This participatory poverty assessment (PPA 2006) comprises one component of ADB’s Technical Assistance to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic for Institutional Strengthening for Poverty Monitoring and Evaluation. The goal of this PPA, as with the first PPA in 2000, is to complement the statistical analyses of poverty in a meaningful way and to record the experiences and concerns of the poor in order to initiate and identify more effective forms of public and private actions to alleviate poverty.

The emergence of social and environmental movements against plantation forestry in Southeast Asia positions rural development against local displacement and environmental degradation. Multi-scaled NGO networks have been active in promoting the notion that rural people in Southeast Asia uniformly oppose plantation development. There are potential pitfalls in this heightened attention to resistance however, as it has often lapsed into essentialist notions of timeless indigenous agricultural practices, and unproblematic local allegiances to common property and conservation.

Over the last decade, following the doi moi reforms, the Vietnamese government has formally recognised the household as the basic unit of production and allocated land use rights to households. Under the 1993 Land Law these rights can be transferred, exchanged, leased, inherited, and mortgaged. A land market is emerging in Vietnam but is still constrained for various reasons. Additionally, lack of flexibility of land use is an issue.

Policy plays a very important role in natural resource management as it lays out a government framework for guiding long-term decisions, and evolves in light of the interactions between human and environment. This paper focuses on soil and water conservation (SWC) policy in the Yellow River Basin (YRB), China. The problems, rural poverty, severe soil erosion, great sediment loads and high flood risks, are analyzed over the period of 1949–present using the Driving force–Pressure–State–Impact–Response (DPSIR) framework as a way to organize analysis of the evolution of SWC policy.

In the recent past there has been increasing recognition that local knowledge of farmers can yield insight into soil quality. With regard to constraints and possibilities for the production of irrigated rice in the south of Brazil there is no documentation on local soil knowledge. The goals of this study were to answer the following questions: (1) Which soil quality perceptions do rice farmers have? (2) Which soil quality indicators are most important to them?

Land cover data is widely used for the design and monitoring of land use policies despite the incapability of this type of data to represent multiple land uses and land management activities within the same landscape. In this study, we operationalized the concept of land systems for the case of the Lao PDR (Laos). Distinct land systems like shifting cultivation and plantations (land concessions) cannot be fully captured by land cover inventories alone, in spite of their relevance for land use policies.

This study aims to identify key differences between farmers who spontaneously implement stone bunds (i.e. farmers implementing stone bunds by their own initiative) and farmers who do not. Data were collected in the Girar Jarso woreda in the central highlands of Ethiopia, through a household survey with 80 farmers: 40 with spontaneously implemented stone bunds and 40 without. Independent samples t test, principal component analysis and regression analysis were used to analyse the data.

FAO is pleased to announce the e-learning course on “Sustainable Land Management and Land Restoration”, which has been developed in collaboration with CIHEAM-Bari, WOCAT, ELD and University of Leeds.

本《可持续土壤管理自愿准则》在全球土壤伙伴关系框架内通过一个包容性进程编制。准则旨在用作参考，为投入其中的广大利益相关者提供可持续土壤管理方面的一般性技术和政策建议。准则已在全球土壤伙伴关系第四届全体会议（2016年5月25日，罗马）上获得通过、在粮农组织农业委员会第25届会议（2016年8月29日，罗马）上获得批准并在粮农组织理事会第155届会议（2016年12月5日，罗马）上获得最终批准。

The project goal is to promote responsible, productive, and sustainable management of forest resources by local communities to meet their needs and to stimulate development. This is expected achieved by building the knowledge and capacity of FA and CF User Groups in sustainable forest management and on responsible utilization of forest resources and nation-wide networks of stakeholders.

Public policy makers from developed and developing countries, at all levels (national, regional, local), have the opportunity to take leadership as FLR financing champions. Even without controlling private capital, they can support resource mobilization in a number of ways This publication shares the experiences of some initiatives from around the world which public policy makers can learn from and adapt.