This book provides a significant contribution to the literature on land reform in various African contexts. While the economic evidence is clear that secure property rights are a necessary condition for catalysing broad-based economic development, the governance process by which those rights are secured is less clear. This book details the historical complexity of land rights and the importance of understanding this history in the process of trying to improve tenure security. Through a combination of single country case studies, comparative case studies and regional comparisons, the book is unequivocal that good governance is paramount for improving the performance of land reform programmes. All attempts at moving towards more formal secure tenure require congruence with informal norms, beliefs and values, and a set of clear systems and processes to avoid corruption and unintended negative consequences.

This book explores the existing and diverse institutional bottlenecks of land acquisition, ranging from legal and social to political and even environmental within the Asian context. It identifies the short- and long-term risks associated with land sale through regional case studies and aims to propose a more sustainable policy framework. One such policy framework proposed is that of Land Trust for mitigating some of these risks. For instance, recent studies argue that land trust or land lease is one of the best ways to increase the rate of return to invite private investors into infrastructure investment and industrialization. A rare snapshot of a continent in the process of rapid development, this book offers an invaluable resource for scholars, activists and politicians alike.

Despite 250 years of land reform all over the World, important land inequalities remain, especially in Latin America and Southern Africa.While in these countries, there is near consensus on the need for redistribution, much controversy persists around how to redistribute land peacefully and legally, often blocking progress on implementation.This book focuses on the "how" of land redistribution in order to forge greater consensus among land reform practitioners and enable them to make better choices on the mechanisms of land reform. Reviews and case studies describe and analyze the al.