Land Use Policy最新文献

Carbon emission reduction through land use management and forest-based initiatives such as REDD+ depends on multiple factors, including awareness programs, capacity building and inclusive design, and equitable and transparent benefit-sharing mechanisms. Even after a couple of decades of discussion over the REDD+ process, there have still been many contested issues that need to be resolved. Taking the case of three countries in the Asia and Pacific Region ― Vietnam, Nepal, and Fiji, ― at different stages of the REDD+, we have mapped the countries’ progress toward emission reduction program and its benefit-sharing mechanism, documented the perceived impact of a capacity building program and provided the stakeholders’ perspective on the performance of REDD+ program. Our study shows REDD+ participating countries are implementing various REDD+ capacity-building programs, but having a different level of impact from the stakeholders’ perspective. Multilevel governance presents challenges for REDD+ outcomes, as REDD+-related policies and legislations are constrained within the forest ministry but not in other sector ministries, leading to both vertical and horizontal coordination issues. Much emphasis has been given to the technical content of capacity-building programs but little has been done to enhance the functional capacity of REDD+ implementers, especially of Indigenous People and Local Communities. The decision-making process on emission reduction benefit-sharing is neither transparent nor inclusive. Although various social safeguard mechanisms are proposed by the studied countries, there is still a huge gap in understanding the impact capacity building programs in inclusive decision-making, and equitable benefit sharing for Indigenous people. REDD+ stakeholders perceived that REDD+ can be a promising financial tool for developing countries and also contribute to non-carbon benefits, but the prospects of benefit-sharing plans are not fairly inclusive. Increasing transparency and accountability through digital platforms, raising the carbon price from $5/tCO2, adopting unified safeguards, and strengthening horizontal and vertical collaboration at all levels are pivotal for the REDD+ program to generate manifold environmental and livelihood benefits in the Asia and Pacific Region.

Climate change and anthropogenic disturbances have threatened the ecosystem functions including ecological, production and livelihood functions (EPLFs) of the alpine grassland on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP). Integrating the trade-offs and synergies among the EPLFs into the regional development decision-making system is important for achieving sustainable development goals on the QTP. This study constructed an ecological-production-livelihood functions (EPLFs) index system to quantify and compare the functions of various cooperative and individual management grasslands. A comprehensive functions index (CFI), a total functions value (TF) and a trade-off index (TOI) were built to evaluate these two types of grasslands. The results indicated that production function (PF) of cooperative management grasslands were significantly higher and lower than those of individual management grasslands due to higher productive fixed assets of cooperative management grasslands. By contrast, ecological and livelihood function of cooperative and individual management grasslands did not show significant difference. In addition, the correlation between PF and CFI was also higher in cooperative management grasslands than individual management grasslands. The SEM analysis revealed that the ecological and production functions have positive direct effects on TF. Furthermore, the PF have negative direct effects on TOI. The cooperative management grasslands with higher PF can reduce TOI and enhance TF, and in turn increase the CFI, compared with individual management grasslands. The improvement of PF is critical for enhancing overall EPLFs and decreasing the trade-off of EPLFs. Therefore, we recommend that policymakers attach importance to the multi-objective optimization potential offered by cooperative management grasslands, and provide corresponding policy support to decrease trade-offs and increase synergies of EPLFs on the QTP.

The use of Land Value Capture (LVC) tools in addressing urban inequality is a much-debated problem. A vital aspect of this problem is how the effectiveness of these tools could be measured. To this end, the article focuses on the credibility of LVC tools and assesses this in terms of the extent to which these instruments successfully embody the social function of property. The theoretical perspective of the credibility thesis could be a fruitful approach for understanding how LVC tools materialize (or not) the social function of property. Based on this, the article analyzes whether LVC tools arose endogenously from the interactions between social actors or whether they were exogenously imposed thereby generating the emergence of non-credible institutions. To deal with this complex issue, the article employs a broad qualitative and quantitative dataset (i.e. court cases, interviews, surveys, government/corporate statistics and textual materials), as well as integrated methods including the Conflict Analysis Model (CAM) to measure conflict intensity; the Formal, Actual and Targeted (FAT) Framework to identify actors’ perceptual divergences; and the Credibility Scales and Intervention (CSI) Checklist to relate credibility to desired policy effects. As a case-study, the paper examines LVC tools in a socio-economically skewed metropolis in South America: Medellín, Colombia.

Research on land use policy has been vexed by the pivotal question of which institutions achieve credibility. Scholars have been split as it has been difficult to assess credibility. To provide a solution, an alternative theory pushed forward a renewed understanding of the question why some property rights succeed while others fail. At its heart is the axiom that Form – be it private/public, secure/insecure or formal/informal – follows from Function. This position – aka the Credibility Thesis – has propelled a fundamental change on the study of land, housing, settlements and resources evidenced through a steady stream of publications. Building on this literature, this collection reports several findings: 1) theoretical – credibility revolves around maintaining congruence between the function of institutions; 2) methodological – credibility can be measured via conflict, perceptual divergences and shifts over time; 3) empirical – institutions tend to change when functional congruence is disregarded while enduring when it is safeguarded. The findings cover different geographies (ranging from India and Ethiopia to China and Colombia) demonstrating the theory’s applicability. The collection ends with a double treatise; one pointing out like-minded bodies of thought with reference to Elinor Ostrom and another identifying quandaries that research must consider. To appreciate the collection’s main thrust, this introduction leads it off by reviewing 10 years’ research on the Credibility Thesis in terms of the field, findings and future.

Farmlands, positioned at the interface of mangrove forestlands and urban centers, serve as critical buffer zones. These areas play a pivotal role in determining the ecological fate of mangrove forests, acting as a cushion against mangrove deforestation. This study aims to study the spatiotemporal data from Landsat imagery whilst considering the geo-political and scocio-economic transformations of such a buffer region adjoining the Sunderban mangrove forest to understand the surreptitious reason for such expansive nature of the farmlands. Results indicate that these buffer farmlands are in a constant tug-of-war between the urban and forest ecosystems. The built up area adjoining the cities increases at a much higher pace than the areas adjoining the forest lands. Quite contrary to the popular belief, it is seen that the majority of cropland expansion in the mangrove adjoining regions arises from the use of fallow land rather than the clearing of vegetation. The study shows that the changes need to be addressed through the government’s policies and a restructure of governance is required. In policymaking, the collaborative action of scientists, governments, and local people should be involved. The lack of sustainable development and targeted improvement can increase the threat and risk nearby the mangrove farmlands.

The emerging marketization of agricultural factors allows farmers to expand agricultural production by renting in farmland from land rental market or purchasing services through labor market. Farmers’ transactions in the two markets can stimulate the agricultural transformation in developing countries, but may increase their financial burden in agriculture. Based on the primary data collected from banana farmers in China, this study attempts to clarify farmers categories based on their different choices regarding participation in land rental and labor markets for agricultural production, analyze the determinants of farmers’ simultaneous participation in the two markets, and explore heterogenous effects of farmers’ market participation on agricultural economic performances using the multinomial endogenous switching treatment regression model. The results show that farmer’s tie to retailers is highlighted as an important driving force behind farmers’ simultaneous participation in the two markets, while their participation choices are also varying due to different household head characteristics and family resource endowments. Farmers who participated in the two markets significantly reduce the cost of material input in agricultural production, but the total production cost of participants is higher than that of non-participants due to the high rent of land resource and cost of hired labor for production services. Interestingly, farmers’ participation in land rental market increases the yield of their farms, while participation in labor market has a negative impact on the yield. Farmers’ participation in both land rental and labor markets can significantly increase farm net income by nearly 67 %. In contrast, participation in labor market decreased farm net income by 22 %, whilst participation in land rental market increased farm net income by 186 %, though without statistical significance. The findings underscore the important role of land rental markets in boosting farm economic performance. Policymakers can facilitate land transfer among smallholder farmers in the land rental market and promote agricultural technologies to substitute labor force so as to reduce the adverse effect of labor market, thereby improving agricultural economic performances in developing regions.

In addition to its impacts in terms of illness and death, the COVID-19 pandemic caused significant socioeconomic hardship in Myanmar as it did around the world. How land was implicated in how people coped with this hardship remains poorly understood. Other pre-pandemic studies in the region have found that rural communities and land provide a safety net for migrants engaged in precarious work, to which they can return in times of crises; it is partly for this reason that people do not sell land despite it becoming less important for livelihoods. Research conducted between June and October 2020 in ten rural villages severely impacted by the loss of remittances accompanying the pandemic, and in which many returned migrants were now living, found that land did indeed provide a significant safety net but in unexpected and specific ways. Land replaced remittances as the main source of livelihood and security. It allowed returned migrants to survive as they waited to go back to Thailand, reinforcing the co-dependency between farmers and their migrant relatives. Yet many returned migrants only reluctantly turned to farming when they had no other options, and some households had land that was only partially used while others remained landless. Ultimately, land’s role as a safety net was limited due to the unviability of smallholder farming and the unequal distribution of land.

In the face of the growing competition and demand for land resources, abandoned farmland has received renewed attention as a land resource that can either be recultivated or provide other land-use opportunities, including recultivation, options for rewilding, and other alternatives to agricultural land uses. Using the example of Armenia, this study examines farmland abandonment from the perspective of land ownership rights in the post-Soviet transition context from centrally planned to market economies. Through a case study across three villages in the Armavir province of Armenia, we evaluate the role of land markets in farmland abandonment and assess the influencing factors of land market participation by landowners. Based on the analysis of structural surveys with logistic regressions, we reveal that landowners who are willing to lease out and sell their land parcels are more likely to leave their farmland abandoned. Additionally, this study reveals that the most frequent factors of importance for landowners’ selling and leasing intentions are related to the lack of information regarding market price, indicative rent, interested counterparts for transactions. These findings underscore that addressing these factors could enhance land mobility and facilitate the better functioning of the land market. This study examines the extent as well as temporal and spatial aspects of farmland abandonment in the studied villages and highlights other risk factors of farmland abandonment, such as the aging of farmers, a lack of successors to continue farming, and the absence of irrigation. Finally, this study recommends designing an integrated policy response to improve the functioning of agricultural land markets and local farming conditions through rural development and farm structure measures. A toolbox of potential solutions includes lease facilitation or early farmer retirement schemes with the country-wide scope of implementation, as well as solutions applied on a per-project basis such as land consolidation and land banking.

The unprecedented built-up area expansion in China has resulted in a significant occupation of cropland. Yet, to date, we have not achieved continuous monitoring of the occupation of cropland by different types of built-up land, nor have their annual impacts on non-agriculturalization been revealed. Here, for the first time, we have generated a dataset spanning from 1990 to 2020, consisting of annual areas for urban land (UL), rural residential land (RRL), and other built-up land (OBL) and their occupation of cropland at the county level across China. Subsequently, the annual contributions of these three types of built-up land expansion to non-agriculturalization in China were unveiled. Our results show that the average annual conversion of cropland into UL, RRL, and OBL was 1520.60 km², 1464.60 km², and 987.44 km², respectively, during the study period. Among these, only the conversion of cropland into OBL exhibited a significant increasing trend of 4.64 km²/a. Overall, different types of built-up land have distinct spatial impacts on the non-agriculturalization of cropland at the county level, which undergo significant changes over time. The non-agriculturalization of cropland in China is significantly influenced by the expansion of built-up areas, particularly in counties in the eastern regions. The northern regions are most affected by UL expansion and RRL expansion, followed by the southern regions. OBL expansion has significantly impacted the non-agriculturalization of counties in the southern regions, with its influence gradually extending from eastern to western China during the study period. Before 2015, the expansion of UL had a higher impact on non-agriculturalization compared to RRL and OBL. However, from 2015 to 2020, in 62.52 % of counties, the expansion of RRL contributed more to non-agriculturalization than the expansion of RRL and OBL. It is suggested that China should pay more attention to protecting cropland from being occupied by RRL expansion. This study provides insights that can inform sustainable land use planning and facilitate the development of targeted cropland protection policies.