Rural development projects are operations with a limited lifespan that bring together the human, fi nancial and material resources needed to achieve their particular objectives. Many of these projects have no land-related objectives, and tend to avoid these highly topical questions even when they have to contend with the problems raised by land issues. Those projects that do include landrelated objectives in the broader context of rural development (land and natural resource management) tend to deal with land issues in several ways.

This paper analyses the way that different types of development project deal with land issues, identifi es the lessons that can be learned from this, and makes a number of recommendations for future action.

It is also available in French here.