Purpose – The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of land rights and tenure types on farmers' investment behavior in Chinese collective forests, using household survey data from Fujian Province.

Design/methodology/approach – In this study, the authors conducted a household survey in Fujian province of 520 randomly selected forest farmers. The authors used a random-effects Tobit model to estimate the impact of land rights and other components on, for example, tenure security and harvest quota, and the impact of tenure types on farmers' investment incentives.

The expansion of a given land use may affect deforestation directly if forests are cleared to free land for this use, or indirectly, via the displacement of other land-use activities from non-forest areas towards the forest frontier. Unlike direct land conversion, indirect land-use changes affecting deforestation are not immediately observable. They require the linking of changes occurring in different regions.

Land conflicts can be detrimental. An important goal of development policy is to help define and instill respect for borders. This is often implemented through mandatory and expensive interventions that rely on the expansion of government land administration institutions.

This paper assesses the impact of a landcertification program in Ethiopia on the level of interpersonal and institutional trust among households in the Amhara region. The landcertification program is designed to enhance landtenure security of farmers, by maintaining (egalitarian) status quo land distribution and equity concerns.

Cómo los incentivos de mercado afectan el comportamiento de los que no reciben el PSA? Con este estudio el Programa de Investigación en Desarrollo, Economía y Ambiente (IDEA) de CATIE se dio a la tarea de explorar esta pregunta en Costa Rica.

What are the impacts of climate change on the Ethiopian economy?

Agriculture in Ethiopia is heavily dependent on rain. In addition to its low adaptive capacity, its geographical location and topography make the country highly vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change. Results indicate that, over a 50-year period, the projected reduction in agricultural productivity may lead to 30 percent less average income, compared with the possible outcome in the absence of climate change.

The restitution of parkland to the Khomani San “bushmen” and Mier “agricultural” communities in May 2002 marked a significant shift in conservation in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and environs in South Africa. Biodiversity conservation will benefit from this land restitution only if the Khomani San, who interact with nature more than do other groups, are good environmental stewards.

Little is known about land cover change in agroforestry systems, which often supply valuable ecological services. We use a spatial regression model to analyze clearing in El Salvador’s shade coffee–growing regions during the 1990s.

Although a large theoretical literature discusses the possible inefficiency of sharecropping contracts, empirical evidence on this phenomenon has been ambiguous at best. Household‐level fixed‐effect estimates from about 8,500 plots operated by households that own and sharecrop land in the Ethiopian highlands provide support for the hypothesis of Marshallian inefficiency.

The risk of losses of income and productive means due to adverse weather can differ significantly among farmers sharing a productive landscape, and is of course hard to estimate, or even “guesstimate” empirically. Moreover, the costs associated with investments in reduced vulnerability to climatic events are likely to exhibit economies of scope. We explore the implications of these characteristics on farmer's decisions to adapt to climate change using a framed field experiment applied to coffee farmers in Costa Rica.