Strained relations: A critical analysis of the mining conflict in Prestea,Ghana

This paper examines the dynamics of the ongoing conflict in Prestea, Ghana, where indigenous galamsey mining groups are operating illegally on a concession awarded to Bogoso Gold Limited (BGL), property of the Canadian-listed multinational Gold Star Resources. Despite being issued firm orders by the authorities to abandon their activities, galamsey leaders maintain that they are working areas of the concession that are of little interest to the company; they further counter that there are few alternative sources of local employment, which is why they are mining in the first place. Whilst the Ghanaian Government is in the process of setting aside plots to relocate illegal mining parties and is developing alternative livelihood projects, efforts are far from encouraging: in addition to a series of overlooked logistical problems, the areas earmarked for relocation have not yet been prospected to ascertain gold content, and the alternative income-earning activities identified are inappropriate. As has been the case throughout mineral-rich sub-Saharan Africa, the conflict in Prestea has come about largely because the national mining sector reform program, which prioritizes the expansion of predominantly foreign-controlled large-scale projects, has neglected the concerns of indigenous subsistence groups.     

Universal heritage meets local livelihoods: ‘awkward engagements’ at the world cultural heritage listing in Bali

In 2012 the UNESCO World Heritage Committee added to its World Heritage List the ‘Cultural Landscape of Bali Province: the subak system as a manifestation of the Tri Hita Karana Philosophy’. Barely a year later, UNESCO had become sufficiently concerned about reports of various problems that it advised the Government of Indonesia of these concerns. Through ethnographic study of the initial implementation of the listing, this article reveals problems of uncontrolled development, and disputes over the allocation of benefits to local communities, and challenges to effective governance. It focuses on two key locations of the site, offering an analysis of problems, their causes and effects. Beginning with the premise that the gulf of understanding between the global World Heritage system and local communities often creates a range of unintended consequences, this article reveals the many ‘awkward engagements’ that have emerged ‘on the ground’ in Bali as local agencies of government are left to their own devices to manage the World Heritage site.     

Mapping Common Futures: Customary Communities,NGOs and the State in Indonesia's Reform Era

The post‐Suharto ‘Reform Era’ has witnessed explosive revitalization movements among Indonesia's indigenous minorities or ‘customary’(adat) communities attempting to redress the disempowerment they suffered under the former regime. This study considers the current resurgence of customary claims to land and resources in Bali, where the state‐sponsored investment boom of the 1990s had severe social and environmental impacts. It focuses on recent experiments with participatory community mapping, aimed at reframing the relationship between state and local institutions in planning and decision‐making processes. Closely tied to the mapping and planning strategy have been efforts to strengthen local institutions and to confront the problems of land alienation and community control of resources. The diversity of responses to this new intervention reflects both the vitality and limitations of local adat communities, as well as the contributions and constraints of non‐governmental organizations that increasingly mediate their relationships to state and global arenas. This ethnographic study explores participants’ experiences of the community mapping programme and suggests its potential for developing ‘critical localism’ through long‐term, process‐oriented engagements between communities, governments, NGOs, and academic researchers.     

Family Property and the Limits of Intervention: The Article 27 Reforms and the PROCEDE Programme in Mexico

In the 1990s the Mexican peasants witnessed the introduction of a new Agrarian Law and the implementation of the land regularization programme, PROCEDE. In this article it is demonstrated that the privatization of previously communally held ejido land did not lead to the promised dynamic land market, nor to an increase in agricultural productivity. On the basis of an in–depth study of land tenure practices in the ejido La Canoa in Western Mexico, it is shown that the changes of 1992 did not address the main problems of peasant agriculture. The new Agrarian Law legalized practices which, although illegal, had already become quite common in ejidos throughout Mexico. In addition, it is argued that legal security does not necessarily reside in official registration by the state, but can also be based on local recognition of land rights. The main argument of the article is that property consists of complex sets of claims, rights and obligations that cannot be manipulated by forms of state intervention that reduce land tenure predicaments to technical problems.     

Developing geographic information infrastructures for local government: the role of trust

The United States's National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) model presumes that the local government agencies of counties and municipalities will share their geographic information freely with government agencies of regions, states and federal agencies. This article takes up the issue of local government involvement in the NSDI by asking the question: why should local governments involve themselves in the NSDI? This question is informed by considering the social and technological imbrication of the NSDI. One of the oldest spatial data infrastructure projects, the NSDI offers insights into the complexity of implementing infrastructure in federal models of shared governance. This article focuses on the political and financial dimensions of developing infrastructure among local governments. Trust is quintessential at this level of government. Local government agency activities experience an inherently closer coupling with political representatives and with different agencies in both intramunicipal and intermunicipal activities. Building the NSDI is fundamentally an interagency act and thus a matter of trust. Trust is a key issue in the development of the NSDI, as the results of a study of Kentucky local government agencies indicate.     

European cultural diplomacy: diaspora relations with Kazakhstan

Abstract

Cultural diplomacy using diasporic communities as facilitators of interaction between states has long been important. This article suggests a typology of networks of communication derived from a case study of long-established diasporas living in post-independence Kazakhstan and their relationship with their European ‘homelands’. The typology juxtaposes the official stance of homeland governments expressed in formal and legal provisions with the lived experience of the diaspora communities. The study highlights the benefits of developing vibrant ‘valued’ networks of communication embracing both local diasporas and homeland embassies and agencies. In such cases, diplomatic benefits accrue to the homeland and local communities are empowered. Similarly, failing to capitalise on positive sentiment with some infrastructural support may leave an ‘expressive’ network as one of neglected potential.     

Regulatory Enforcement,Riskscapes, and Environmental Justice

Does environmental regulation vary over poor and minority communities? An uneven governmental response may follow from regulators' varying incentives to negotiate enforcement challenges. We argue that regulators confront two in particular. Regulators can pursue political enforcement, responding to mobilized interests, regardless of environmental risk, or they can pursue instrumental enforcement, responding to at‐risk communities, regardless of political mobilization. To examine these competing strategies, we use an original dataset from the EPA's Risk‐Screening Environmental Indicators model to develop a geographic “riskscape” combined with census tract community data and facility‐level enforcement data. We find that state regulatory agencies pursue a mixture of political and instrumental enforcement, but that these tactics are applied unevenly across traditional environmental justice communities. Specifically, state agencies devote more attention to facilities in communities with relatively higher risk, but less attention in the area of punishment for violations for facilities located in Hispanic communities. Importantly, this lack of attention to Hispanic communities is not mediated by the relative level of risks that they face, but it is to a significant extent in communities in which environmental justice advocacy organizations operate.     

Innovation and the Entrepreneurial State in Asia: Mechanisms of Bond Market Development

Abstract

Bond markets have expanded rapidly in emerging East Asian economies in recent years. Asian policymakers have played a pivotal role in this development. This process presents an interesting challenge to the developmental state literature associated with bank-based financial systems. We argue that it is best to understand the role of the state as an entrepreneurial state in the construction of these markets, focusing on institutional innovation in three mechanisms of state-led market infrastructure: national or local credit rating agencies, mortgage corporations and bond pricing agencies. National credit rating agencies rate the creditworthiness of debt in local currency. Mortgage corporations create markets in securitised housing loans. Bond pricing agencies put a value on illiquid debt instruments to enable mark-to-market portfolio management. Together, these three mechanisms constitute the core determinants of the market (demand for creditworthy products, supply of tradeable assets, and the fixing of a price to those assets). In so doing they influence the nature of market operations, producing outcomes very different from the free market ideal type. We also consider cross-country commonalities and variations in this general pattern.     

Market Creation by Leninist Means: The Regulation of Financial Services in the People’s Republic of China

Abstract

Within the process of China’s transition from a centrally-administered to a more market-oriented economy, financial services have played a very special role, but in a counter-intuitive way: what looks like Western market economics turns out to be a Leninist regulatory model. Even as international financial service providers and regulatory communities are invited to play a role in the creation of a Chinese market in financial services, the Communist Party has strengthened its control of top personnel, the judiciary and the media. The reform of the central bank and the establishment of technically independent regulatory agencies seemed to have taken China down the path of OECD economies. The model of a very specific post-regulatory state with Chinese characteristics, however, has not fully incorporated the notion of private authority. Such an acceptance would pose a threat to the CCP monopoly on political power. The attempt to use only semi-private organisations to develop financial markets undermines the long-term stability of the political and economic order.     

The nation,the élite and the Southeast Asian antiquities trade: With special reference to Thailand

Abstract

The dealings that the Thai nation state has had with archaeological sites and antiquities appear to fit at least as well within the framework of antiquarian collecting as within that of modern archaeology. It is argued that this reflects the potential that sites and antiquities have to function as cultural capital. Citing Pierre Bourdieu, it is proposed that there is a commonality of interests between the state and the many private collectors among the Thai elite and that this derives partly from the emphasis that is placed on the display or performative potential of sites and antiquities. An appreciation of how antiquities function as cultural capital is surely a prerequisite for any successful effort to counter the looting of sites and the illegal trade in antiquities.

‘There is an economy of cultural goods, but it has a specific logic.’[1]     

The Neolithic and ‘Pastoralism’ Along the Nile: A Dissenting View

A largely accepted paradigm in African recent prehistory considers pastoralism to be the main subsistence source of food-producing communities along the Sudanese Nile valley from the 6th millennium cal BC onwards. This paradigm is constraining the development of a wider theoretical perspective that assumes, instead, a regionally differentiated picture of the economic and social organisation of local communities in northeastern Africa. This paradigm is thus the strongest impediment to achieving reliable and convincing syntheses of the transition from food collection to food production in this area. New data from Upper Nubia and central Sudan open the way for different and more complex scenarios and a new understanding of the local transition from agro-pastoral to agricultural practices. A more systematic data-based approach helps to change radically our perception of different Neolithic trajectories. Moreover, it helps to place in a different perspective—based on various levels of identity formation processes—change and continuity along the chrono-cultural sequence, as well as the different meanings that each local group confers on apparently similar acts in the context of the funerary ideology.

     

Governing the local in the North Caucasus

Abstract

The article provides an in-depth analysis of local governance in the North Caucasus, by example of land tenure conflicts in Kabardino-Balkaria. We follow an iterative analytical strategy, systematically combining qualitative case studies to develop grounded hypotheses, with subsequent statistical hypothesis testing. Based on fieldwork conducted in Kabardino-Balkaria, we identify the most relevant patterns and dynamics of natural resource governance. Our research shows that there are three dominant patterns. The first pattern is formed in areas where land is of little value and communities are left to themselves to solve issues. In the second case, larger businesses with state backing manage to monopolize land resources and sideline local communities. In the third case, local communities are strong enough to defend their control over external attempts to take hold of land resources. Finally, we use original survey data to further investigate plausible causes for stronger and weaker local self-governance and its consequences for state-society relations. We show that local self-government (LSG) lacks independence, and its functional quality depends on the degree of state interference via patronage. Despite this challenging environment, we find that higher perceptions of LSG quality predict more trust in the state at central and subnational level.     

Negotiating Statehood in a Hybrid Political Order: The Case of Somaliland

This article investigates the negotiation of statehood in Somaliland, a non‐recognized de facto state which emerged from Somalia's conflict and state collapse. The negotiation process centres on the continuing transformation of a hybrid political order, involving ‘formal’ as well as ‘informal’ spheres, both in existing institutions (as ‘rules of the game’) and in the bodies or agents enforcing these rules. The negotiation processes considered take place at the national and local level respectively, as well as between the two. These negotiations are heterogeneous, non‐linear and ongoing. The article demonstrates how the polity's tolerance for heterogeneous negotiations and different forms of statehood allowed local political actors to establish peace in their own local settings first. Although it did not produce uniform statehood, it provided the basis for communities to explore the scope for common statehood. On the national level, hybrid elements initially allowed for a healthy adaptation of statehood to local needs, and for legitimate, productive instruments of negotiation. This responsiveness was not maintained, and current hybrid elements threaten to undermine the polity's stability.     

Neoliberalism and the Institutions for Regional Development in Australia

This paper examines some effects of the pursuit of neoliberalism on regional development policy and practice in Australia, and in particular on the activities and effectiveness of regional development organisations. The paper interprets data from a survey of 505 regional development organisations across Australia through the framework of Jessop's contribution to state theory and his identification of four key trends in economic management under neoliberalism. Regional development policies are seen as a response of governments to electoral pressure from regions, but a response that is constrained by the dominance of neoliberal ideology. The objectives of regional development are predominantly economic, but are often limited to the role of facilitation and the provision of information. Some responsibility for regional development has been shifted downwards to regions, but the effectiveness of the organisations given this responsibility is reduced by the short‐term and competitive nature of much of their funding, the lack of coordination between regional development actors at the local level, the proliferation of agencies and the competition between them. The paper concludes that regional development agencies in Australia are in many ways a product of neoliberalism, since they represent one way in which governments can be seen to be responding to regional pressure for assistance but they can do so without incurring significant costs. Yet regional development bodies are also a victim of neoliberalist thinking, since it denies them the resources and the powers they need to be more successful in their work.     

Ulinzi Shirikishi: Popular Experiences of Hybrid Security Governance in Tanzania

In the context of increasing academic and policy‐related attention to hybrid forms of security provision which combine state and non‐state institutions, in Africa and elsewhere, this article explores the implementation of community‐based or participatory policing (ulinzi shirikishi) in Tanzania. Through ulinzi shirikishi citizens are encouraged to form local security committees, organize neighbourhood patrols and investigate reported crime. In contrast to earlier forms of state‐sponsored sungusungu vigilantism in Tanzania, community police are expected to cooperate with the Tanzania Police Force and to adhere to state law. Based on 11 months’ fieldwork in three sub‐wards of the city of Mwanza, this article argues that community policing has been fairly effective in improving residents’ perceptions of local safety. However, two important concerns emerge that may compromise the sustainability and legitimacy of community policing in the future. Firstly, organizing local policing entails considerable costs for communities, which disproportionately disadvantage the relatively poor. Secondly, controlling local service provision can enable individuals to pursue private gains, at the expense of the production of public goods. It is thus important to consider the development of hybridity over time towards models that may look less like community‐based policing and more like commercial security provision.     

Monks and Local Communities: The Late-medieval Landscape of Troed y Rhiw,Caron Uwch Clawdd,Ceredigion

Abstract

In a zone of improved upland pasture some 2 km east of the Cistercian monastery of Strata Florida (Ystrad Fflur), Ceredigion, are the earthwork remains of a 'sheepcote' and four abandoned medieval farms, one probably originating as a monastic sheep-handling station. Documentary evidence and field observation suggest that these farms have preserved their late-medieval forms in a relatively unmodified state. Three were apparently situated along a contemporary ffridd boundary (head dyke) that separated a zone of pasture and perhaps arable land from mountain pasture. We cannot establish the relationship between the 'sheepcote' and the 'farms' through field observation alone, nor do we know the absolute age of the ffridd boundary. Our paper describes and briefly discusses the character and local context of the area defined by the latter. The pattern of land-use is comparable to that in Swaledale (North Yorkshire), an area that has been discussed on the one hand in terms of patterns of townships (hamlets) and their land-use zones, and on the other in terms of monastic enterprise and the identification of 'vaccaries'. In the study of 'monastic landscapes', we risk becoming preoccupied with estate economies and the identification of 'tool-kits', at the expense of dealing with the complexity of relationships between monasteries and local communities.     

The coastal evacuation of Zhangpu County in early Qing: Borders,shifting zones,and social change as seen in forts and fortified villages

Abstract

Qianhai, the early Qing order that forced people in southeast coast to evacuate the coast to a distance of ten to eighteen miles inland in order to eliminate anti-Qing activities, is an excellent topic through which to examine the formation of the border in Han local society. The development of regional studies during the past 20 years encourages us to both refine our local case studies and map the wider picture. The story of social transformation in Zhangpu County during the Ming-Qing transition provides a perfect case to discuss how the coastal evacuation policy was implemented in local society. It can also promote our understanding of multiple histories. First, the lineage story of the coastal evacuation can be described in greater detail. Even in a single county, there was no standard evacuation distance. Local officials relied on mountainous terrain and existing forts and fortified villages to form a line of defense that determined the scope of the evacuation. Second, the social landscape in the communities of the county demonstrates the rise and decline of local power structures. Many of the most influential and deep-rooted lineages were badly weakened by the time they returned home after the evacuation order was rescinded. On the basis of the ebb and flow of local elites, the Qing state began to regulate households more closely, and state power thus penetrated to the local level. The household registers of Zhangpu were established based on the specific historical context of the county, but the process shared with the rest of the southeastern coastal region a pattern whereby pacification and local Defense shaped state penetration. Even in a supposedly “traditional” Han region, the empire needed to handle the problems of the border and social complexity, just as it did in “non-Han” areas. This illustrates the process of late imperial state formation in practice.     

Pastoralism and Land‐Tenure Change in Kenya: The Failure of Customary Institutions

Until recently, the Pokot in the highlands of the Baringo area in Kenya have practised semi‐nomadic pastoralism. Today they are rapidly sedentarizing and in many areas suitable for farming, they are adopting rain‐fed agriculture. As a result of these dynamics, claims to individual property on de facto communal rangelands have arisen, and to such an extent that they seriously threaten the peace of the community. This article explores the conflicts that emerge in the transition from common property to private tenure. Using locally prominent land disputes as exemplary cases, it focuses on the role of traditional gerontocratic authorities in the attempt to resolve a growing number of land disputes; on the emerging power of patrilineal clans and local elites in the enforcement of access to land; and on the incompetence of government agencies to intervene. The failure of customary institutions to ensure land tenure security leads to a situation in which women and marginalized actors in particular are threatened with displacement, and in which most local actors want the state to intervene and establish formal property rights.     

Postcolonial Conservation and Kiekie Harvests at Morere New Zealand – Abstracting Indigenous Knowledge from Indigenous Polities

Conservation authorities and local Maori are engaged in a collaborative science project within the Morere Scenic Reserve (east coast of the North Island in New Zealand). Although the project was restricted initially to the integration of knowledge to support sustainable harvests of kiekie (Freycinetia baueriana), the illegitimacy of state agencies to manage competing Maori demands for that species led inadvertently to the devolution of harvest administration to a local tribe. The success of the Morere experiment is evident in widespread support for a subsequent decision to fallow the kiekie resource, suggesting that further experiments to activate Indigenous polities within conservation management are warranted. Nonetheless, ambivalence towards Maori development needs circumscribes the potential of devolved management and collaborative science.