Those who led southern African states to independence promised to redress the inequalities of settler colonialism by returning the land to the people. A generation later the rural poor are still waiting. Many lack access and full rights to agricultural land and, as developments in Zimbabwe and South Africa show, they are getting angry. Where did post-independence land reform policy go wrong?

This paper argues that legal reform of land tenure will not take place fast enough to enable developing countries to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation through REDD+. It highlights that a global agreement on REDD+ is needed by 2020, if the mechanism is to have a significant impact on mitigating climate change. However, legally defensible and enforceable land tenure rights, while a key enabling condition for effective and equitable REDD+, will not be achieved in most forest countries before this date.

The objective of the research that this policy brief reports on is to analyse different mechanisms of access to land for the rural poor in an era when redistribution through expropriative land reform is largely inconsistent with the forces of political economy. The roads of access to land which are explored are intra-family transfers, access through community membership, land sales and rental markets, and government programmes including decollectivisation and land-market assisted land reform.

This study contends that Zambia cannot develop if it neglects policy for the efficient utilization of its natural resources. One such area has been the absence of land policy for effective management of rural land.While failure in this area has been attributed to a number of factors, notably absence of credit and funding, this paper contends that the base factor is the absence of efficient land management for rural land.This paper attempts to show that rural land in Zambia remains undeveloped for a number of reasons:The absence of an institutional framework to guide land administration.

Written by ODI's Anna Locke and Giles Henley, the guide provides a summary of the latest thinking around contemporary global land issues in developing countries. It also gives guidance on and evidence for how this thinking can be used in practice; provides signposting to reliable sources that can inform development professionals on issues not covered in the Topic Guide; and highlights where there are gaps in knowledge and evidence.

Agriculture plays an important role in climate change, both as a contributor emitting greenhouse gasses (GHGs) and as a potential reducer of negative impacts. This paper gives an overview of how current and proposed agricultural practices affect climate change and how the proposed measures for mitigation and adaptation impact agriculture. The paper states that industrial agriculture, as currently practiced with monocultures and agrochemicals in a globalised production system, is a major contributor to climate change.

This report aims to assess what poverty means to marginalized rural families, what kind of survival strategies families use in times of hardship, and what these families believe is needed to alleviate their poverty.

The paper offers two models for looking at land reform as a human rights issues in Namaqualand, South Africa. It argues that South African land reform needs to be grounded in a human rights and policy discourse in local, real-world entitlement processes. It uses two theoretical models: an environmental entitlement framework: analyses how people turn resources into endowments, entitlements and capabilities.

This book is about the history of anthropology in Sudan. Contributors to the book represent different generations of anthropologists who at some point in time either taught at the department in Khartoum or had some sort of connection to it. They also represent different countries: Sudan, Norway, United Kingdom, United States, Germany, and France. Some contributors taught at the department during the 1960s and 1970s, and they represent different traditions of anthropology.

This report is a follow up of a study that was carried out in the year 2001/2 commissioned by the FAO and SARPN. The main objective of the initial study was an assessment of the negative impacts of HIV/AIDS on livelihoods of the affected and infected communities through lowering their agricultural productivity.

This annotated bibliography provides evidence that community tenure over forests can result in more forest cover and more species-rich forests, less deforestation and degradation, and fewer fires than some other approaches to protecting forests. The authors initiated the review by identifying relevant scholarly articles published since 2002 based on interviews with experts and keyword searches of databases.