Since 1952, U.S. timberland has decreased by about 20 million acres, with about one-quarter of the reduction in the South. Although some of the timberland has been converted to urban and developed uses, larger amounts of land shifted uses between forest and agriculture because of changes in product markets and policy conditions. We summarize area trends for major land uses, examine recent polic...

The de-collectivization of Vietnamese agriculture was a crucial step in the country’s transition to a market economy. The assignment of land-use rights had to be decentralized, and local cadres ostensibly had the power to capture this process. We assess the realized land allocation against explicit counter-factuals, including the allocation implied by a competitive market-based privatization. D...

Introduction This paper is provided as a background essay for the international workshop on Fundamental Rights in the Balance, to be held at IDS 16 -18 October. It reflects on key events, processes and publications emerging from donor engagement and research on issues of land and property rights, and land reform, over a five to six year period from mid-1997 up to the present day. The idea is to...

N A period of readjustment, old ideas which have lost their vogue are likely again to be advocated along with ideas whose main attraction is their novelty. In the dosing years of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth there was considerable agitation in the United States for registration of title to land. In the prosperous twenties, reform was quiescent, and with it t...

Over the last eighty years, virtually all Latin American governments have used the power of the state to alter access to land for specific categories of households and to redefine land rights for those with access. Extensive land reforms were part of the outcome of revolutions in Mexico (1917), Bolivia (1952), and Nicaragua (1979). Authoritarian governments imposed land reforms in Peru (1969-75...

Local and regional private land trusts are among the most important and most numerous conservation actors in contemporary America, and conservation easements are perhaps the key land conservation tools used by these trusts. In recent decades, privately held conservation easements and local and regional private land trusts have grown at a rapid and increasing rate, and the total acreage protecte...