Land uses are changing rapidly in Vietnam’s upland northern borderlands. Regional development platforms such as the Greater Mekong Subregion, state-propelled market integration and reforestation programs, and lowland entrepreneurs and migrants are all impacting this frontier landscape. Drawing on a mixed methods approach using remote sensing data from 2000 to 2009 and ethnographic fieldwork, we examine how land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) has occurred across three borderland provinces—Lai Châu, Lào Cai and Hà Giang—with high proportions of ethnic minority semi-subsistence farmers.

Patterns of human land use (LU) necessarily transform the land systems that sustain and contain them. Importantly, the impacts of such transformations are not isolated in space and time. LU management decisions that are made at a given geographic unit regularly impact both human and nonhuman well-being beyond the spatiotemporal boundaries of that unit. To superintend the conflicts that arise out of such circumstances, human LUs are generally subject to institutional regulations.

Drawing on a survey of large-scale ecological restoration initiatives, we find that managers face contradictory demands. On the one hand, they have to raise funds from a variety of sources through competitive procedures for individual projects. These projects require the specification of deliverable outputs within a relatively short project period.

Land-titling programs, land and forest allocation programs, and projects on state-allocated land for development and investment in Laos have been key drivers of change in land tenure. These have triggered major shifts in land use rights, from customary, to temporary, and then to permanent land use rights. This article explores how government programs to grant land use rights to individual households have affected the way people have been able to acquire and secure land tenure.

The notion that the formal titling and individualization of land rights in developing countries lead to higher investments in land and agricultural productivity holds sway in academic and development circles. In this paper, this notion is analyzed based on a comparative study of land reform programs and their implications for access to land, credit, and agricultural investments in Ghana, Kenya, and Vietnam. It focuses on how different access routes to land influence access to credit, and the transaction costs of land reform programs for agricultural investments.

This paper proposes the use of agent-based models (ABMs) as “interested amateurs” in policy making, and uses the example of the SWAP model of soil and water conservation adoption to demonstrate the potential of this approach. Daniel Dennett suggests experts often talk past or misunderstand each other, seek to avoid offending each other or appearing ill-informed and generally err on the side of under-explaining a topic. Dennett suggests that these issues can be overcome by including “interested amateurs” in discussions between experts.

Under Vietnam’s State land ownership regime, the Government holds supreme authority over compulsory land acquisition. The results show that many improvements in land acquisition policies have been made, but poor implementation measures largely cannot prevent or even mitigate the adverse impacts on displaced persons. In particular, ineffective compensation measures and a lack of production land and livelihood alternatives accelerate the resistance of communities displaced as a result of hydropower development.

Many internally displaced people (IDPs) find refuge in cities. However, the scale of global urban internal displacement caused by violence, conflict, disasters and development projects is unknown. Cities struggle to accommodate IDPs since their movements are largely spontaneous, and some authorities may resist helping IDPs for fear of encouraging further influxes. Meanwhile, IDPs face displacement-specific challenges to rebuild their lives in urban settings and may be displaced again in the process due to lack of housing tenure security and violence and insecurity.

The report analyses displacement in Coast region and identifies tensions over land tenure and poor land governance as key triggers, and obstacles to durable solutions. It provides examples of land issues underlying displacement caused by generalised violence, disasters and human rights violations, and establishes a close link between tenure insecurity and forced evictions. Disputes arise from competing land claims and incompatibility between formal and informal tenure systems.

n recent decades, many cities and towns around the world have seen dramatic population growth, with significant inflows from rural areas. People forcibly displaced by armed conflict, violence or natural disasters have moved to urban areas in search of greater security, better access to basic services and greater economic opportunities.

According to the government agency Acción Social, around six per cent of national territory has been abandoned, while between 3.3 and 4.9 million people have been displaced by conflict and violence in Colombia. Roughly half of the internally displaced families owned or occupied land before their displacement. Almost all of them have lost it as a result.

Armed conflict broke out in Côte d’Ivoire in 2002, which caused the country to be divided in two: the north under the control of the Forces Nouvelles rebels and the south in the hands of the government. It also caused the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. In the west of the country, and in particular in the two regions of Moyen Cavally and Dix-Huit Montagnes, the crisis provoked a series of successive displacements involving population groups with competing claims over land.