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A year after popular uprisings overthrew dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, a former diplomat and press officer travelled to Cairo and Tunis to interview local journalists and learn about both their experiences under the previous regimes and how they were navigating the political transitions. Based on these conversations, the resulting study explains the shifting red lines under the Mubarak and Ben Ali regimes, examining how these lines were enforced and how the regimes manipulated media to manufacture popular acquiescence or apathy. A map emerges of an institutional and cultural media landscape that presents challenges to establishing the genuine public service media both countries need in order to thrive as democracies

Asian societies are entering a new era of decentralized governance of forests. The authority to make decisions on forest management has shifted to lower levels. of government and, in some cases, to the local people themselves. But can governments. simply `decentralize` authority away from the center, or are there certain core. elements necessary to achieve sustainable management and conservation of forests. in a decentralized world?. This book argues that policy solutions to resource dilemmas faced by forest-accessing. rural communities must be flexible, and should allow for local dynamics and

Political and economic transitions have had substantial impacts on forest conservation. Where transitions are underway or anticipated, historical precedent and methods for systematically assessing future trends should be used to anticipate likely threats to forest conservation and design appropriate and prescient policy measures to counteract them. Myanmar is transitioning from an authoritarian, centralized state with a highly regulated economy to a more decentralized and economically liberal democracy and is working to end a long‐running civil war. With these transitions in mind, we used a horizon‐scanning approach to assess the 40 emerging issues most affecting Myanmar's forests, including internal conflict, land‐tenure insecurity, large‐scale agricultural development, demise of state timber enterprises, shortfalls in government revenue and capacity, and opening of new deforestation frontiers with new roads, mines, and hydroelectric dams. Averting these threats will require, for example, overhauling governance models, building capacity, improving infrastructure‐ and energy‐project planning, and reforming land‐tenure and environmental‐protection laws. Although challenges to conservation in Myanmar are daunting, the political transition offers an opportunity for conservationists and researchers to help shape a future that enhances Myanmar's social, economic, and environmental potential while learning and applying lessons from other countries. Our approach and results are relevant to other countries undergoing similar transitions.

The supposition that agricultural intensification results in land sparing for conservation has become central to policy formulations across the tropics. However, underlying assumptions remain uncertain and have been little explored in the context of conservation incentive schemes such as policies for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, conservation, sustainable management, and enhancement of carbon stocks (REDD+). Incipient REDD+ forest carbon policies in a number of countries propose agricultural intensification measures to replace extensive "slash-and-burn" farming systems. These may result in conservation in some contexts, but will also increase future agricultural land rents as productivity increases, creating new incentives for agricultural expansion and deforestation. While robust governance can help to ensure land sparing, we propose that conservation incentives will also have to increase over time, tracking future agricultural land rents, which might lead to runaway conservation costs. We present a conceptual framework that depicts these relationships, supported by an illustrative model of the intensification of key crops in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a leading REDD+ country. A von Thünen land rent model is combined with geographic information systems mapping to demonstrate how agricultural intensification could influence future conservation costs. Once postintensification agricultural land rents are considered, the cost of reducing forest sector emissions could significantly exceed current and projected carbon credit prices. Our analysis highlights the importance of considering escalating conservation costs from agricultural intensification when designing conservation initiatives.

Effective conservation planning needs to consider the threats of cropland expansion to biodiversity. We used Myanmar as a case study to devise a modeling framework to identify which Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) are most vulnerable to cropland expansion in a context of increasingly resolved armed conflict. We studied 13 major crops with the potential to expand into KBAs. We used mixed-effects models and an agricultural versus forest rent framework to model current land use and conversion of forests to cropland for each crop. We found that the current cropland distribution is explained by higher agricultural value, lower transportation costs and lower elevation. We also found that protected areas and socio-political instability are effective in slowing down deforestation with conflicts in Myanmar damaging farmland and displacing farmers elsewhere. Under plausible economic development and socio-political stability scenarios, the models forecast 48.5% of land to be converted. We identified export crops such as maize, and pigeon pea as key deforestation drivers. This cropland expansion would pose a major threat to Myanmar's freshwater KBAs. We highlight the importance of considering rapid land-use transitions in the tropics to devise robust conservation plans.

Informal gold mining (IGM) is a major driver of deforestation and source of global mercury emissions. Policy makers may seek to control the spread of IGM by enforcing rules and/or providing alternative livelihoods. We investigated the dynamics and drivers of IGM in northern Myanmar to shed light on the conditions needed for alternative livelihood and enforcement interventions to succeed. We surveyed 226 respondents who practiced mining and/or farming. We found that mining and agriculture provided complementary livelihoods for many respondents as they met different livelihood needs, and that many of the miners were economic migrants. Livelihood-based interventions based on agriculture/plantations—as currently planned by the regional government—are thus unlikely to provide true substitutes. The willingness of migrant miners to move under different economic circumstances suggests that livelihood-based interventions are unlikely to scale well—mining may simply be displaced to other regions, or new migrants might replace old migrants. We estimated that current enforcement efforts were insufficient and that a much higher level of enforcement—either constant presence of enforcement officials at each informal mining site, or confiscating equipment every month—would be required to make informal mining unprofitable. Enforcement effectiveness was further undermined by corruption in the guise of informal payments to local authorities. Our study is the first to estimate costs that enforcement imposes and the level of enforcement required to deter informal gold mining, and adds to the growing body of evidence that enforcement and alternative livelihood approaches alone are unlikely to deter informal gold mining.