A independência de São Tomé e Príncipe, em 1975, foi um projeto de um grupo muito restrito de exilados. O arquipélago tornou-se independente sob a liderança do Movimento de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe (MLSTP) e Pinto da Costa. Apesar de alguns militantes viverem no Gabão e não serem socialistas, o MLSTP, apoiado pelo Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, tornou-se socialista. Depois de 1975, sob a ditadura do partido único, o MLSTP tentou impor uma política que enfatizava o valor do trabalho e o ideal do homem novo.

Although land forms the basis for marginal livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa, the asset is more strategic for women as they usually hold derived and dependent rights to land in customary tenure areas. Initiatives to secure women’s land tenure in customary areas are undermined by the social embeddedness of the rights, patriarchy, lack of awareness by the communities, legal pluralism, and challenges of recording the rights.

This chapter investigates how land tenure reforms in Ethiopia have influenced the position of women in terms of land tenure security, access to land, decision-power over land within households, as well as the gendered impacts of these tenure reforms on land investments, land productivity, land renting, and household consumption welfare. It is based on a careful screening of the relevant literature based on its quality and critically examining the reliability of the causal effects in each study.

Most of the land in sub-Saharan Africa is governed under various forms of customary tenure. Over the past three decades a quiet paradigm shift has been taking place transforming the way such landl is governed. Driven in part by adaptations to changing context but also accelerated by neo-liberal reforms, this shift has created a ‘new’ customary tenure in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper reviews some of the evidence and analyses the ways in which this neo-liberalisation of customary tenure has been transforming relations of production and how land is governed in sub-Saharan Africa.

Contemporary discourses on customary land tenure in Africa, and South Africa in particular, have emphasized the socially embedded and flexible nature of customary land rights, recognising these as inherently more ‘pro-poor’ than individual titling. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observations in Venda, a former homeland in South Africa, this paper explores how in the context of expanding commodity frontiers, customary land markets have emerged, leading to de facto privatisation of customary land.

Land as an essential resource is becoming increasingly scarce due to population growth. In the case of the Kenyan coast, population pressure causes land cover changes in the Arabuko Sokoke Forest, which is an important habitat for endangered species. Forest and bushland have been changed to agricultural land in order to provide livelihood for the rural population who are highly dependent on small-scale farming. Unclear land rights and misbalanced access to land cause uncontrolled expansion and insecure livelihoods.

In this book research focuses on a comparative analysis of the collective strategies employed by indigenous and peasant women to gain access to justice for the sexual violence and other human rights violations they suffered in the context of armed conflict and transition in Colombia and Guatemala.

Deforestation and forest degradation account for up to 20% of the total annual anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, current approaches to address climate change include strategies to reduce deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD). Even though REDD is still under discussion within the UNFCCC framework, many REDD pilot projects are being implemented across the tropics.