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With looming scarcity of land for expansion, sustainable intensification of production systems is increasingly crucial for addressing the multiple demands for land-based products and services. With globalization, land-use changes are increasingly influenced by distant causes.

Here we discuss the overall framework and some preliminary results of the MIDLAND project. The project focuses on understanding the processes that condition and shape the emergence and development of land use frontiers, i.e., areas with abundant land and natural resources relative to labor or capital, and rapid land use change. The focus is on the dry forests and savannas region of Southern Africa and its linkages with distant places. This region is considered as one of the areas concentrating the remaining large-scale pools of potentially available cropland. Agriculture and forestry linked to global markets is still limited in the region but rapidly growing. Distant actors and investors are increasingly mobilized to overcome constraints on frontier development including through various forms of land-use investments.

We discuss different types of land-use spillovers, i.e., situations where land-use changes or interventions on land use (policy, program, new technologies…) in one place result in effects on land use in another place. We synthesize the pathways and conditions of different spillovers: (i) Leakage as a spillover caused by a land-use intervention, such as an environmental conservation policy, which triggers land-use change elsewhere, thereby reducing the overall benefit of the local intervention, (ii) Indirect land-use change, as land-use change somewhere resulting from another land-use change elsewhere, and (ii) Rebound-effect of intensification. The project should contribute to establish the knowledge for pro-active governance of the frontier to foster resilient human-modified landscapes that sustain ecosystem services, biodiversity and livelihoods.