The fifth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-5) analyses the state, trends, outlook and responses to environmental change. It assesses progress towards meeting internationally agreed goals and identifies gaps in their achievement.The outlook examines the drivers of environmental change and the overarching socio-economic forces that exert pressure on the environment.

The paper offers proposals for integrating understanding of and response to the pandemic into land reform-related development activities.

Informal systems for land delivery, which have in many cases evolved from earlier customary practices, still account for over half the land supplied for housing in African cities and are a particularly important channel for the poor. This study examines how informal systems of housing land delivery operate in six African cities discussing how they are evolving and how they interact with formal land administration systems.

This short, desk-top study investigates and reviews how technology is being used in developing countries to promote transparency around land acquisitions. This includes reactive solutions to identify and highlight what land acquisitions have taken place and proactive solutions that promote and protect land rights from future land acquisitions.

Foreign ownership of land has historically been a sensitive political issue,and measures to regulate or restrict the practice in one form or another have figured prominently in national land laws. The study by Hodgson, Cullinan and Campbell provides an overview of the various regulatory approaches that have been devised to deal with this issue.

The paper presents case studies from Kenya, Lesotho and South Africa in order to examine the impact of HIV/AIDS upon land, and present preliminary policy recommendations.

This compendium provides an improved understanding of the complex issues concerning gender and land. It draws on research commissioned by FAO. The authors argue that hunger and poverty are, in general, consequences of inadequate and restricted access to land and other resources, such as capital, inputs and technology; women are among those with less access to land, while accounting for a large share in small-scale food production.Rights to land, especially women’s rights to land, are determined by a complex interaction between the institutions, and underlying power relations, of a society.

This paper documents a participatory approach for supporting black South Africans in developing knowledge and skills to use land, acquired under the land reform scheme, more effectively. This approach enables land reform groups to work jointly through a sequence of steps in order to develop and implement a land management plan.The participatory planning method can be summarised into four main stages. First, the land reform group seeks to understand how the agricultural sector operates in its area, and identifies those agencies that provide technical and managerial support.

Sets out to examine the question of aid provision. As part of a general study on Finnish aid, the main focus is on two projects in Zanzibar: Zanzibar Forestry Project (ZFP) and Zanzibar Integrated Lands and Environment Management (ZILEM) project. This study centres on initial research carried out in Dar es Salaam (documentary) and Unguja (documentary, observational and in-depth interviews). [author]

This paper is a desk-based study of land rights and conflict in Sierra Leone.  It reviews post-2002 academic and grey literature. It addresses land ownership and rights within Sierra Leone, as well as exploring the concept of land ownership as a source or driver of conflict. It also reviews literature on the current land tenure system, and government stated policies.

This paper analyses issues that affect the role of agriculture as a source of economic development, rural livelihoods and environmental services. Using experiences of land expansion in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa, it assesses the extent to which recent demand for land differs from earlier processes of area expansion and identifies the current challenges, in terms of land governance, institutional capacity and communities’ awareness of their rights.

We have used gender-disaggregated household panel data from 2007 and 2012 in combination with dictator games and hawk-dowe games to assess the effects of joint land certification of husbands and wives on wives' involvement in land-related decisions within households. Wives' stated preferences for stronger land rights to women and husbands' stated preferences for the traditional weak position of women were significantly affecting the wives' degree of within-household involvement in land-related decisions in opposite directions.