Land Leadership and Local Resource Management

Sustainable land management is essential for providing solutions to many problems of development especially in South Asia and the Pacific region, which house the largest number of poor and undernourished in the world. Despite the fact that the poverty rate is steadily declining in South Asia and the Pacific region, the existence of huge population having less than $1.25 a day still now, has made the region vulnerable to challenges on food, fodder, ecosystem and natural resources like river water. Land grabbing, legal or illegal whatsoever, has magnified those challenges to a great extent. On the basis of mainstream policy discourse, this book upholds that a successful land management encourages financial transactions, greater investment in land and empowerment of the women other than providing food security and ecosystem protection. All these can happen with the potentialities of political will of the leaders located mainly in the rural as well as local contexts and their capabilities in local resource management, which have been focused in this book. Initiating a discourse on land governance from a critical perspective, this book raises questions about the assumptions and methods of land governance and the nature of leadership in mobilizing local resources. This book highlights issues of land resources for women empowerment and for well being and progress, land market, displacement by land grabbing for mining, role of training institute in land governance, local leadership and resource management in the sectors of health care, education and civil service in India as well as in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Philippines. (jacket)