In a new and critical analysis, this book explores the impact of an influential idea - sustainable development - on the institutions and practices governing use of land. It examines the paradox that in spite of increasing attention to sustainability, land use conflict is as ubiquitous and intense as ever.

This book explores the impact of an influential idea – sustainable development – on the institutions and practices governing use of land. The new edition adds a Foreword by Professor John Forester as well as a substantial chapter by the authors in which they reflect on the arguments propounded in the book in the light of subsequent events.

The first edition of this seminal book was written at a time of rapidly growing interest in the potential for land use planning to deliver sustainable development, and explored the connections between the two and implications for public policy. In the decade since the book was first conceived, environmental imperatives have risen still further up the policial agenda and land use conflicts have intensified, lending even greater importance to the authors' research. In a rigorous discussion of concepts, policy instruments and contemporary planning dilemmas, the authors challenge prevailing assumptions about planning for sustainability. After charting the remarkable growth in expectations of planning, they show how attempts to interpret sustainability must lead to fundamental moral and political choices.

Land Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs. This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land's fictional powers and global visions of landed property's imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development. Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, exposing its simultaneously contingent and collective nature. The essays advance understanding of the politics of land while also contributing to current debates on the intersections of local and global, urban and rural, and general and particular. Contributors Erik Harms, Michael Watts, Sai Balakrishnan, Brett Christophers, David Ferring, Sarah Knuth, Meghan Morris, Benjamin Teresa, Mi Shih, Michael Levien, Michael L. Dwyer, Heather Whiteside

A history of the public and private acquisition of land for conservation and an analysis of its effectiveness in protecting the environment.

This policy focus report examines options that exist for timely and efficient aid to needy taxpayers, including circuit breaker programs that reduce taxes based on income level; truth in taxation measures; deferral options on property tax payments; partial exemptions on owner-occupied or homestead properties; and classified tax rates.

Over the last decade, land governance has become a major priority for the development community.1 A particular focus has been on sub-Saharan Africa due to the recognized paradox of high levels of land availability and low productivity in the region (see Deininger et al. 2012). While poor land governance systems have long been identified as a key reason for this disjuncture, the relatively recent large-scale impetus to improve land governance emerged from the inclusion of land management in 2009 as one of the four pillars under the African Union’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Develop-ment Program (CAADP). Subsequently, in the wake of the G-8’s launch of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutri-tion in 2012, many international initiatives have emerged to promote better land governance. These include the African Union’s Land Policy Initiative (AULPI) and the World Bank’s Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF). At the national level in Africa, land registration and land titling are the most common approaches to reform (Sikor and Müller 2009), with governments selecting among a broad spectrum of modalities to pilot. These include rural land use plans in some francophone countries (e.g., Benin, Burkina Faso, and Côte d’Ivoire), systematic land tenure regularization (Ethio-pia, Madagascar, Rwanda), and communal land demarcation and registration (e.g., Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania) (see Byamugisha 2013).