by an increase in landlessness, forced evictions, land-grabbing and widespread tenure insecurity in Cambodia. In large part this is the result of a persistent lack of political will to consistently implement the legal framework that LMAP has developed.

"This study highlights lessons from recent policy, law and practice to improve and secure access to rural land for poorer groups. It focuses on Africa, Latin America and Asia, while also referring to experience from Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

During 2012, a key choice facing developing countries revealed itself ever more starkly. Would they choose a development path built on inclusiveness, respect for the rights of their citizens, and the rule of law? Or would they seek a short-cut to development and opt to hand over community land and natural resources to international investors and national elites? Would they turn their rural citizens from landowners into landless laborers?

This report provides select findings of an extensive survey of relocation sites in and around Phnom Penh, conducted in 2011 and 2012. The aim of the report is to highlight some key issues facing residents at existing relocation sites, and provide recommendations for both improving existing sites and improving future relocation practices, in cases when relocation is considered unavoidable. The report follows a previous 2007 report ‘Relocation sites in Phnom Penh’.

This report is a review of city’s development paradigm, including an examination of urban services and infrastructure, the regulatory framework, mobility networks, major stakeholders, and key issues in the city's development. The authors argue that Phnom Penh stands at a crossroads. Ahead is the continuation of a “planned” development of the city first developed by the French and then adopted by the Sihanouk regime. To either side is the new “unplanned” approach, a path that already seems to be the favored choice.

This report compares independently-gathered household data from four communities located along railroad tracks in Phnom Penh to data gathered by the Inter-Ministerial Resettlement Committee (IRC) in charge of the resettlement of households along the railways. Based on comparative data from 70 households, the report finds significant and widespread anomalies in the data gathered by the IRC. In the majority of cases, data collected by STT shows households are eligible to receive higher rates of compensation than those proffered by the IRC.

This paper assesses the relation between
access to markets and cultivated land in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Making use of a geo-referenced panel over three decades
(1970-2005) during which the road network was significantly
improved, the analysis finds a modest but significant
positive association between increased market accessibility
and local cropland expansion. It also finds that cropland
expansion, in turn, is associated with a small but

The rural economy in Bangladesh has been
a powerful source of economic growth and has substantially
reduced poverty, especially since 2000, but the remarkable
transformation and unprecedented dynamism in rural
Bangladesh are an underexplored, underappreciated, and
largely untold story. The analysis identifies the key
changes occurring in the rural economy, the principal
drivers of rural incomes, the implications for policy, and

Groundwater is a vital yet threatened
resource in much of South Asia. This paper develops a model
of groundwater transactions under payoff uncertainty arising
from unpredictable fluctuations in groundwater availability
during the agricultural dry season. The model highlights the
trade-off between the ex post inefficiency of long-term
contracts and the ex ante inefficiency of spot contracts.
The structural parameters are estimated using detailed

This issue includes the following
headings: Changes in Poverty and Female-Headed Households in
Africa; Growth and Capital Inflows in Africa; Growth and
Capital Inflows in Africa; Vulnerability to Climate Change
in Coastal Bangladesh; Improving Agricultural Data for
Better Policies; Enhancing Transparency of Large-Scale Land
Acquisition; Explaining the Gender Gap in Agricultural
Productivity; Changing Patterns of Growth and Poverty

There is no doubt that the poorest
people are already and will continue to be most severely
impacted by climatic changes, including shifting trends as
well as more frequent and severe extreme events. Yet, new
insights on the dynamics and distribution of poverty point
to the need to comprehend where the poor and poorest are,
how they are poor, and why their poverty constrains their
abilities to cope with and adapt to occurring and predicted

A competitive city is a city that
successfully facilitates its firms and industries to create
jobs, raise productivity, and increase the incomes of
citizens over time. Worldwide, improving the competitiveness
of cities is a pathway to eliminating extreme poverty and to
promoting shared prosperity. The primary source of job
creation has been the growth of private sector firms, which
have typically accounted for around 75 percent of job