Land Reform in the Time of Neoliberalism: A Many‐Splendored Thing

Abstract: Over the past 20 years, land reform – defined here as the redistribution of land from large to small properties – has emerged as an important political issue in the Global South. Actors with widely differing ideological perspectives have claimed land reform as central to their political, social and economic platforms. In this paper, I compare reforms championed under the neoliberal auspices of the World Bank (the so‐called Market Led Agrarian Reforms) with those supported by popular grassroots actors such as the Movement of Landless Workers (the MST) in Brazil. I argue that although these two approaches to land reform are often considered antithetical to one another, they share a common theoretical foundation. Both are rooted in a labor theory of property that attributes the fruits of one's labor to the laborer. Where the two differ is in their interpretation of the “original sin” through which land and labor came to be misaligned: neoliberal actors see the state as the key source of land‐related inefficiency while popular grassroots actors identify the market as the key source. I analyze case material from northeastern Brazil and suggest that the institutionalization of the labor theory of property (across civil society, state and market in the region) has generated insecurities for new land reform beneficiaries who must protect their property rights with visible evidence of their productivity.     

Property Rights and the Environment in Pastoral China: Evidence from the Field

It is widely perceived that the degradation of China’s rangelands has accelerated since the introduction of rural reforms in the late 1970s. The popular explanation for this phenomenon has been that a ‘tragedy of the commons’ exists, as privately‐owned livestock are being grazed on ‘common’ land. Since the passing of the Rangeland Law in 1985, Chinese pastoral tenure policy has emphasized the establishment of individual household tenure as a necessary condition for improving incentives for sustainable rangeland management. Yet household tenure has yet to be effectively established in many pastoral regions. The first objective of this article is to describe pastoral tenure arrangements in northern Xinjiang‐Uygur Autonomous Region. Its second objective is to explain pastoral tenure arrangements, particularly the observed persistence of collective action. It is argued that there is no ‘tragedy of the commons’ and that it is characteristics of rangeland resources and the social environment that give rise to the particular types of institutional arrangements found.     

Local area farming Plans — a common reality for farmers and conservationists in the Scottish Highlands?

This paper supports the need for new policy developments to produce farm conservation plans specific to local areas. It explores attitudes to land management for conservation and economic goals, and presents views of fanners and local conservationists, who are directly involved in agri‐environmental and farm woodland schemes, in three regions of the Highlands of Scotland. It reviews the current state of Scottish agri‐environmental schemes, and presents results of on‐farm workshops conducted with farmers and conservationists and discusses common management plan approaches for environmental action. It concludes that farmers and conservationists are already considering the advantages of local area planning at a local area level and agree that there should be focus on addressing local site specific issues which take into account both the whole farm and its wider environment.     

Securing the Return: How Enhanced US Border Enforcement Fuels Cycles of Debt Migration

Expanded border enforcement has made unauthorised migration to the US more risky, costly, and prone to failure. Research on the material consequences of border enforcement for migrant‐sending households in Central America reveals that the economic hardships enforcement exacts on migrants at times diminishes enforcement's desired deterrent power. Heightened risks have driven up the cost of migration and pushed many to fund their trips through loans. Consequently, migrant detention, deportation, or death can result in poverty and privation for indebted households and the seizure of loan collateral, typically homes and land, in turn prompting crises in household reproduction. With a US wage the most viable means to ameliorate economic hardships, enforcement outcomes push some to return migration. Our findings suggest that US border enforcement efforts at times perpetuate the very unauthorised migration they seek to impede, while also helping to reproduce the border itself by deepening the marginalisation that drives migration decisions.     

Mortality among farmers and cotters in the Sundsvall area of Sweden during the nineteenth century

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Sundsvall area of Sweden underwent a dramatic economic transformation powered by the exceptional growth of the sawmill industry. Industrialization certainly had a devastating consequences for the health of sawmill employees and their families but also contributed to a gradual reduction in mortality rates among many farmers and cotters. This was particularly true among those who could benefit from the increased market for their produce found in the town and near the sawmills. Much of this study examines the consequences of industrial growth on the population's health. Nonetheless, the marked increase in tuberculosis mortality among women toward the end of the century illuminates the need to consider the social and cultural implications of industrialization rather than simply its economic characteristics when examining mortality patterns.     

China’s Rangelands under Stress: A Comparative Study of Pasture Commons in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region

China’s economic reforms have exacerbated the problems of over‐grazing and desertification in the country’s pastoral areas. In order to deal with rangeland degradation, the Chinese government has resorted to nationalization, or semi‐privatization. Since the implementation of rangeland policy has proved very difficult, however, experiments with alternative rangeland tenure systems merit our attention. In Ningxia, in northwest China, local attempts have been undertaken to establish communal range management systems with the village as the basic unit of use and control. Some of these management regimes are under severe stress, due to large‐scale digging for medicinal herbs in the grasslands. This digging has resulted in serious conflicts between Han and Hui Muslim Chinese, during which several farmers have been killed. It is against this backdrop that this article explores the institutional dynamics of range management in two different villages.     

Crisis attack: Impromptu ethnography in the Greek maelstom (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Assailed by mounting debt and increasing economic distress, Greece today is also the target of media representations that emphasize violence and disorder. Michael Herzfeld – who was mugged and tear‐gassed in Athens this past July – argues that these representations are misleading and indeed are part of the problem they seek to explain. The structural violence of an insistent barrage of negative media coverage as well as that of international financial pressures undermines a previously stable and relatively crime‐free country, encouraging new forms – including police and popular racism, physical violence at demonstrations, and acts of petty crime – of what had once been a largely codified and ritualized idiom of aggression. While many Greeks do feel that debts should be paid, increasing economic desperation fuels a different view, and one that can best be interpreted in light of the social values that anthropologists have long studied in Greece: that the country's creditors are violating their own obligations toward Greece and thus deserve to face both default on the massive debt and the public hostility of the Greek people.     

Co‐opting Conservation: Migrant Resource Control and Access to National Park Management in the Philippine Uplands

The history of political and economic inequality in forest villages can shape how and why resource use conflicts arise during the evolution of national parks management. In the Philippine uplands, indigenous peoples and migrant settlers co‐exist, compete over land and forest resources, and shape how managers preserve forests through national parks. This article examines how migrants have claimed lands and changed production and exchange relations among the indigenous Tagbanua to build on and benefit from otherwise coercive park management on Palawan Island, the Philippines. Migrant control over productive resources has influenced who, within each group, could sustain agriculture in the face of the state's dominant conservation narrative — valorizing migrant paddy rice and criminalizing Tagbanua swiddens. Upon settling, migrant farmers used new political and economic strengths to tap into provincial political networks in order to be hired at a national park. As a result, they were able to steer management to support paddy rice at the expense of swidden cultivation. While state conservation policy shapes how national parks impact upon local resource access and use, older political economic inequalities in forest villages build on such policies to influence how management affects the livelihoods of poor households.     

Disability and the Family in South Wales Coalfield Society,c.1920–1939

This article utilises the south Wales coalfield in the interwar period as a case study to illustrate the applicability of two sociological theories – family systems theory and the social ecology of the family – to impairment in the past. It demonstrates that a theoretically-informed approach can help to situate impairment in its particular contexts, most especially the family and the community, and give a better sense of the lived experience of disability. It also demonstrates the complexity of the experience of disability as the family and economic circumstances of each impaired individual varied and led to different forms of care-giving or the utilisation of different sources of support. The article also sheds further light on the ubiquity of disability as many families included a number of individuals with different impairments and this too had consequences for experiences and coping strategies.     

Access and Property: A Question of Power and Authority

In this introduction we argue that access and property regarding natural resources are intimately bound up with the exercise of power and authority. The process of seeking authorizations for property claims also has the effect of granting authority to the authorizing politico‐legal institution. In consequence, struggles over natural resources in an institutionally pluralist context are processes of everyday state formation. Through the discussion of this theoretical proposition we point to legitimizing practices, territoriality and violence as offering particular insights into the recursively constituted relations between struggles over access and property regarding natural resources, contestations about power and authority, and state formation.     

Patronage or Participation? Community‐based Natural Resource Management Reform in Sub‐Saharan Africa

This article examines the institutional factors that account for the outcome of efforts to decentralize control over natural resources to local communities. It focuses on the political nature of institutional processes associated with decentralization in sub‐Saharan Africa through a comparative analysis of wildlife management reforms in seven east and southern African countries. Institutional reforms are largely dependent on state authorities' patronage interests, which in turn are shaped by the relative economic value of wildlife, the degree of central control over commercial utilization, and the accountability of governance institutions. Our findings have a range of practical implications for the design of CBNRM initiatives and institutional reform strategies.     

Community-based Fisheries Management,Tradition and the Challenges of Development in Marovo,Solomon Islands

This study examines traditional fisheries-related resource management through a case in which local communities, from a basis of customary, ‘common property’ control over the sea and its resources, handle a multitude of development issues. Presenting first some important issues relating to people's role in fisheries management and to the ‘common property’ debate, the article then describes a traditional system for management of land and sea resources in a Pacific Islands society; that of Marovo Lagoon, Solomon Islands. Emphasis is given to fisheries resources, with a view to explaining in practical terms how a system of customary marine tenure operates under the wider social, political, economic and ecological circumstances of change arising from development pressures. Against this background, assessments are made of the viability of this traditional fisheries management system under present conditions of state control and of both external and internal pressures for large-scale resource development enterprises.     

From the Guerra Del Agua to the Guerra Del Gas: Resource Governance,Neoliberalism and Popular Protest in Bolivia

Recent resource protests in Bolivia have crystallized broad sets of claims involving livelihood rights, political participation, regional autonomy, and the meanings of citizenship and the nation. In both the 2000 “Water War”, and the 2003 “Gas War”, protestors objected to the restructuring and re‐scaling of resource governance that has taken place under recent waves of neoliberal reforms in Bolivia. In both cases, protestors demanded greater participation in decision‐making regarding resource management, more equitable distribution of the economic benefits derived from resource exploitation, and a more socially oriented alternative to Bolivia's neoliberal model of economic development. In spite of these similarities, however, these struggles were characterized by markedly uneven geographies of popular protest. The water and gas wars had different spatial dynamics, stemming in part from the biophysical differences between water and natural gas, and the ways these resources enter into social life. Moreover, the protests had very uneven social effects, and in some respects excluded the most marginalized sectors of Bolivia's poor.     

Social Polarization and the Politics of Low Income Mortgage Lending in the United States

ABSTRACT The structured inequalities of capital investment and disinvestment are prominent themes in critical urban and regional research, but many accounts portray ‘capital’ as a global, faceless and placeless abstraction operating according to a hidden, unitary logic. Sweeping political‐economic shifts in the last generation demonstrate that capital may shape urban and regional processes in many different ways, and each of these manifestations creates distinct constraints and opportunities. In this paper, we analyze a new institutional configuration in the USA that is reshaping access to wealth among the poor – a policy ‘consensus’ to expand home‐ownership among long‐excluded populations. This shift has opened access to some low‐ and moderate‐income households, and racial and ethnic minorities, but the necessary corollary is a greater polarization between those who are able to own and those who are not. We provide a critical analysis of these changes, drawing on national housing finance statistics as well as a multivariate analysis of differences between owners and renters in the 1990s in New York City. As home‐ownership strengthens its role as a privatized form of stealth urban and housing policy in the USA, its continued expansion drives a corresponding reconstruction of its value for different groups, and inscribes a sharper axis of property‐rights inequalities among owners and renters in the working classes.     

Uncommon Ground: The ‘Poverty of History’ in Common Property Discourse

It would not be a great exaggeration to say that scholars of environmental conservation and conflict have re‐discovered the institutional foundations of social and economic life. At the heart of this ‘renaissance’ is the belief that property and property relations have a strong bearing on how people use, manage and abuse natural resource systems, and that institutional arrangements based on the creation and management of common property can have positive impacts on resource use and conservation. Two bodies of thought compete for a voice in this literature. One, which aims to resolve Hardin's tragedy of the commons, is primarily concerned with the problem of encouraging collective action to conserve resources that are both depletable and unregulated. A second, influenced by notions of moral economy and entitlement, deals with the problem of creating and sustaining resource access for poor and vulnerable groups in society. This article argues that the literature on common property has become divided between a body of scholarship that uses deductive models of individual decision‐making and rational choice to explain the ways in which different types of property rights arrangements emerge and change over time, and one whose questions, aims and methods are more modest, and historically‐specific. It then aims to understand this evolution by situating the mainstream common property discourse in the wider intellectual trend of positivism, methodological individualism and formal modelling that has come to dominate social science in the United States. In so doing, it attempts to unravel the political and ideological foundations of what has come to be a dominant mode of understanding environmental problems, and solutions to these problems.     

The benevolent proprietor and the property law: A British‐Indian dilemma

British Indian revenue policy determined British‐Indian property law. ft was essential to establish a class of landed proprietors, entitled by law to collect rents from their tenants, from which in turn government could legally assess its revenue demand. Revenue was principally settled with the zamindars, who had had rights to a share in agricultural produce which carried a duty to meet government's revenue demand recognised by the Mughal government. The zamindars were redefined unequivocally as landlords by the British‐Indian property law. Their estates were assigned on the basis of existing records and were composed for the most part of disparate shares in villages. Such estates were essentially not economically viable; the social and domestic circumstances of the zamindars further compromised the management of their estates. Government intended that the landlords should become progressive farmers, but conditions, as much a product of legal enactment as of economic reality, frustrated that aim. The history of the nineteenth century administration of British India illustrates the dilemma of government, and the conflict between conservatism in the rural sphere and the pursuit of progressive policies. The radical reform of the zamindars’ estates, namely the drastic curtailments which took place under the zamindari abolition statutes under the Congress government's programme for land reform, has paradoxically achieved for independent India that which the government of British India struggled throughout a century and a half to achieve: the creation of the progressive proprietor.     

THE VALUE OF WATER VALUES: DEPARTING FROM GEOGRAPHY TOWARDS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY SYNTHESIS

Water valuation represents both an opportunity and a challenge for interdisciplinary scholarly research, given that it can mobilize academic work beyond unnecessary cleavages between physical and social sciences. The article revisits the most common valuation approaches – namely, water as an economic resource, entangled in commodification strategies and embedded in cultural heritages – as important, but incomplete, considerations of the multitude of water values. While previous publications have dealt with the values held by different social groups and by the territorialized manifestation of water values, the limitations of prevailing valuation strategies are discussed here and a relational synthesis is proposed. As relevant as the examination of particular values (e.g. economic, non‐economic, religious, cultural, aesthetic values, etc.) is the realization that the valuation of water is articulated according to socionatural interdependencies and the historic‐geographical trajectories of individuals and groups. Water valuation is, therefore, premised on a relational, holistic ontology, in the sense that values are necessarily interrelated and emerge out of concrete, politicized socionatural interactions. Making use of relevant examples, it is argued that the valuation of water is ultimately a political statement that synthesizes mechanisms of cooperation and competition between individuals and social groups for the allocation, use and conservation of water. Such politicized understanding of the interconnections between water values provides a helpful entry point into the causes and consequences of water management problems. These are all profoundly geographical, but also interdisciplinary, questions, as water values reflect multiscale connections between local processes and wider relations of production, consumption and reproduction.     

Politically Engaged Geographical Research with the Community Sector: Is It Encouraged by Australia's Higher Education and Research Institutions?

With the application of neoliberal thinking to the higher education sector, measures of research quality and utility have proliferated in efforts to increase academic accountability, innovation, and contributions to public policy. We intend to reignite discussion about community activism and the role of the academic in response to trends in higher education policy and recent debate in Australia about research quality assessment and policy relevance. We challenge the common portrayal of the public sector as the sole locus of policy‐making and argue the case for greater recognition of the role of the community sector and its research partners in policy development and implementation – one that is not given due attention in the discourse on or in measures of research value and impact. Informed by recent literature on governance and interpretative approaches to policy analysis, we draw on our combined experience conducting research with two Australian movements at the forefront of reforms to property rights institutions, legal standards, and norms relating to social and economic equity to outline the institutional tensions and structural impediments facing researchers working with the non‐government sector. The paper documents the progressive roles the academic can play in such work, arguing that institutional change is required within the tertiary sector to support researchers to build closer, more trusting research partnerships in which due attention is given to social impact and relevance.     

'Taming the Lagoon': Aquaculture Development and the Future of Customary Marine Tenure in Kiribati, Central Pacific

ABSTRACT The atolls and low‐lying limestone islands of Kiribati (Micronesia) illustrate the challenges of economic development based on natural resources exploitation. For that reason, the widely scattered island nation has relied heavily on foreign aid and remittances sent by merchant seamen. However, it is becoming apparent that excessive reliance on external support can no longer be considered secure in the medium to longer term, notably with cutbacks in aid assistance and advances in marine technology. In attempts at achieving ‘self‐reliance’, successive governments have always perceived marine resources development, particularly living resources, as a means of attaining greater economic independence. Recently, efforts have been underway to promote inshore and aquaculture development by smallholders. Seaweed farming, and especially black pearl production, are new commercial ventures. Giant clam mariculture remains an option. While it is too early to measure the success of some of these projects, their establishment may have important implications for reviving marine tenure by encouraging smallholders to reassert their traditional rights to inshore resources. Customary marine tenure (CMT) has declined significantly as a result of colonial intrusion. Today, the impact of population growth, urbanization, more efficient extractive technologies and expanding market opportunities calls for more effective village‐based control of threatened resources. Close monitoring of aquaculture projects will be required to minimize potential conflicts over traditional marine ownership.     

Health Care Reforms in Developing Asia: Propositions and Realities

Market‐oriented reforms in the health sector continue to dominate health policy agendas in many developing countries despite growing evidence of their negative impacts. This article critically examines eight key arguments that are used to justify market‐oriented reforms and that continue to hold widespread appeal among policy makers and analysts. The authors conclude that although the axiom that health care is atypical due to pervasive market failures is widely acknowledged by reformers, the scope and depth of the negative consequences of market competition and private sector involvement are systematically underestimated in policy design and implementation, while the regulatory capacity to overcome them is overestimated. Their analysis suggests that while there is considerable scope for market‐oriented reforms, the success of such reforms depends on a tight set of conditions that are often absent in the health care sector, especially but not exclusively in developing countries.