The impact of incentives on the decision to transfer agricultural land functions to non-agricultural uses

The influence of incentives on landowner’s decision-making regarding land-use change is an intriguing consideration when developing sustainable agricultural land policies. Owners of agricultural land in rural areas with varying characteristics and varying agricultural yields each year have varying views on changing or maintaining their land. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of incentives on people’s attitudes toward maintaining or selling land (land-use change from agricultural land to non-agricultural land). This study employed a descriptive analysis to calculate the impact of incentives from the government on the decision to change or keep the land. The responses of 500 respondents were categorized as follows: 20-46.67 in favor of land change, 46.67-73.33 neutral, and 73.4-100 in favor of maintaining land. The analysis revealed that additional factors influence the decision to sell or maintain the land. However, some villages seek to preserve land through government incentives.

Discourse and Practice of REDD+ in Ghana and the Expansion of State Power

Green market mechanisms, as part of the architecture of climate finance, have become key components of international environmental frameworks. One of the most widely known mechanisms for climate change mitigation has been the creation of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+). The purpose of this paper is to trace global discourses and narratives throughout REDD+ official documents and compare them to the implementation on the ground to determine the extent that REDD+ meets its stated objectives in the Ghanaian context. Then, given the gaps in discourse and practice, this paper aims to define the inexplicit consequences, or rather instrumental effects, of REDD+. Discourse analysis of official REDD+ documents and land policies combined with qualitative interviews and focus groups to determine the linkages between discourse and practice of REDD+ and the impacts of these gaps. While critical civic environmentalism, highlighting environmental justice as a core principle, was somewhat incorporated into official discourse from the international to the national level, the depoliticization of the discourse and the apolitical nature of interventions make these justice concerns negligible and create gaps in discourse and practice. These gaps create disjointed, infeasible policies that establish REDD+ as a fad to bring in financial resources that expand state control of forest resources under the veil of social-ecological responsibility. As a result, state power expands into rural areas, allowing for greater control over land and forests at the expense of local communities.

‘We Owned the Land Before the State Was Established’: The State, Traditional Authorities, and Land Policy in Africa

This chapter looks at the land policy reform challenges in Africa, focusing on the struggle between the state and traditional leaders over the control of customary land. The governance of customary land is one of the most contentious land issues in Africa. As many African governments seek to reform land policies in order to respond to the challenges of population growth and urbanisation leading to the increasing demand for land, the proposed reforms are often challenged by traditional leaders who see the reforms as a ploy to undermine their authority over customary land. It is argued in this chapter that, while the state sometimes attempts to co-opt traditional leaders into cooperating with it, this alliance often does not hold for long, especially when traditional leaders sense that their interests are being undermined by proposed land policy reforms. Drawing from the Zambian experience, the chapter shows that although the state, as a sovereign entity, has the authority over all land under its territory, the situation is complicated by the fact that traditional leaders also assert authority over customary land. This situation sometimes leads to contestations that often frustrate the formulation and implementation of land policy reforms.

Empire and Arab Indology

This article focuses on the Chouf-born poet, lawyer and translator Wadiʿ al-Bustani (1888–1954), who called himself a “Lebanese Palestinian,” as he moves from Beirut, to Cairo, Hudaydah, Bombay, Transvaal, and finally Haifa. The first to translate Tagore into Arabic after a visit to his Santiniketan in 1916, Bustani spent his life annotating and translating into Arabic the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and Kalidasa's Shakuntala . Alongside his self-professed and self-funded philological project, Bustani was one of the most important poets and lawyers in British Mandate Palestine, inspiring protest with his verse and litigating against colonial land policies. By focusing on Bustani's relation to British imperial culture, his political commitments in Palestine, and the contours of his indological project, this article uncovers a new history of global philology and an enabling colonial frame, long hidden in the many narrations of orientalism's travel and Palestine's colonization.

Membangun Sumber Daya Manusia dalam Pelaksanaan Pengkajian Kebijakan Agraria, Tata Ruang dan Pertanahan

ABSTRACT Developing the role of research in agrarian, spatial planning, and land policies requires qualified human resources in their fields. HR Researcher and Policy Analyst (HR P and AK) as the “pioneer” in providing recommendations for policy development by the Center for Development and Standardization of Agrarian, Spatial, and Land Policy (PPSK-ATP) at the the Ministry of Agrarian Affairs and Spatial Planning/National Land Agency (Ministry of ATR/BPN). However, the recommendations could not be able to be carried out efficiently due to the limitations of human resources. The purpose of this study is to describe the importance of human resource availability as a researcher to carry out the task of research and analysis to formulate the suitable policy for the Ministry of ATR/BPN. The methode was conducted to investigate existing documents related to the existence of PPSK-ATP in carrying out their duties and activities as a work unit that develops and evaluates agrarian, spatial planning, and land policies. The findings of this study show that PPSK-ATP has to take various initiatives to strengthen the role of evaluation in policy making, including: conduct out the hiring process in accordance with the required credentials, focused on capacity building in accordance with their fields, establish an environment that is conducive to learning. Keywords: Research, Human Resources, Policy ABSTRAK Peningkatan peranan pengkajian dalam kebijakan agraria, tata ruang dan pertanahan membutuhkan sumber daya manusia yang unggul di bidang pengkajian. SDM Peneliti dan Analis Kebijakan (SDM P dan AK) adalah “ujung-tombak” pada Pusat pengembangan dan Standarisasi Kebijakan Agraria, Tata Ruang dan Pertanahan (PPSK-ATP) dalam menyusun rekomendasi perumusan kebijakan Kementerian Agraria dan Tata Ruang/Badan Pertanahan Nasional. Namun, hal itu belum dapat diperankan dengan efektif mengingat berbagai keterbatasan yang melekat di dalamnya, seperti sumber daya manusia yang masih sangat terbatas. Tulisan ini bertujuan mendeskripsikan urgensi ketersediaan SDM Pengkajian untuk dapat mengemban tugas pengkajian (penelitian dan kajian) yang berkualitas dalam menghasilkan rekomendasi kebijakan yang efektif di Kementerian ATR/BPN. Metode dilakukan dengan menganalisis dokumen yang pernah ada berkaitan dengan eksistensi PPSK-ATP dalam melaksanakan tugas dan fungsinya sebagai unit kerja yang melakukan pengembangan dan pengkajian kebijakan agraria, tata ruang, dan pertanahan. Hasil telaah menunjukkan bahwa terdapat beberapa langkah yang perlu dilakukan PPSK-ATP untuk meningkatkan peran pengkajian dalam perumusan kebijakan yaitu rekruitmen yang serius, peningkatan kapasitas yang fokus, dan menciptakan atmosfir pengkajian yang kondusif. Kata kunci: Pengkajian, Sumber Daya Manusia, Kebijakan

Do land policies make a difference? A data-driven approach to trace effects on urban form in France and Germany

Against the backdrop of rapidly expanding urban structures, land policies in many countries have been adapted to contain and redirect growth to existing urban structures. However, obstacles remain to measure the effects of policies. In the meantime, geoinformation technologies have given rise to a wide range of approaches to measure and describe urban form. Nevertheless, its application for the assessment of land policy has a high, but not yet fully exploited, potential. It is thus the aim of this research to address and investigate the options of spatial analysis and machine learning in particular to analyse urban form from a land policy perspective. To do so, we develop urban metrics informed by urban planning and land readjustment policies of two countries describing urban form on different spatial levels. We therefore formulate hypotheses on causal relations between policy and form. Based on the metrics, we apply the random forest algorithm to classify the building stock of the region. We then extract the residential areas, those with single-family houses, as this is where the effects of the policy are considered most visible. In a next step, we use random forest to predict the nationality of a building. Through variable importance measures, we identify and discuss urban morphological differences between the two countries and test the hypotheses on effects of land policies. We develop and test the approach for the French-German city-region of Strasbourg using OpenStreetMap data. We identify significant differences in the building coverage ratios, which tend to be higher in Germany. This can be linked to differences in planning regulations. Furthermore, German residential areas appear to be more diverse in urban form. Differences in land readjustment policies have proven to be plausible here, as French policies favour strong actors that develop residential areas more uniformly. In Germany, policies favour fragmented ownership-oriented development of residential areas. The metrics and the applied algorithm for building classification have proven to be robust in terms of data heterogeneity and have shown high levels of accuracy. They could also be successfully used for tracing causal relations.