1/ 1/ I am grateful to Mizanour Rahman Chowdhury, Association for Land Reform and Development, Dhaka, for giving me fresh insights into many complex land reform issues in Bangladesh and Krishna Ghimire, UNRISD, Geneva, for streamlining my thoughts in this chapter.

Land use patterns are the consequence of dynamic processes that often include important legacy issues. Evaluation of past trends can be used to investigate the role of path dependence in influencing future land use through a reference “business as usual” (BAU) scenario. These issues are explored with regard to objectives for woodland expansion in Scotland as a major pillar of climate change pol...

Karachi is one of the world's fastest growing large cities. This paper describes the complex processes by which land is (formally and informally) made available for housing (and for commercial development), as well as who benefits - and how the low-income majority of Karachi citizens lose out. It also describes what underpins this - especially the political complications in a city that has grow...

We survey the literature on spatial bio-economic and land-use modelling and review thematic developments. Unobserved site specific heterogeneity is common in almost all of the surveyed works . Heterogeneity appears also to be a significant catalyst engendering significant methodological innovation. To better equip prototypes to adequately incorporate heterogeneity, we consider a smorgasbord of ...

The book written by seventeen experts in the field of rangeland management, this compilation of essays brings to light the latent issues concerning this subject to readers all over the globe. Though technical approaches can address some issues, social processes ultimately prevent the balancing of these matters. Socio-economic and political institutions are often a stumbling block for improving ...

Land shortage for burials is one of many issues that emerge out of accelerated urban growth in most developing Asian cities, including Kuala Lumpur. Despite actions taken by the federal government and local authorities in addressing this issue, there is no strategic solution being formulated. Apart from making provisions for land to be developed as new cemeteries, the future plan is merely to a...

This introduction to the Special Issue summarizes the results of 14 scientific articles from the interdisciplinary research program Ekoklim at Stockholm University, Sweden. In this program, we investigate effects of changing climate and land use on landscape processes, biodiversity, and ecosystem services, and analyze issues related to adaptive governance in the face of climate and land-use cha...

This essay is concerned about how to evaluate positive theories on Latin American development. Its content is nested in a broader discussion on theoretical decay and theoretical progress by using Imre Lakatos’ approach of sophisticated falsificationism. The main argument states that theory driven research on Latin American development provides further evidence to the assumption that methodologi...

undoubtly, land degradation causes apparent decrease of natural resources potential which are highly linked to desertification. different countries and also international organization have realized a great number of projects to combat desertification. unfortunately these projects have not reach to their goals. the experiences shows that the reason of these unsuccessful works is lack of consider...