Political transitions often trigger substantial environmental changes. In particular, deforestation can result from the complex interplay among the components of a system—actors, institutions, and existing policies—adapting to new opportunities. A dynamic conceptual map of system components is particularly useful for systems in which multiple actors, each with different worldviews and motivations, may be simultaneously trying to alter different facets of the system, unaware of the impacts on other components.

Despite the increasing acknowledgment of scholars and practitioners that many large-scale agricultural land acquisitions in developing countries fail or never materialize, empirical evidence about how and why they fail to date is still scarce. Too often, land deals are portrayed as straightforward investments and their success is taken for granted. Looking at the coffee sector in Laos, the authors of this article explore dimensions of the land grab debate that have not yet been sufficiently examined.

Sudden and gradual land use changes can result in different socio-ecological systems, sometimes referred to as regime shifts. The Lao PDR (Laos) has been reported to show early signs of such regime shifts in land systems with potentially major socio-ecological implications. However, given the complex mosaic of different land systems, including shifting cultivation, such changes are not easily assessed using traditional land cover data. Moreover, regime shifts in land systems are difficult to simulate with traditional land cover modelling approaches.

ABSTRACTED FROM THE FIRST TWO PARAGRAPHS: Over the past several years, the enormity of the environmental challenges facing the Mekong River Delta region of southern Vietnam has become increasingly clear. Climate change and dam construction on the upper reaches of the Mekong threaten to disrupt the flow of the river, making both droughts and floods ever more common. Meanwhile, the rapid intensification of rice agriculture in the Mekong Delta and the export-oriented cultivation of farmed fish and shrimp have increasingly strained.

ABSTRACTED FROM INTRODUCTION: This paper traces the implications of key agrarian transformations −particularly the reforms in land policy and emerging land relations− for livelihood security and vulnerability. Part of a broader societal transformation and globalization of economies, these new development trajectories include commercialization of farmers’ produce, contract farming, cooperative sector reform, rising landlessness and tenant farming, and the end of exclusive dependence on land for earning a living.

Myanmar's agricultural economy has been under transition from a planned to a market system since the late 1980s and has experienced a substantial increase in production. However, little research is available on the impact of economic policies in this country on agricultural production decisions and rural incomes. Therefore, this paper investigates the impact using a micro dataset collected in 2001 and covering more than 500 households in eight villages with diverse agro-ecological environments.

The paper documents how the implementation of the land tenure policy of the Vietnamese government has affected the agricultural system, livelihood strategies and food self-sufficiency of Thai farmers in a remote upland village, Que, in Nghe An Province, North Central Vietnam. It is shown that the enforcement of restrictions on the area under swidden agriculture has resulted in a strong reduction of swidden agriculture production and shortened fallow periods, not compensated for by the slow increase in paddy rice production.

O território do norte paraense possui 270.040,7 km², distribuídos em nove municípios: Alenquer, Almeirim, Curuá, Faro, Monte Alegre, Óbidos, Oriximiná, Prainha e Terra Santa. Tal área ocupa 22% do estado do Pará, o equivalente à soma dos estados de São Paulo e Sergipe (IBGE, 2019). Em 2019, esse território abrigava uma população estimada em apenas 344.385 habitantes (4% da população total do Pará). Além disso, seu incremento populacional tem ficado abaixo da média do restante do estado. De fato, a população do Norte do Pará aumentou somente 51.480 habitantes entre os anos 2000 e 2019.

Sabe-se que o processo de ocupação econômica, pós-1970, foi extremamente prejudicial ao meio ambiente e às populações tradicionais da região Amazônica, persistindo ainda hoje as imensas dificuldades de reprodução das famílias no interior da floresta. Um dos principais desafios na busca de um Desenvolvimento Sustentável é a viabilização do desempenho econômico das unidades produtivas, a partir dos produtos florestais não madeireiros (PFNM), e, conseqüentemente, da reprodução social dessa população.

Sabe-se que o processo de ocupação econômica, pós-1970, foi extremamente prejudicial ao meio ambiente e às populações tradicionais da região Amazônica, persistindo ainda hoje as imensas dificuldades de reprodução das famílias no interior da floresta. Um dos principais desafios na busca de um Desenvolvimento Sustentável é a viabilização do desempenho econômico das unidades produtivas, a partir dos produtos florestais não madeireiros (PFNM), e, conseqüentemente, da reprodução social dessa população.

Land tenure security is widely considered to be a fundamental factor in motivating farmers to adopt sustainable land management practices. This study aims to establish whether it is true that owner-operators adopt more effective soil conservation measures than tenant-operators, and whether well-designed agro-environmental instruments can provide sufficiently strong motivation to compensate for the differences between these two groups.

Land use decision making requires knowledge integration from a wide range of stakeholders across science and practice. Many participatory methods and instruments aiming at such science-practice interaction have been developed during the last decades. However, there are methodological challenges, and little evidence neither about the methodological applicability and practicability under diverse socio-political conditions nor about their dynamics. The objective of this paper is to offer some insights on the design and implementation of reasonable science-practice interaction.