This article seeks to draw connections between a political ecology of global investment in resource sector development and a culturally informed understanding of rural out-migration across the Lao–Thai border. The author highlights how the departures of rural youth for wage labor in Thailand and the remittances they return to sending villages are becoming important for understanding agrarian transformations in Laos today. In the first section the author introduces the contemporary context of cross-border migrations across the Lao–Thai Mekong border.

Women are often the primary users of land for residential and agricultural purposes, but are frequently denied primary and ownership rights to land and other natural resources because of cultural norms. Women are also often excluded from effective participation in the provision of land administration services. This toolkit provides a quick guide for task team leaders of land administration projects, titling components of larger operations, or other land titling initiatives to ensure greater participation by women in the land titling process.

ABSTRACTED FROM INTRODUCTION: Women’s access to and control over land can potentially lead to gender equality alongside addressing material deprivation. Land is not just a productive asset and a source of material wealth, but equally a source of security, status and recognition. Substantive gender equality is both relational and multi-dimensional, cutting across race, class, caste, age, educational and locational hierarchies and can only be achieved if rights are seen as socially legitimate.

ABSTRACTED FROM SUMMARY: Many ethnic groups practice a system of land use and resource management which is uniquely adapted for upland areas. This has developed over generations as part of traditional ways of life, and is underpinned through ritual and customary practices. This study looks at how women’s land and property rights are established and maintained under these customary or traditional tenure systems. Five different ethnic groups were studied: Brao, Trieng, Hmong, Khmu and Tai Dam.

The process of decollectivization in Vietnam, leading up to the 1993 Land Law, ensured farming households the rights to market their own produce and to transfer, exchange, lease, inherit, and mortgage their land-use rights. These changes imply a reworking of relations between state, market, and household, but also within households. Although the allocation of agricultural land in northern Vietnam was relatively equitable, allocation by the state represents only one channel of entitlements to land.

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 Pre-Analysis Plan is for a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) for recently formed youth business groups in Tigray Region of Ethiopia. Resource-poor rural youth are given a business opportunity by being allocated a rehabilitated land area where they can establish a joint business. They are organized as a primary cooperative and self-organize with a board of five members including a leader and a vice leader. The overall objective of the project is to identify factors that enhance the performance and sustainability of formal youth groups as a business and livelihood option.

While strengthening women’s land rights is increasingly on national and international agendas, there is little consensus on how to understand women’s tenure security. Analyses of women’s land rights often use very different definitions of land rights, from formal ownership to women’s management of plots allocated to them by their husbands. This paper identifies aspects of women’s tenure that should be included in indicators. It then provides a conceptual framework to identify the various dimensions of women’s land tenure security and the myriad factors that may influence it.

Countries of the Near East, North Africa, Europe and Central Asia (NEN) region face a myriad of social, economic and political challenges that have stalled their structural and rural transformation processes. This has had a detrimental impacton rural youth, who, as a result, face limited economic opportunities. The NEN region has the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. Weak education systems are failing to provide youth, especially in rural areas, with the cognitive and non-cognitive skills they need to compete in a global economy.

This article offers a general picture of the situation of rural youth in Latin America and the Caribbean(LAC). The population is described through its demographic dynamics, its socio-economiccharacteristics, the situation of priority groups (women and indigenous peoples) and subjects ofinterest for these particular population groups (use of IT, sexual and reproductive health, violence andsocial participation).