Despite the growing attention on uncontrolled and unprofitable urban sprawling in many African countries, few pragmatic solutions have been raised or effectively implemented. While uncontrolled and unprofitable urban expansions happened primarily due to poor land use management and dysfunctional land market, the cost of land management enforcement and reform is high. This paper suggests that the recently re-emerging special economic zones (SEZs) in Africa could be a practical way of using government intervention to reduce uncontrolled urban expansion and optimize urban land use.

The desire for refining status quo cost–benefit protocols to fully encompass econometric model uncertainty motivates the search for improved technology. Availability of unique Ethiopian highlands milk-market livestock data provides an ideal laboratory for investigation of alternative land-use pathway designs. In these contexts, we present novel methodology for ranking and selecting sustainable ‘land-use pathways,’ arguing that the methodology is central to sustainable-land-use-policy prescriptions, providing essential innovation to assessments hitherto devoid of probabilistic foundation.

Assessing the effects of different land use scenarios on subsequent changes in ecosystem service has great implications for sustainable land management.