Insufficient energy supply and low levels of development are closely linked. Both are major issues in Uganda where growing demand cannot be met by overstretched infrastructure and the majority still rely on traditional biomass use. Uganda's renewable energy policy focuses on decentralised sources including modern biomass. In this paper, stakeholder dynamics and potential socio-economic impacts of eight modern bioenergy feedstock production models in Uganda are considered, and key considerations for future planning provided.

Land tenure and agricultural reforms are essential components of postwar development. The importance of land use and management systems to livelihood stability and economic growth is especially relevant in Rwanda, where eighty per cent of the population depends on subsistence agriculture in a rural system plagued by conflict over holdings and decreasing production.

A preoccupation with the idea of land as a productive asset continues to dominate donor policy prescriptions imposed on poor nations of the world. The presumption is that a view of land as a productive asset implies security which then induces investment and improvements in agricultural productivity.

SUMMARYIn this article we discuss the two largest reforestation and forest conservation programmes in China, the Natural Forest Protection Programme (NFPP), and the Slope Land Conversion Programme (SLCP, also called Grain for Green), introduced in 1998. The NFPP reformed the state forest enterprises to reduce deforestation, increase the amount of forestland to be protected, and increase the sustainability of logging, while improving their financial viability. The SLCP reformed collective (i.e.

Spanish rangelands occupy more than 90,000km² of land grazed by millions of domestic and wild animals. Organic matter content of soil is an essential component for fertility and productivity in both, natural and human-induced ecosystems. Despite its importance to soil quality, soil organic carbon has been little studied in these rangelands. The main goal of this study is to assess the amounts and characteristics of soil organic matter in grazed open woodlands of SW Iberia as influenced by vegetation cover and land management.

This article aims at testing whether the ecosystem services framework helps in understanding the link between local management and biodiversity conservation. Tourism was analysed in Camargue (France), a wetland area of high biodiversity value, via semi-structured interviews with local stakeholders. Three types of stakeholders were interviewed: protected area managers, livestock farmers and public institutions. This was done to examine whether they manage the land to enable tourism and/or maintain or restore the ecological state of ecosystems.

Biomass will play a role in the UK meeting EU targets on renewable energy use. Short Rotation Coppice (SRC) and miscanthus are potential biomass feedstocks; however, supply will rely on farmer willingness to grow these crops. Despite attractive crop establishment grants for dedicated energy crops (DECs) in the UK, uptake remains low. Drawing on results from an on-farm survey with 244 English arable farmers, 81.6% (87.7%) of farmers would not consider growing miscanthus (SRC), while respectively, 17.2% (11.9%) would consider growing and 1.2% (0.4%) were currently growing these crops.

Collective action, on communal grazing land, has evolved in the highlands of northwestern Ethiopia to mitigate the problems of feed shortage and land degradation due to overgrazing. The exercise is liked by farmers for improving the availability of natural pasture during the long dry season when other feed sources get depleted. However, large portions of the communal grazing lands are still managed under free grazing throughout the year.

By the year 2050, agriculture will have to provide the food and nutrition requirements of some 9 billion people. Moreover, to maintain that level of productivity indefinitely it must do so using environmentally sustainable production systems. This task will be profoundly complicated by the effects of climate change, increasing competition for water resources and loss of productive lands.

Apart from the difficulty to attract new members, leakage of sales outside the cooperative is a major challenge for the coffee cooperatives in Rwanda. Local (independent) traders still constitute a major market for coffee producers. Yet, cooperatives also accept the produce from non-members and pay them the same price. Our objective in this paper is to analyse the importance of this phenomenon of double side-selling. We collected data from a sample of 170 coffee farmers. We use a probit model to analyse characteristics linked to cooperative membership and to study double side-selling.

The need for climate change mitigation has led to a recent upsurge in policies aimed to deliver re-afforestation across the globe, but with mixed successes observed depending upon the levels of private land ownership and ability of governments to engage land managers. This paper evaluates a new government-led scheme in Wales, which is intended to increase woodland cover from 14% to 20% by 2030 to offset the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.

The South African government has endeavoured to strengthen property rights in communal areas and develop civil society institutions for community-led development and natural resource management. However, the effectiveness of this remains unclear as the emergence and operation of civil society institutions in these areas is potentially constrained by the persistence of traditional authorities. Focusing on the former Transkei region of Eastern Cape Province, three case study communities are used examine the extent to which local institutions overlap in issues of land access and control.