During the last two decades the concept of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) has gained ever-increasing attention among a wide public of scholars as well as conservation and development practitioners. The main premises of this innovative conservation approach are appealing: private...

The concept of Payments for Environmental Services (PES) has gained increasing popularity in the conservation literature as it offers the potential to reconcile opposing social and ecological objectives by paying land owners for the positive environmental externalities they generate on their...

A key issue in the context of increasing large-scale land acquisitions in developing countries is how poor populations can prevent their land rights being encroached upon by more powerful actors. To date, the majority of policy recommendations have been directed towards the legal recognition and...

Land property issues remain firmly on the agenda in Nicaragua. Revolutionary land reform, followed by additional land redistribution and overnight liberalisation of land markets, are assumed to have caused severe insecurity of land tenure. Dominant received wisdom is that only significant state...

At a time when technological innovations are making our world increasingly smaller and our production systems are becoming increasingly more efficient, the benefits of economic growth and development as a whole have not been able to reach all of society. Indeed, many poor countries,...

We try to construct a bridge between an institutional perspective on poverty and poverty interventions (Bastiaensen, De Herdt & Vaessen 2002) and a more operational screening instrument to be used for a local socio-institutional analysis of anti-poverty interventions (LSIA). While reviewing...

In recent decades, a new paradigm for public policies in rural areas has made headway. This new approach aims to support economic and institutional transformation processes designed and implemented by local rural actors themselves. It argues for the building of local partnerships as atoolfor the...