Land-use regulations are a critical component of forest governance and conservation strategies, but their effectiveness in shaping landholder behaviour is poorly understood. We conducted a spatial and temporal analysis of the Brazilian Forest Code (BFC) to understand the patterns of regulatory compliance over time and across changes in the policy, and the implications of these compliance patter...

Many threatened species worldwide rely on patches of remnant vegetation in private landholdings. To establish private reserves that contribute effectively to conservation involves a wide range of complex and interacting ecological, legal, social, and financial factors. These can be seen as a series of successive hurdles, each with multiple bars, which must all be surmounted. The golden lion tam...

Over the past 50 years, large areas of agricultural land have been drained and put into intensive agricultural production. Increasing attention is now being paid to the issue of restoring wetland areas and promoting environmental benefits. Collective action is important for wetland restoration, both because of the physical interactions among landholders and because of the cost saving and enhanc...

Payment for ecosystem services programs are being implemented in a wide variety of settings, but whether and in what contexts such programs present ‘win–win’ scenarios that simultaneously improve human wellbeing and achieve conservation goals remains poorly understood. Based on semi-structured interviews with early program participants enrolling either collectivelyor individually-held land, we ...

This study examined how the terms used to describe climate change influence landholder acceptability judgements and attitudes toward climate change at the local scale. Telephone surveys were conducted with landholders from viticultural (n = 97) or cereal growing (n = 195) backgrounds in rural South Australia. A variety of descriptive and inferential statistics were used to examine the influence...

Researchers are increasingly interested in understanding the impact of contentious social processes on land change. In the Brazilian Amazon, there are often contentious interactions between landholders defending private property rights and squatters who have the right to occupy land that is deemed unproductive. Previous studies suggest that the contentious social processes inherent in the Brazi...

Tanzania led the wave of land reform in sub-Saharan Africa, promoting ‘institutional fixes’ property rights to stimulate urban development and poverty alleviation. Since 2005, Residential Licence programme has offered short-term leases around 180,000 households unplanned settlements Dar es Salaam. However, rate title acquisition been moderate low, as much Africa. To understand demand for titles...

Building on available theory, this work uses controlled laboratory experiments to investigate the budgetary and the economic performance of competitive tenders for allocating conservation contracts to landholders. Experiments have been replicated in two different countries to check for robustness of results. We find that auctions outperform the more traditional fixed-price programs only in the ...