The study is set against the backdrop of the urbanization trend in present-day China, and focuses on the relationship between farmers who have lost their land (“land-lost farmers”) and local government. Particularly, it applies the extended case method to answer the following two questions: first, in what ways do the forces of integration and conflict manifest themselves in the relationship between land-lost farmers and local government? Second, how do land-lost farmers and local government apply respective modalities in the context of their interplay? The main finding is that the two groups, land-lost farmers and officials, are engaged in a complex and dynamic relationship. That relationship is played out locally within a network of power-interest structures, which not only manifests itself as forces of integration and conflict, but also as an ongoing process, a game played by knowledgeable agents, whose strategies are enacted, and in so doing, both reproduce that game and alter it. Readers will gain an ethnographic understanding of the relationship based on an in-depth examination of perspectives on both sides of the equation.

Prague is a vibrant and growing city facing significant land-use pressures related to rapid peri-urban growth. This report examines land use and governance trends in Prague and the broader metropolitan area, including the formal elements of the planning system and broader governance ...

Land, as a fundamental resource in regional development, provides major opportunities for farming, housing, urban planning, and financing. In order to meet the requirements of the new era, every state has developed and implemented a series of policies according to its national specificities and to the international regulations and trends. Geospatial Technologies for Effective Land Governance is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the application of the use of GNSS, remote sensing, and GIS. While highlighting topics such as crop management, multispectral images, and irrigation, this publication explores land administration, encompassing both cadastral systems and land registration, as well as the methods of land governance strategies. This book is ideally designed for researchers, agricultural professionals, engineers, environmentalists, land developers, educators, students, and policymakers seeking current research on land and land-based conflicts in urban and rural communities.

Who makes land-use decisions, how are those decisions made, and who influences whom, how and why? This working paper is part of a series based on research studying multilevel decision-making institutions and processes. The series is aimed at providing insight into why efforts to keep forests standing, such as initiatives like Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), are still so far from altering development trajectories. It underlines the importance of understanding the politics of multilevel governance in forest, land and climate policy and practice, and identifies potential ways forward, while highlighting the role of conservation and sustainable management of forests for the enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries.

The importance of good land governance to strengthen women s land rights, facilitate land-related investment, transfer land to better uses, use it as collateral, and allow effective decentralization through collection of property taxes has long been recognized. The challenges posed by recent global developments, especially urbanization, increased and more volatile food prices, and climate change have raised the profile of land and the need for countries to have appropriate land policies. However, efforts to improve country-level land governance are often frustrated by technical complexities, institutional fragmentation, vested interests, and lack of a shared vision on how to move towards good land governance and measure progress in concrete settings. Recent initiatives have recognized the important challenges this raises and the need for partners to act in a collaborative and coordinated fashion to address them. The breadth and depth of the papers included in this volume, all of which were presented at the World Bank s Annual Conference on Land Policy and Administration, illustrate the benefits from such collaboration. They are indicative not only of the diversity of issues related to land governance but, more importantly, highlight that, even though the topic is complex and politically challenging, there is a wealth of promising new approaches to improving land governance through innovative technologies, country-wide policy dialogue, and legal and administrative reforms. The publication is based on an on-going partnership between the World Bank, the International Federation of Surveyors, the Global Land Tool Network and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization provide tools that can help to address land governance in practice and at scale. It is our hope that this volume will be of use to increase awareness of and support to the successful implementation of innovative approaches that can help to not only improve land governance, but also thereby contribute to the well-being of the poorest and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.

Land grabbing per se is not a new phenomenon, given its historical precedents in the eras of imperialism. However, the character, scale, pace, orientation and key drivers of the recent wave of land grabs is a distinct historical event closely tied to the changing dynamics of the global agri-food, feed and fuel complex. Land grabbing is facilitated by ever greater flows of capital, goods, and ideas across borders, and these flows occur through axes of power that are far more polycentric than the North-South imperialist tradition. Land grabs occur in the context of changes in the character of the global food regime, formerly anchored by North Atlantic empires; the integrated food-energy complex seems to be headed towards multiple centres of power, especially with the rise of the BRICS and the proliferation of middle income countries participating in many of the land transactions. Land Grabbing and Global Governance offers insights from leading scholars and experts on contemporary land grabs. This volume examines land grabs in direct relation to a global economy undergoing profound change and the role of new configurations of actors and power in governance institutions and practices. This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.

The authors develop a model of land leasing with agents characterized by unobserved heterogeneity in ability and presence of an off-farm labor market. In this case, decentralized land rental may contribute to equity and efficiency goals and may have several advantages over administrative reallocation. The extent to which this is true empirically is explored using data from three of China's poorest provinces. The authors find that both processes redistribute land to those with lower endowments but that land rental markets are more effective in doing so and also have a larger productivity-enhancing effect than administrative reallocation, implying that more active land rental markets would allow producers to realize significant productivity gains. At the same time, the presence of a large number of producers whose participation in rental markets remains constrained suggests that efforts to reduce transaction costs in land rental markets would be warranted.