Land management includes the actions of different stakeholder groups at different scales, from local measures to regional land use strategies to land use policies. For sustainable land management (SLM), particularly in its planning stage, it is essential to know stakeholders and, ideally, to involve them in decision-making, or at least to understand a given situation from their perspective in an attempt to target their problems and interests in solution development. Although stakeholder analysis (SA) has been adopted in various projects with the aim of grasping stakeholders' perceptions and encouraging their deeper involvement in land management, the "how to" remains unclear. Current guidelines for SA remain vague and fail to lead practical application. One reason is the complexity of land use itself. SA is case specific for each project and requires highly flexible project management that adjusts methods and instruments according to given conditions. This article provides a practical example and discusses experiences from a sustainable rubber management project in Southwest China. This case study shows how, to a certain extent, "usage-oriented" SA can support joint decision making in SLM. With a more general aim, we reflect on the process and its management. As a result, we identify some core management issues: the heterogeneity of stakeholder groups with their multiple interests, stakeholders' involvement in decision making, the necessity of iteration, and adjustments with respect to cultural context.

India ranks first among the rainfed agricultural countries in the world. The impact of changing climate threatens rainfed food production as well as the food security of millions of people in the tropics and subtropics. The Government of India initiated Watershed Development Programmes (WDPs) for the overall development of these areas. We, therefore, established a comprehensive, location-specific, bottom-up tool to analyse and compare the climate vulnerability of watershed areas. For this, we deducted a new Climate Vulnerability Index for Rainfed Tropics (CVI^RFT) to evaluate the potential effectiveness of programmes to adapt to climate change impacts. The CVI^RFT comprises of three dimensions of vulnerability, i.e., adaptive capacity, exposure and sensitivity. These dimensions consist of ten major components and 59 indicators with emphasis on rainfed farming and WDP interventions. To test the tool, we collected primary data through household surveys (n = 215, split among three watershed communities) in Kerala. We show that there were strong variations in the exposure dimension, moderate in sensitivity and negligible in adaptive capacity across the watersheds. After analysing the major components under the dimensions, we suggest focusing on policy orientation towards redesigning of the WDPs with emphasis to economic diversification, livelihood strategies, social networking coupled with stakeholder participation, natural resource management and risk spread through credit and insurance flexibility. The CVI^RFT is replicable to similar physio-geographic areas of rainfed farming, with the refinement of indicators suited to the locality.