The report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the Illegal/Irregular Allocation of Public Land is finally out! Popularly known as the ‘Ndung’u’ Report, the publication of this three-volume document is important to the Kenya Land Alliance for two major reasons. Firstly, the appointment of the Coordinator of the Kenya Land Alliance to the Commission marked a threshold in the relations between KLA and the Government of Kenya.

This paper explores key issues relating to the privatisation of livestock production in Botswana, with particular relevance to pastoral livelihoods.The paper reviews the history of land policy; summarises developments in recent years of rangeland policies; and analyses the economic, social and environmental impact of the process of privatising the commons in Botswana.Main conclusions include:the benefits of the privatisation of the commons have mainly been concentrated in the hands of a small number of wealthy cattle owners, an elite consisting largely of members or supporters of the ruling

This paper analyses the effect of ethnic conflict on economic growth. It presents an econometric approach which develops a simple growth’s model with four ethnic variables and institutional regressors (a democratic and a rule of law index) along with two production factors (capital and labour).The report argues that these events shed light on how multi-ethnic societies are subject to “the tragedy of the commons” as each ethnic group seeks to benefit alone from common resources.

In this paper, we develop an empirical model of an agro-pastoral system subject to high climatic risk to test the impact of rainfall variability on livestock densities, land allocation patterns and herd mobility observed at the community level. Also, because grazing land is a common-pool resource, we determine the impact of cooperation on these decision variables.

This paper describes the land property rights and tenure systems in the western escarpments of the Yemeni Highlands, and analyses the impact of land tenure arrangements and other socioeconomic factors on terrace maintenance. Owner-cultivated land is dominant in the terraced area, but more than one-third of the land is sharecropped. Terraces cultivated by landowners have a lower number of broken walls per hectare than those cultivated by tenants under sharecropping arrangements.

Under the socialist regime that prevailed until the start of the 1990s, Mongolia made great progress in improving human development indicators, and poverty was virtually unknown. Through innovative service delivery mechanisms to nomadic pastoralists, almost universal coverage of primary health care services was achieved and adult literacy reached 97%.Political and economic transition in the 1990s ushered in a rapid rise in asset and income inequality, and a third of the population have been defined as living below the poverty line since 1995.

This article explores the history of notions of land ownership among Mongolian pastoralists in a historical context.In the 1990s the Mongolian state implemented a series of reforms designed to create a competitive market economy based on private property. These included the wholesale privatisation of the pastoral economy and the dissolution of the collective and state farms. The Asian Development Bank and other international development agencies advocated new legislation to allow the private ownership of land.

This article discusses what is the best means of managing the commons. The article stresses that these are critical questions in the current wave of decentralisation and tenure reform taking place in many Sahelian states.

This paper considers the evidence surrounding the popular view that common property management regimes (CPMRs) of forest management in Latin America must inevitably break down in the face of economic and demographic pressures. The evidence shows that there have been both positive and negative experiences, with a number of policy implications. The over-riding need is to correct for institutional and policy failures which have catalysed the erosion of CPMRs.