Policies for Biodiversity Conservation: The Case of Sub-Saharan Africa

Why does biodiversity conservation matter, and what can be done about it? The article discusses the options in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, drawing on the results of a Darwin Initiative project on the ecology and economics of biodiversity conservation in the continent. It uses the case of Sub-Saharan Africa to illustrate both the consequences of biodiversity loss and the constraints within which policy-makers operate. To most people the biodiversity loss that matters is not the global extinction of species, but the effects of local change in flora and fauna on watershed protection, soil conservation, habitat, productivity and amenity. For this reason, biodiversity conservation concerns even the poorest communities. But because poverty, indebtedness, insecurity of land tenure and other social conditions affect the way in which people respond to incentives, the policy options for biodiversity conservation may be different in different parts of the world.     

The Political Economy of Inappropriate Technology: Industrialization in Sub-Saharan Africa

The failure of public sector investment projects in Sub-Saharan Africa can often be described in large measure as a technological one, where technology is defined not just in the narrow sense of alternative factor proportions, but in the wider terms of scale and import intensity as well. In confining itself mainly to the economic dimensions of the problem, the existing literature fails to consider the reasons for the extraordinarily rapid and widespread expansion of the public sector in Sub-Saharan Africa and it hence ignores the possibility that this expansion might itself be related to the observed patterns of technological behaviour in the sector. Such a possibility, I suggest, resides in the political and institutional compulsions that drive industrial firms in the public sector to increase the size of their operations.     

Animal Disease Challenges to the Emergence of Pastoralism in Sub-Saharan Africa

Despite the antiquity of domestic cattle in the Sahara-Sahel, archaeological evidence from two sub-Saharan regions indicates that the first pastoralist colonization of sub-Saharan Africa may not have proceeded so smoothly as modern appearances suggest. The first appearance of cattle-based economies seems to have been delayed by as much as a thousand years after the first appearance of small stock, in both eastern and southern Africa. This article reviews the relevant archaeological evidence and argues that the lag in successful introduction of cattle stems from new animal diseases encountered by pastoral colonists entering biogeographic zones south of the Sahel. Diseases that are often fatal to cattle, including wildebeest-derived malignant catarrhal fever (WD-MCF), East Coast fever (ECF), foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), and Rift Valley fever (RVF), as well as trypanosomiasis, are described as probable barriers to the early entry of cattle-based economies into these regions.Malgré l'antiquité des animaux domestiques dans le Sahara-Sahel, les données archéologique de deux régions subsahariennes indiquent que les premières colonisations pastoraux des zones au sud du Sahel ne se propagèrent pas aussi promptement que suggèrent les apparences actuelles. En l'Afrique orientale et en l'Afrique du sud, l'apparition d'économies basées sur l'élevage des gros bovins paraît être retardée de quelque mille ans par rapport à l'apparition des petits ruminants domestiques dans ces mêmes régions. L'article recense les données archéologiques pertinentes et propose que le délai de l'introduction effective des gros bovins fût causée par des nouvelles maladies vétérinaires rencontrées par les premiers colonisateurs pastoraux entrant dans les zones biogéographiques au sud du Sahel. Des maladies fréquemment fatales aux gros bovins, telle que le coryza gangreneux, la thèleriose, la fièvre aphteuse, l'arbovirus des Bunyaviridae, aussi bien que la trypanosomiase, sont proposées comme des obstacles probables à la diffusion des économies à gros bovins dans ces régions.     

Status of geoinformatics education and training in Sub-Saharan Africa: initiatives taken and challenges

This paper presents an update on some of the activities that have taken place since a World Bank report; “Guidelines for Education and Training in Environmental Information Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa: Some Key Issues” was published and provides details on the current situation. It shows how organizations such as the African Association on Remote Sensing of Environment, International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, European Association of Remote Sensing Companies, Group on Earth Observation, and several others have helped to increase manpower resources in the region and strengthened institutional capacity in the field of geoinformatics, through capacity building, technology transfer, international cooperation and the provision of internal African resources. After reviewing what has happened in the field of geoinformatics education and training, we focused on current initiatives taken and challenges in five Sub-Saharan countries: Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. We reviewed GIS education and training in the private sector, government, information communications technology in higher education institutions, GIS application areas and challenges facing GIS education and training. Findings show that; change should involve education stakeholders in all levels of education and curriculum quality, regional and international cooperation through exchange programs, should be a priority for Sub-Saharan Africa countries.     

Politics and the Cultural Landscape: The Case of Aboriginal Land Rights

In this paper Aboriginal land rights are analysed from the perspective of a disadvantaged group seeking access to a scarce resource controlled by external agents. The Aboriginal participants in land rights politics are found to be actively seeking ways in which their interest in the land can most effectively be communicated to external groups which have constructed well-formed, but often distorted images of what constitutes a genuine Aboriginal interest in the land These externally constructed notions of Aboriginality and what constitutes a valid land claim are influencing the concepts used by Aboriginal groups in the public political arena to demonstrate their unique interest in the land In this paper three examples of this process are explored- the emphasis of a specific gender model, the emphasis on spatially discrete sacred sites and the emphasis on the bounded tribal territory.     

Land Rights under Stress in Darfur: A Volatile Dynamic of the Conflict

Abstract

The aggravation of land rights over time in Darfur was a primary factor in the initiation of the conflict, and has emerged as a particularly dif?cult set of issues in the search for viable peace. While the prospect of being able to keep land acquired in course of the conflict was a primary factor in recruitment for the Janjaweed, it came on the heels of a set of changes in the environment, land use and population patterns, institutions, law and governance that produced a highly unwieldy and volatile land rights scenario. This article explores the role of land tenure in the Darfur conflict, examining the aggravation of rights, custom, and law over time, and then focusing on two of the primary war-related tenure problems currently facing Darfur — use of land rights as tools of belligerence, and the land dispossession — secondary occupation problem.     

The Assessment of Land Resources: Achievements and New Challenges

It is surprising that despite all the pleas and policies regarding the development of sustainable land use systems, there is still considerable ignorance regarding the nature and significance of land resources. This paper traces the development and achievements of land evaluation during the 20th century, with particular reference to soils. The most active period was between 1950 and around 1980 with the development of soil and land capability surveys, methodological advances initiated with the FAO Framework for Land Evaluation, and regional land resource assessments. Thus there were considerable achievements in land evaluation by the early 1980s, and subsequently there have been important advances in the subject through the application of GIS, spatial analysis, modelling and fuzzy set algebra. Since the late 1990s there has been a phenomenal rise in interest in soil quality assessment. Considerable debate has focussed on definition, and methods of assessment and monitoring. The latter part of this paper discusses the major challenges to the development and application of land evaluation. The inadequacy of much soil survey data in terms of variables, quality, spatial coverage and scale is emphasised. Also, there is a continuing need to highlight the centrality of land resource issues in any attempt to develop sustainable land use systems.     

Aquaculture A Critical Assessment of its Potential and Future

Abstract

Atonal compositions based on the 12-tone method devised by Arnold Schoenberg remain, in some cases a century after they were written, largely unpopular with music audiences. Research on the science of music cogni- tion may now offer some clues to why this is. Schoenberg’s method of atonal composition actively undermines some of the basic cognitive princi- ples that allow our brains to turn notes into music. Unless 12-tone music is granted other aids to cognition, it may thus fail to create a cognitively coherent auditory experience, but becomes a mere collection of sounds.     

Custom and the Courts: Ensuring Women's Rights to Land,Jharkhand, India

Based on field research in Dumka district, Jharkhand, this article examines the mechanisms through which women operationalize their rights to land. It questions the polarization of legitimation systems into statutory codes and customary practices, as operating independent of each other, and demonstrates the political and temporal situatedness of ‘law’, and the processes of hybridization that allow for the actualization of a legal right, by providing it social recognition and validity. The article explores the choice of different arenas by women for making their claims, with the choice of a particular arena depending not just on access and resource availability, but also on the women's social positionality.     

New Guinea Leadership as Ethnographic Analogy: A Critical Review

Increasingly, archaeologists are recognizing cultural anthropological work in New Guinea as an important source of ethnographic analogy for understanding the initial stages of cultural evolution. This article critically reviews the literature on leadership in contact-era New Guinea. It is intended as an introduction both to different theoretical interpretations of leadership, as these have developed from Marshal Sahlins's Big-man archetype to the present, and to the primary literature on the topic. It points to several implications for archaeological theory, identifies a number of problems in the ethnography and theory of contact-era New Guinea leadership, and concludes with a brief guide to deploying the ethnographic and theoretical literature.     

No Change for Thirty Years: The Renewed Question of Women's Land Rights in Rural China

Since the mid‐1990s, a new land‐use rights regime has gradually come into effect in China. It follows upon a series of earlier changes — land reform, collectivization and the first wave of contracting land to households — that paid attention to women's role in publicly recognized work and provided access to land. The new regime, which has gradually come into effect as previous (usually fifteen‐year) terms expired, authorizes an adjustment in land allocation which is then normally frozen for thirty years. An apparently inadvertent effect of this policy is not only the exclusion of young people from direct access to land for up to thirty years from birth, but the de facto separation of the majority of women who marry or remarry patrilocally from allocated land. ‘No change for thirty years’ (sanshi nian bu bian) has thus become the distinctive feature for women of China's current land‐use regime. The state has renounced its potential to reallocate land periodically and there is no indication that market mechanisms are filling, or are capable of filling, the void thereby created. This article examines local conceptions, responses and practices regarding land‐use rights and their transfer within this new framework, using field evidence from three upland agricultural communities in Chongqing and Sichuan (studied in 2003, 2004 and 2005), where land allocations were fixed in 1995, 1999 and 2001 respectively. The ethnographic findings are further explored in relation to contemporary research on gender and land rights.     

Orphans’ Land Rights in Post‐War Rwanda: The Problem of Guardianship

In 1994, the Rwandan civil war and genocide produced thousands of orphans. Alongside the war, the growing HIV/AIDS crisis in Rwanda has produced a current population of about 300,000 orphans — many of whom are compelled to head households. These orphans urgently require land use rights, but many find that their rights to their deceased parents’ customary land holdings are denied or restricted by their guardians and others. Despite the legal protections for children that are guaranteed within Rwanda's laws, the reality is that many guardians do not respect orphans’ land rights and few orphans have sufficient access to administrative and legal forums to assert and defend these rights. In contrast to most accounts in the literature that discuss more generally the issue of African orphans’ land rights in the context of adults’ land rights, this article focuses on specific cases in which Rwandan orphans independently pursued their land rights. Ultimately, the article concludes that in Rwanda — and elsewhere in Africa — government officials should re‐examine their ideas about guardianship and grant orphans urgent attention as individuals and as a special interest group.     

‘The Law is to Blame’: The Vulnerable Status of Common Property Rights in Sub‐Saharan Africa

The context of this article is the surge in large‐scale land acquisitions of African lands by local and foreign investors for commercial food, livestock, oil palm and carbon trading purposes. Involuntary loss of rural lands at scale is not new to Africa's majority rural poor, nor is it driven by a single factor. Historically inequitable land relations within communities, compounded by a century of capitalist transformation, take their toll. This study argues, however, that the weak legal status of communal rights is the most pernicious enabler in their demise, allowing governments to take undue liberties with their citizens’ lands, and particularly those which are unfarmed and by tradition held in common. While international acquiescence to abusive domestic law helps entrench the diminishment of majority land rights, the domestic laws themselves are principally at fault and necessarily the target for change. This legal vulnerability is explored here through an examination of more than twenty African land laws.     

More than Paradoxes to Offer: Feminist History as Critical Practice

Book reviewed in this article:
Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man By Joan Wallach Scott     

The Conflict over Property Rights during the Second World War: The Labour Party's Abandonment of Land Nationalization

The Second World War brought about a dramatic increase in supportfor land-use control in urban areas primarily as a result ofthe impact of the blitz on British cities. The wartime controversyover land reform reached a climax during the second half of1944 following the publication of the Government's Town andCountry Planning Bill and the White Paper on Control of Land-Use.Up until 1945 the Labour Party supported a policy of land nationalization,but this was not included in the manifesto for the 1945 GeneralElection. This article will argue that the Labour Party abandoneda policy of land nationalization not because it feared the creationof internal divisions or damaging its electoral chances (supportfor land nationalization was anyway running high in the opinionpolls), but that it was responding to pressure from Labour localgovernment for more immediate housing and town planning reform.     

Land,Law and Courts in India: Tracing Land Rights Debates through Processes of Judicial Decision Making

The pace of industrial and allied infrastructure development in India is encumbered by scarcity in the supply of land. As a result, the state in India has frequently resorted to expropriation of land through conversion of land away from its traditional uses and through displacement of communities. Consequently, land acquisition in the country is mired in disputes over human rights and environmental rights violations. In the face of continued political support for infrastructure‐led development in India, those who stand to lose their land have often resorted to judicial recourse for pressing their rights. This article draws on empirical evidence from court cases related to two urban development projects in the states of Karnataka and Kerala to examine how courts have responded to the question of violation of land rights and appeals against land acquisition for the two projects. The author argues that the courts, while responding to the claims against the two projects, have refrained from holding the implementing agencies or the state governments accountable even in cases where there were recognizable incidents of malfeasance. The article illustrates that the inability of the courts to confront the state lends a tacit assent to the development agenda of the state.