Search

Most land governance reforms seek to enhance tenure security, encourage investments and thereby promote economic growth. Increasingly, land reforms attempt to secure women's and other vulnerable groups' access to land. This article reviews the extent to which gender equality in land tenure has been pursued in these reforms and examines the role played by donor cooperation. Despite significant progress in developing land legislation that upholds gender equality, implementation often does not follow suit, and women still face discrimination. Based on country case studies, the article identifies six challenges, which should be addressed to achieve gender equality in land tenure., Most land governance reforms seek to enhance tenure security, encourage investments and thereby promote economic growth. Increasingly, land reforms attempt to secure women's and other vulnerable groups' access to land. This article reviews the extent to which gender equality in land tenure has been pursued in these reforms and examines the role played by donor cooperation. Despite significant progress in developing land legislation that upholds gender equality, implementation often does not follow suit, and women still face discrimination. Based on country case studies, the article identifies six challenges, which should be addressed to achieve gender equality in land tenure.

Non-PR, IFPRI1; CAPRi, EPTD, Water governance reforms are underway in many parts of the developing world. They address the principles, institutions, and legal and administrative practices through which decisions are made on the development, allocation, and conditions of use of water resources at all levels of society. As such, water governance--and efforts to reform it--is shaped by and helps to shape the way in which decisions are taken and authority is exercised in fields that extent well beyond water. Based upon research conducted in Condega district, Nicaragua, this paper argues that community-specific power constellations may lead to the existence of radically different water governance regimes among neighboring communities, despite these communities sharing the same national and district-level water policy and associated legal and administrative framework. Moreover, the involvement of community-external third parties to mediate in situations where peoples legitimate access to water is challenged provides a promising avenue towards ensuring more equitable water governance. However, institutions potentially serving as such community-external third parties are often too poorly staffed or their staff too poorly supported--technically, economically, and institutionally--to attend to calls for support. Furthermore, in contexts characterized by economic, social, and political inequality, the community-specific power constellations may limit opportunities available to different segments of the rural population for calling upon community-external third parties in cases when their legitimate access to water is hampered by the locally powerful. Ensuring that all rural citizens enjoy equal opportunities for calling upon third party institutions constitutes a challenge to local water governance

Non-PR, IFPRI1; 2020; CAPRi, EPTD; DGO, Cada año, las plagas de cultivos y animales privan a los agricultores de gran parte de su producción. Algunas estimaciones indican que las plagas agrícolas destruyen del 10% al 40% de la producción agrícola bruta mundial. Estas plagas incluyen una gran variedad de organismos diferentes —no sólo insectos, ácaros, gusanos, roedores y pájaros— sino, en un amplio sentido, toda clase de organismos dañinos tales como hongos, bacterias, virus y organismos semejantes a los virus, y mala hierba. La variedad de plagas y su interacción con las condiciones de otros ecosistemas hace que los problemas de plagas sean muy diversos y con frecuencia muy complejos, por lo cual las soluciones a los problemas de una plaga única deben variar considerablemente. Los agricultores pueden controlar individualmente algunas plagas pero otras sólo pueden controlarse a través de programas públicos como la fumigación aérea. Sin embargo, muchos enfoques de la gestión de plagas hacen llamados para que los vecinos trabajen juntos.

Non-PR, IFPRI1; Environment and Natural Resource Management; CAPRi, EPTD, Many watershed development projects around the world have performed poorly because they failed to take into account the needs, constraints, and practices of local people. Participatory watershed management -in which users help to define problems, set priorities, select technologies and policies, and monitor and evaluate impacts -is expected to improve performance. User participation in watershed management raises new questions for watershed research, including how to design appropriate mechanisms for organizing stakeholders and facilitating collective action. Management of a complex system such as a watershed may also require user participation in the research process itself. An increasing number of watershed research projects are already participatory, however challenges remain to institutionalizing user participation in both watershed management and research.

Non-PR, IFPRI1; Environment and Natural Resource Management; CAPRi, EPTD, Leaf-cutting ants (Atta. cephalotes) represents a serious problem to farmers in many parts of Latin America and accounts of ants eating up a whole cassava plot or destroying one or more fruit trees overnight are not uncommon. Ants do not respect farm boundaries. Therefore, farmers who control anthills on their own fields might still face damage on their crops caused by ants coming from neighboring fields where no control measures are taken. In that sense, crop damage caused by leaf-cutting ants constitutes a transboundary natural resource management problem which, in addition to technical interventions, requires organizational interventions to ensure a coordinated effort among farmers to be solved. This paper reports on a research effort initiated by CIAT and implemented jointly between CIAT and farmers in La Laguna - a small community in the Andean Hillsides of Southwestern Colombia. The objective of the research effort was two-fold: i) to identify low cost technical options for ant control, and ii) to analyze and visualize the transboundary nature of the ant control problem and thus identify organizational options to enable collective or coordinated ant control.

In the fall of 2015, world leaders adopted the most ambitious global development agenda in history. Meeting the aspiring targets of the Sustainable Development Goals will require financing far beyond traditional aid. At the same time, aid itself is under major pressure as European governments cut aid budgets or divert them to meet refugee and migration issues. In this context of massive global ambition and concurrent uncertainty on the future of aid, other actors and sources of development financing seem ever more critical, such as the private sector, private foundations and the BRICS. But what are in fact the interests and modes of operation of such actors in the context of development financing, and to what extent do they align with the aims of the SDGs? And how do national governments of developing countries themselves perceive and approach these new sources of financing?

In the fall of 2015, world leaders adopted the most ambitious global development agenda in history. Meeting the aspiring targets of the Sustainable Development Goals will require financing far beyond traditional aid. At the same time, aid itself is under major pressure as European governments cut aid budgets or divert them to meet refugee and migration issues. In this context of massive global ambition and concurrent uncertainty on the future of aid, other actors and sources of development financing seem ever more critical, such as the private sector, private foundations and the BRICS. But what are in fact the interests and modes of operation of such actors in the context of development financing, and to what extent do they align with the aims of the SDGs? And how do national governments of developing countries themselves perceive and approach these new sources of financing?

In the fall of 2015, world leaders adopted the most ambitious global development agenda in history. Meeting the aspiring targets of the Sustainable Development Goals will require financing far beyond traditional aid. At the same time, aid itself is under major pressure as European governments cut aid budgets or divert them to meet refugee and migration issues. In this context of massive global ambition and concurrent uncertainty on the future of aid, other actors and sources of development financing seem ever more critical, such as the private sector, private foundations and the BRICS. But what are in fact the interests and modes of operation of such actors in the context of development financing, and to what extent do they align with the aims of the SDGs? And how do national governments of developing countries themselves perceive and approach these new sources of financing?