A border dispute between Indian and Chinese troops, the most dangerous in 45 years, has roiled relations in the High Himalayan valleys and plateaus separating India (Ladakh) and China (Aksia Chin). Against this barren landscape, ancient pathways connecting Central, South, and East Asia converge, making the area today a key nodal point of commercial and strategic interest to three nuclear powers, India, China, and Pakistan.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) is the latest contribution to the green concept family. NBS is defined as actions based in nature addressing societal challenges. In this study, we lean on the concept boundary object, broken down into three analytical categories: use, core ideas and granularities, to explore the cohesive and fragmenting powers of the NBS concept, and discuss its future role in green space governance. The study is based on a structured, qualitative review of 112 scientific peer-reviewed publications that use the term NBS.

With decreasing aquifer levels, increasing groundwater pollution, inequitable access, and generally poor management outcomes, better groundwater governance has been put forward as a recipe to address these challenges worldwide. Existing recommendations focus on improved legal frameworks, monitoring and control of access and abstraction through permits or formal rights. In addition, decentralized water management, enforcement of regulations, and supply-side technological solutions are seen as cornerstone components of good groundwater governance systems.

The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT) call for governments to clearly define the term ‘public purpose’ to allow for judicial review of the goals of expropriations of property. However, recent research indicates that national-level legal frameworks that govern expropriation decision-making not only vary greatly from country to country but also often fail to comply with the VGGT standards on expropriation. This creates the potential for unpredictable and, in some cases, arbitrary applications of expropriation law in practice.

The recent global surge in large-scale foreign land acquisitions marks a radical transformation of the global economic and political landscape. Since land that attracts capital often becomes the site of expulsions and displacement, it also leads to new forms of migration. In this paper, I explore this connection from the perspective of a political philosopher. I argue that changes in global land governance unsettle the congruence of political community and bounded territory that we often take for granted.

In many countries, pastoralism has historically been practiced in areas that are now partitioned by international boundaries. This is a major barrier to sustainable resource management and to pastoral development. However, there are examples from around the world of efforts to facilitate transboundary movements and transboundary ecosystem management by pastoralists. This report examines how pastoral mobility has been impacted by the creation of unnatural boundaries within their landscapes and how societies cope with these constraints through legal or informal arrangements.

The political dysfunction that had come to characterize an imploding Zimbabwean economy is beyond dispute. This paper explores how a government that had become weakened in the face of a formidable opposition in urban areas turned to use land as a reward for supporters and as a means of luring new members to join the ruling party. It argues that land patronage has been used as a means for legitimating fledgling state rule while undermining the tenure security of the poor.

Pastoral mobility is seen as the most effective strategy to make use of constantly shifting resources. However, mobile pastoralism as a highly-valued strategy to manage grazing areas and exploit resource variability is becoming more complex, due to recurrent droughts, loss of forage, government-led settlement schemes, and enclosure of land for community conservation, among other reasons. Yet knowledge of how Samburu pastoralists perceive these changes, and govern and innovate in their mobility patterns and resource use, has received limited attention.

Many developing countries have witnessed the urgent need of accelerating cadastral surveying processes. Previous studies found that large portions of cadastral boundaries coincide with visible physical objects, namely roads, fences, and building walls. This research explores the application of airborne laser scanning (ALS) techniques on cadastral surveys. A semi-automated workflow is developed to extract cadastral boundaries from an ALS point clouds. Firstly, a two-phased workflow was developed that focused on extracting digital representations of physical objects.

Writ­ten sub­mis­sions on the Communal Property Associations Amendment Act to the Portfolio Committee Rural Development and Land Reform

Land reform has generated a range of disputes including overlapping boundaries, double occupations, competing authorities etc. Lists areas in which potential disputes arise.

The Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana (CRIG), with support from the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF) the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), performed the Ghana Land Tenure Baseline Survey, the first of its kind survey of tenure rights among cocoa farmers in Ghana. CRIG surveyed almost 1,800 cocoa farmers operating 3,900 cocoa plots regarding various land tenure issues within customary sharecropping arrangements and on owner-managed land. This report describes the findings from the Survey.