Natural Resource Management, Food Security and Rural Development in Zambia: Moving From Research to Action

More effective policies are needed to improve access and secure rights to land and other natural resources for various stakeholders, particularly smallholder farmers. Service delivery at all levels of governance needs to be restructured and strengthened in order to promote and improve economic development and management of natural resources in both open and protected areas. New strategies are needed for protecting and developing natural resource areas based on appropriate resource management systems that promote broad-based participation and sharing of benefits, and offer potential for more effective community-based natural resource management. Improvements are needed in natural resource policy and law review processes in order to take better advantage of accumulated technical knowledge among stakeholders. In addition more efforts are required to achieve effective public-private pooling of interests and resources as well to adopting business-oriented approaches to natural resource management. Coordinated efforts are required to raise productivity of smallholders’ agricultural land through greatly expanded applied research and extension, and complementary infrastructure investments