Russia’s region of Chernozem and Kastanozem soils in Western-Siberia, where this study focused on the Kulunda steppe, has great potential as a carbon sink, particularly if the current widespread practice of burning crop residue can be replaced with conservation tillage practices that will return the residue to the soil. Environmentally-oriented land use policy measures have been introduced that could accomplish that goal. But these measures are quite recent, and face obstacles in the prevailing post-socialist institutional environment and in cultural norms.

In the recent explosion of attention given to the land grabbing phenomenon, contract farming has been identified as a potentially inclusive alternative for smallholders to outright acquisition of farm land by agri-business capital. This paper responds to these claims by resituating contract farming as an equally important form of land control. The focus of the paper is a case study of potato contract farming in Maharashtra

Enabling knowledge exchange between scientists and decision-makers is becoming increasingly necessary to promote the development of effective decision-support tools (DSTs) for environmental management. Participation of stakeholders in the design process beyond a basic level of consultation is essential for promoting trust in modelled outputs and accelerating eventual uptake of resulting tools and models by end-user communities. This study outlines the development of a DST to visualise and communicate the spatial and temporal patterns of E.