This document reports on findings from learning groups relating to water management in Bolivia, India and Mali during 2005-2006. The groups analysed specific topics with the aim of improving the current and future development strategies of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM). In each of the three countries, the learning group identified key topics to address – equity, empowerment and environmental sustainability were identified as cross-cutting issues.

Zimbabwe’s fast-track land reform has had a bad press. Reports of violence and intimidation have obscured the reality that formal procedures used to settle black farmers in model villages bear a striking resemblance to earlier colonial procedures. Whilst colonial myths about African farmers as subsistence oriented and inefficient live on, evidence from south-eastern Zimbabwe suggests that the reforms have benefited some poor black farmers

The Kailash Sacred Landscape (KSL) spreads across a vast region that includes remote portions of the Tibet Autonomous Region of China (TAR China) and contiguous areas of Nepal and India. This area is historically, ecologically, and culturally interconnected; it is the source of four of Asia’s most important rivers, and at the heart of this landscape is the sacred Mount Kailash, revered by millions of people in Asia and throughout the world.

This paper provides background information on access to natural resources in Southern Africa. Case studies are used from Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa, to explore customary rights and de facto access to a wide range of wild resources, in particular those of greatest importance to the rural poor.

This policy brief explores the importance of land issues in forced displacement in Kenya, drawing out their implications for current humanitarian and early recovery interventions in the wake of the violence and displacement that followed the 2007 elections. Key messages nclude:

This paper examines the impact of land reform in Vietnam which gives households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their land-use rights. The authors expect this change to increase the incentives as well as the ability to undertake long-term investments on the part of households.

Traditional land tenure systems in Togo have been undermined but not destroyed by the introduction of private property and ‘modern’ tenure reform. However, confusion over land tenure issues has proved to be an obstacle to efforts to promote efficient resource management and to combat desertification.

Recent arguments have stated that the new livestock development policy will carry a high social cost, that the reality of range degradation in Botswana has been ignored, and that there is no basis for assuming that de-stocking would decrease the productivity of rangeland.

This paper addresses the issue of land security and sustainability. The paper tackles the assumption that, in the case of China, giving farmers more secure land rights would undermine the function of land as a social safety net and, as a consequence, not be sustainable or command broad support.The report draws on data from three provinces, one of which had adopted a policy to increase security of tenure in advance of the others.

This study analyses the determinants of land tenure insecurity and its impact on intensity of use of purchased farm inputs among households in southern Ethiopia. Seventeen percent of the households stated that they were tenure insecure. The feeling of tenure insecurity could be caused by the land redistribution policy in Ethiopia where household size has been the main criterion used for land allocation after the land reform in 1975. This would imply that land rich households should be more tenure insecure.