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Wetlands provide ecosystem services such as flood protection, improved water quality, and wildlife habitat, but are under attack in urban land-use conflicts in the Global South. This article presents two cases of local wetlands governance conflicts in Colombia (Humedal la Conejera, Bogotá, Cundinamarca) and Argentina (Laguna de Rocha, Esteban Echeverría, Gran Buenos Aires) to illustrate divergent pathways toward improved environmental governance via citizen pressures: the collaborative method (Bogotá) and the adversarial method (Buenos Aires). While existing scholarship on citizen-led regulation stresses the importance of collaboration between community organizations and the state, this article argues that adversarial tactics are also a key component of environmental governance. In both cases, citizen-led pressures led to increased enforcement of regulatory measures to restore wetlands and gain protected-area status. Citizen-led governance involved adversarial strategies such as marches, litigation, and shaming and blaming in the media, as well as collaborative strategies such as creating broad-based educational forums, working inside city government, and partnering directly with public institutions to set new policies. Against the backdrop of extensive collusion between elected officials and land developers, citizen-led subnational environmental governance has become the regulatory regime of last resort in urban Latin America.

Since the year 2000, millions of hectares of land in the Global South have been acquired by foreign investors for large-scale agricultural projects, displacing and disrupting rural communities. Women are especially disadvantaged by the global land grab: they are less likely to inherit, control, or make decisions over land, but often need land to support themselves, their families, and their communities. While international organizations have developed global guidelines to improve land governance, tensions still run high as the current policies fall short. Gender and the Global Land Grab introduces a feminist conceptual framework to analyze land governance policy around the world. Andrea Collins shows how gender norms, biases, and expectations shape land politics at different levels of governance. Drawing on examples from sub-Saharan Africa and with an in-depth case study of land politics in Tanzania, the book assesses guidelines developed by institutions such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Bank to highlight essential considerations for developing and implementing gender-sensitive policy. Illustrating how gender shapes resource policy across all levels of political activity, Gender and the Global Land Grab provides valuable tools for transforming global policymaking.

This article examines how rural roads relate to differences in livelihood patterns, attitudes toward social change, and land disputes in Baringo, Kenya. Although their direct use is limited for many residents, roads have a highly differentiating impact. While some households orientate themselves toward roads, those relying more on (agro-)pastoralist livelihoods avoid their proximity. Our findings suggest that better-off households are not the only ones that tend to live closer to roads, but that poorer households do as well. Rather than by socio-economic status, households living closer to roads can be characterized by higher degrees of formal education and also appear to be more open to economic and social change. Our data also highlight dynamics of land disputes in the face of ongoing large-scale infrastructural investments in Kenya’s previously marginal northern drylands.

Agricultural mechanisation promotes continuous cultivation on a piece of land and expansion of the area under cultivation, thereby intensifying competition for land. This impacts the land tenure system based on customary land tenure and communal landholding that thrived under land fallowing. Situated within the evolutionary theory of land rights and adopting an empirical qualitative research approach, this paper examines the effects of agricultural mechanisation on customary land tenure relations in Ghana's Transitional Zone. The paper argues that the widespread adoption of agricultural mechanisation has led to farm extensification and intensification which have engendered intense competition and conflicts over land and trends towards individual landholding. This has provided the arsenals for manipulation by the powerful in society and ushering in a new form of customary land tenure relations that replaces traditional social relations with capitalist relations and creates tension between allodial rights holders and the usufructuary and customary tenancy rights holders

This paper explores the links between conflict, land, and indigenous peoples on the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. The analysis takes advantage of the unprecedented concurrence of data from the 2020 census, an independent conflict data monitor for Mindanao, and administrative sources on ancestral land titling for indigenous peoples in the Philippines. While evidence elsewhere compellingly links land titling with conflict reduction, we find a more nuanced story in Mindanao using mixed methods. Conflicts, including land- and resource-related conflicts, are generally less likely in districts with higher shares of indigenous peoples. Ancestral domain areas also have a lower likelihood of general conflict but a higher likelihood of land-related conflict. Our econometric findings suggest that ancestral domain titling does not automatically solve land-related conflicts. Only fully awarded ancestral domain titles are—weakly—associated with reductions in land-related conflict. However, when administrative delays occur, titling is associated with sustained, rather than decreased, conflict.

This study reports on the outcomes of customary land certification, which comprised formalisation of customary land rights in three chiefdoms in Zambia. Social learning labs, encompassing sharing, learning and reflection phases were at the core of data collection from villagers, traditional leaders and government officials. Results indicate that customary land certification reduced customary land markets and land conflicts, enhanced land tenure security and transparency in customary land administration but reduced communal natural resources management in the study sites. Access to financial credit was indirectly increased, as certification provided customary landowners with proof of residence, a requirement for bank loans. Villagers became emboldened to assert their land rights post certification. The study argues that customary land tenure systems should not be assumed to encapsulate insecure land tenure a priori but customary land certification processes may induce tenure insecurity when they include conditions that present financial costs to land rights claimants and threaten loss of land rights.

Local governments’ failure to provide proper compensation for rural residents’ land rights has been one of the main sources of political conflict in rural China. Previous literature has focused on why local governments use different means to compensate for land-losing rural residents. Yet, the question of who local governments prioritize when providing compensation for dispossessed land rights has not been fully examined. Employing the data from the China Household Income Survey (2013), I show that local states are more likely to provide compensation, either a cash payment or access to social insurance, to land-losing rural residents who stay in the township. Land-losing rural residents who live outside the township, to the contrary, are less likely to be compensated for their land rights by local states. Drawing on the China General Social Survey (2010), I suggest that the disadvantage of out-migrants stems from their lowered levels of political participation. The findings from this article imply that internal migrants in China are discriminated against not only in the destination localities but also in their home localities.

This paper explores the violence stemming from food riots in Latin American countries that have been triggered by recurring food crises in the twenty-first century, particularly impacting impoverished rural populations. The marginalized sectors of emerging countries, whose demands for basic rights such as the right to food go unaddressed by the State, may resort to protests that can escalate into confrontations. The recurrent food crises exacerbate the struggle to meet the basic needs of those who are unable to subsist regularly. This research focuses on a region that has received less scholarly attention compared to Africa and Asia, and examines indicators such as land grabbing, climate change, demographic pressures, political polarization, as independent variables to elucidate the association with food riot occurrences. The collected data and statistical analysis confirm the hypotheses, although further studies are required to enhance the performance of certain indicators.

The Fast Track Land Reform Programme in Zimbabwe has emerged as a highly contested reform process both nationally and internationally. The image of it has all too often been that of the widespread displacement and subsequent replacement of various people, agricultural-related production systems, facets and processes. The reality, however, is altogether more complex. Providing new and much-needed empirical research, this in-depth book examines how processes such as land acquisition, allocation, transitional production outcomes, social life, gender and tenure, have influenced and been influenced by the forces driving the programme. It also explores the ways in which the land reform programme has created a new agrarian structure based on small- to medium-scale farmers. In attempting to resolve the problematic issues the reforms have raised, the author argues that it is this new agrarian formation which provides the greatest scope for improving Zimbabwe�s agriculture and development. Based on a broader geographical scope than any previous study carried out on the subject, this is a landmark work on a subject of considerable controversy.

The report identifies scarcity and weak governance as main land challenges in the MENA region. It describes how they affect land use and access, result in significant inefficiencies and inequities, and generate economic, environmental and social costs.