Articles Thématiques

Les activités informelles participent pour une large part à la production et à la configuration des espaces urbains, notamment dans les quartiers informels qui abritent le tiers des urbains de la planète. Ces quartiers ne sont cependant pas exclusivement produits par des pratiques informelles. Les politiques publiques et les pratiques légales et institutionnelles jouent un […]

Given the recent trend of granting vast areas of African land to foreign investors, the urgency of placing real ownership in the hands of the people living and making their livelihood upon lands held according to custom cannot be overstated. This publication provides guidance on how best to recognize and protect the land rights of […]

Les réserves mélanésiennes constituent, encore aujourd’hui, en Nouvelle-Calédonie, des territoires « à part », exclusivement kanaks, placés sous un régime de droit particulier dit droit coutumier. Cette spécificité calédonienne, à laquelle les Kanaks sont attachés, est un héritage direct du système colonial instauré au xixe siècle, fondé sur le refoulement systématique des populations autochtones et leur regroupement […]

This thematic issue brings together the scholarly fields of critical conservation studies and African land issues, a relationship largely unexplored to date. The alienation of land for conservation purposes, introduced to Africa under colonial rule and still taking place today, has fundamental impacts on the politics of land and land use, and is contested in […]

This contribution analyses the recent global expansion of different types of tree plantations. A literature review collates accounts from recent academic publications and by NGOs, and is accompanied by field research and interview observations about the causal processes, central features and likely futures of contemporary tree plantation expansion. I will analyse the political and spatial […]

Recent assessments by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) indicate the existence of about 612 recognized primate species and subspecies (IUCN RedList, 2012), but close to 50% of these taxa are at risk of extinction as a result of human action. In this article, I call attention to underlying regional and global socioeconomic […]

Using data from individual transactions for the period 1994-2010 in the French NUTS2 region Brittany, the authors investigated how environmental regulations and transaction land regulations influence the price of sold plots. Regressions on three sub-samples of buyers were performed in order to assess whether different buyers have different attitudes or plans regarding the farmland purchased: […]

Community-led land tenure reform requires specification of “the community,” and this raises long-standing issues concerning the balance between civil and traditional local authorities in Africa. Recent experience with decentralization of authority over land suggests that the cost of creating new local land administration capacities is high. A less costly option is reliance at least in […]