Kei Otsuka is professorial fellow at the Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development (FASID) in Tokyo.
While massive degradation of natural resources, including forests, pastureland, and cropland, has been taking place in many agriculturally marginal areas in developing countries, it has been followed by the restoration and improvement of the natural resource base in some areas due, for example, to the formation of effective forest user groups (e.g., in the hill region of Nepal), to the establishment of clear individual use rights of formerly state-owned forest land (e.g., in northern Vietnam), and to the evolution of customary land tenure system towards individualized ownership systems (e.g., western Sumatra and western Ghana).
This paper attempts to identify how the optimum land rights institutions, which lead to efficient natural resource management from the local community viewpoint, are determined by the land use systems, such as cropland, firewood forest, timber forests, and pastureland, based primarily on a recently completed study on land tenure and natural resource management by Otsuka and Place (2001).
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