This case study deals with the South African government policies for restitution and redistribution of land to people in rural areas who were deprived of it due to racially discriminatory laws and practice. Its main focus is on how the interactions between civil society and the state in the several phases of land reform through the 1990s reflect some key issues of governance, eg.

Improved agriculture in the Drought Prone Uplands (DPUs) depends critically on better water conservation and management. However, there is a high degree of uncertainty surrounding issues of water availability, allocation and local rights. Despite broad similarities in the goals of many programmes, there has been a lack of consistency and coherence among them. The focus of this paper is on the difficulties of developing a coherent analytical framework that would enable questions of technical and institutional choice to be addressed systematically.

Despite the central role of urban areas in socio-economic and geo-political change processes at the local, regional, and global level, as well as in the regional and global biophysical processes, little attention has been paid so far to the complex and dynamic interactions between urban areas and the biophysical and chemical processes of global environmental changes.This book contributes to the knowledge about these interactions.

This draft paper outlines a strategy for World Bank involvement in land policies. It focuses on property rights to land, land transactions, and socially optimal use of land.

Drawing upon several sources of information and types of analysis, including literature reviews, field visits and rapid participatory assessments, this paper provides a critical assessment of land-related development policies and projects over the past two decades in Central America. Reflections on past land-related development policies and projects in Central America are based on their contributions to growth and poverty reduction.

The Forests and Climate Change Programme (FORCLIME) is a collaborative initiative implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry. The project aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the forestry sector and improve the livelihoods of Indonesia’s poor rural communities. This report outlines the results of a gender analysis of Indonesia’s forestry sector undertaken to inform the design of a gender strategy for FORCLIME.

Mitchells Plain is about 20km from the Cape Town city centre. It was built in the 1970s as a township for people classified as ‘Coloured’, who were forcibly removed from areas that had been declared ‘whites only’ under the Group Areas Act. Various attempts were made to upgrade the Mitchells Plain Town Centre (MPTC) after the advent of democracy in 1994, but these were disjointed and lacked a champion to drive the process.

This paper looks at the case of Mdudwa village in the Eastern Cape to explore the processes and impacts of democratic decentralisation.

A survey of the development of pensions in the United States, addressing such issues as what employees want from pensions, what incentives the employer has to create pensions, and what desirable effects industrial pensions have on the economy.Pensions are retirement insurance: They offer protection in case you live long enough to quit collecting a paycheck and can stop working. In the United States, pensions are provided by both public and private sectors.

This document presents the results of an evaluation of an IFAD project aimed at preventing land degradation in Nepal. The project is based on leasehold forestry, an innovative approach introduced by IFAD in the early 1990s. It works by providing forty-year leases to groups of households and giving them user rights over plots of degraded forest land.

This concept paper proposes (a) market driven farm and off-farm entrepreneurial options, that could take advantage of the existing opportunities, thus leading to the creation of indigenous oriented economic growth and (b) empowerment of the small and medium scale private enterprises to create an enabling environment conducive for equitable growth of their businesses.

Describes the main features of the new Eritrean land law and its operative assumption that the legislation is meant to extend state control over land.The legal devices employed by the law are widely used in sub-Saharan Africa (and were largely inspired by colonial policies). The State of Eritrea frequently asserts that its recent independence gives it the opportunity to learn from other developing countries' mistakes and to avoid them.The basic patterns of the new land law, however, are common to the rest of Africa, notwithstanding the evident poor results.