Large-scale land acquisitions have increased in scale and pace due to changes in commodity markets, agricultural investment strategies, land prices, and a range of other policy and market forces. The areas most affected are the global “commons” – lands that local people traditionally use collectively — including much of the world’s forests, wetlands, and rangelands. In some cases land acquisition occurs with environmental objectives in sight – including the setting aside of land as protected areas for biodiversity conservation.

Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals requires drylands sustainability. Treating drylands as global environmental commons enables better tailored governance responses. Key nested governance elements for drylands involve setting goals, monitoring and delivering sanctions across scales. The present global governance system for drylands only partially delivers these elements. Drylands require a particular focus on linking local and global governance.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the institutional arrangements for gaining access to land and natural resources in southern Benin. This study analyses these practices in two zones, the Allada region and the coastal zone around the city of Ouidah, each of which has particular conditions of access to land.

FOOD SYSTEMS ARE EVOLVING QUICKLY TO MEET GROWING AND CHANGING DEMAND, BUT THEY ARE NOT SERVING EVERYONE’S NEEDS. As we modernize food systems to make them climate-smart, healthy, and sustainable, we must also strive to make them inclusive of smallholders, youth, women, conflict-affected people, and other poor and marginalized people.

The Government of Ethiopia and more specifically, the Rural Land Administration and Use Directorate, (RLAUD) has identified land use planning as an important tool for the sustainable development of the country. Land use planning is vital for optimising the use of the land and for reconciling conflicts between different land uses. Land use planning should be carried out at different levels – from national to regional to local including community: these different levels should support and integrate with each other.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the nature and scope of the linkages between the resource environments, livelihoods and food security of households and individuals. These are analyzed using the livelihood systems framework with the biophysical environment as the entry point. The biophysical and socio-economic environments are investigated as the conditioning and influencing factors that help define the relationships along the production-consumption continuum. The context is spatial, in this case that of fragile areas, where most of the poor and food insecure live and work.

The Lawra district of the Upper West region was selected as the case study. This study compared crop yields for FMNR and non-FMNR farmers. FMNR farmers are classified as having at least 8 trees per acre, with an average of 13 trees per acre (33 per ha) and a maximum of 40. Non-FMNR farmers are classified as having between 1 and 7 trees per acre, with an average of 5.Qualitative (focus group discussion) and quantitative (household survey) data were collected in April to May 2019. Over 500 households were interviewed in both CIKOD intervention communities and control sites.

In recent years, there has been growing attention and effort towards securing the formal, legal recognition of land rights for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Communities and Indigenous Peoples are estimated to hold as much as 65 percent of the world’s land area under customary systems, yet many governments formally recognize their rights to only a fraction of those lands. This gap—between what is held by communities and what is recognized by governments—is a major driver of conflict, disrupted investments, environmental degradation, climate change, and cultural extinction.

Resilience-building planning in drylands requires a participatory, integrated approach that incorporates issues of scale (often large scale) and the interconnectedness of dryland ecological and social systems. In an often political environment that supports small, “manageable” administrative units and the decentralisation of power and resources to them, planning at large scale is particularly challenging; development agents in particular may find it difficult to work across administrative boundaries and/or collaboratively.

The original entry point for this study was how to optimize long-term rotation strategies for addressing the problem of soil fertility decline in Wenchi, Ghana. However, as the study progressed over time, it was realized that what we initially interpreted as soil fertility management strategies were closely intertwined with wider issues such as cropping systems, livelihood aspirations and land tenure relations.

Decisions over tenure – who gets access to land, fisheries and forests, for how long, and under what conditions – have important implications for people’s livelihoods. Spatial planning procedures can have a considerable impact on the legitimate tenure rights of the respective rights holders and, in the long term, can affect livelihoods. This technical guide on regulated spatial planning and tenure acknowledges this link and provides guidance on the importance of recognizing legitimate tenure rights in spatial planning processes.

Indigenous and community lands, crucial for rural livelihoods, are typically held under informal customary arrangements. This can leave the land vulnerable to outside commercial interests, so communities may seek to formalize their land rights in a government registry and obtain an official land document.