Post‐Conflict Ambon: Forced Migration and the Ethno‐Territorial Effects of Customary Tenure

In post‐conflict contexts characterized by large‐scale migration and increasing levels of legal pluralism, customary land tenure risks being deployed as a tool of ethno‐territorialization in which displaced communities are denied return and secure land rights. This thesis will be illustrated through a case study of the Indonesian island of Ambon where a recognition of customary tenure — also called adat — was initiated in 2005 at the end of a high‐intensity conflict between Christians and Muslims. Although a system of land tenure providing multiple forms of social security for the indigenous in‐group, adat in Ambon also constitutes an arena of power in which populations considered as non‐indigenous to a fixed historical territory are pushed into an inferior legal position. The legal registration of customary tenure therefore tends to be deployed to settle long‐standing land contests with a growing migrant community, hereby legally enforcing some of the forced expulsions that were brought about by the recent communal violence.     

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.     

The Double Movement of Immovable Property Rights in Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is one of many countries around the world where the relationship between customary land tenure and economic development has been hotly debated for a long time. A commonplace of the debate in PNG is that 97% of the nation's land is held under customary tenure, while only 3% has been alienated, and these proportions have not changed since the country became independent in 1975. This paper shows that the boundary between customary and alienated forms of land or immovable property was already showing signs of instability in the late colonial period, and this instability has been greatly magnified in the post-colonial period. The areas of land subject to some form of partial alienation have increased along with the ways and means by which immovable property has been ‘mobilised’, while a variety of customary claims to previously alienated areas have grown stronger over the same period. Although Karl Polanyi's idea of a ‘double movement’ can throw some light on this phenomenon, the PNG case also reveals a new side to the application of this concept.     

Gendered frontiers of land control: indigenous territory,women and contests over land in Ecuador

Agricultural and rural land has become the site of considerable policy, governmental and scholarly concern worldwide because of violence and dispossession, food insecurity and contests over private property regimes. Such issues are highly gendered in territories with majorities of indigenous populations where overlapping legal regimes (statutory, multicultural, customary) and histories of dispossession have created complex spatialities and access patterns. States' formalization of indigenous rights, neoliberal restructuring and land appropriation are the backdrop to Ecuadorian women's struggles to access, retain and pass on land. Despite a burgeoning literature on Latin American indigenous territories, women are often invisible. Using collaborative research among two indigenous nationalities, the article analyses the political–economic, legal and de facto regimes shaping women's claims to land and indigenous territory. Focusing on Kichwa women in the rural Andes and Tsáchila women in a tropical export-oriented agricultural frontier area, the article examines the criteria and exclusionary practices that operate at multiple scales to shape women's (in)security in tenure. Women's struggles over claims to land and territory are also discussed. The article argues that Latin America's fraught land politics requires a gendered account of indigenous land–territoriality to unpack the cultural bias of western feminist accounts of multiculturalism and to document the racialized gender bias across socio-institutional relations.     

‘Best Practice’ Options for the Legal Recognition of Customary Tenure

Is there a ‘best practice’ model for the legal recognition of customary tenure? If not, is it possible to identify the circumstances in which a particular model would be most appropriate? This article considers these questions in the light of economic theories of property rights, particularly as illustrated by the World Bank's 2003 land policy report. While these theories have their flaws, the underlying concept of tenure security allows a typological framework for developing legal responses to customary tenure. In particular, this article suggests that the nature and degree of State legal intervention in a customary land system should be determined by reference to the nature and causes of any tenure insecurity. This hypothesis is discussed by reference to a wide variety of legal examples from Africa, Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific. The objective is not to suggest that law determines resource governance outcomes in pluralist normative environments, but to improve the quality of legal interventions in order to assist customary groups to negotiate better forms of tenure security and access to resources.     

Ruling by Record: The Meaning of Rights,Rules and Registration in an Andean Comunidad

This contribution looks at land property relations in a peasant community in the central highlands of Peru. Rather than using a rights‐based approach, the authors propose a ‘practice force field approach’ for their analysis of property relations under communal land tenure regimes. Their study combines qualitative ethnographic case studies with quantitative analysis of data on land distribution. In contrast to rights‐based approaches, this perspective understands the legal discourses that people draw upon to explain property relations as ‘justifying rule talk’ rather than the reflection of a system of property rights. It is shown how property relations are shaped in mediated interactive processes, where official rules, moral principles, shared histories and strategic games come together. The authors use this practice force field approach to study Usibamba, an Andean community that has developed a true disciplinary regime of communal governance based on control over land. The role of ‘rule talk’ and the function of elaborate local systems of land registration are examined in the context of the annual reallocation of communal land. Particular attention is paid to the performance of the president of the comunidad during this delicate process and his reflections on the course of events.     

Urban Land Restitution and the Struggle for Social Citizenship in South Africa

Reintegrating the city is a priority of social justice and development in many urban centres of the ‘South’ that bear the legacy of forced displacement. In South Africa, much of the land restitution programme has thus far focused on urban areas. In certain large cluster claims involving the transfer and development of significant tracts of well‐placed land, restitution has presented the prospect of altering landed property regimes in the heart of the city. The predominantly rural and economic emphasis in scholarship and policy debate on land reform in South Africa — which reflects historical trends in development studies — has led to a narrowed vision of what is at stake in urban land restitution. Complex interventions aimed at redressing urban spatial segregation can potentially alter the relationship between citizens, institutions and urban space in ways that expand the possibilities for social and political agency in sites that are strategically important for influencing the direction of change more broadly. A key, as yet unrealized, challenge is how to articulate such struggles for a ‘right to the city’ with efforts at redressing the spatialization of poverty on the urban periphery.     

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.     

Reciprocal Repossession: Property as Land in Urban Australia

Repossession of land by Indigenous people is commonly understood as a legal act that unfolds within the confines of state apparatuses. But for many Indigenous urbanites, legal repossession is both impossible and irrelevant due to their histories of dispossession and dislocation. Moreover, while land repossession in Australia is predominantly non‐urban, I demonstrate that land is also reclaimed within cities. Urban repossession of land, considered here as reciprocal rather than legal, challenges the model of private ownership by asserting a territorially transferable relationship to property as land. The order of property entrenches Indigenous people's dispossession by demanding immobility as precondition to ownership and rendering Indigenous urbanites all “too mobile”. Against this framing and the liquidation of their lands as capital, Indigenous people practice reciprocal forms of repossession that challenge both liberal and traditional meanings of ownership. This helps retrieve urban Indigenous subjectivities while compelling partial relinquishment of non‐Indigenous properties.     

Aquatic Identities,Fluid Economies: Water Affinities and Authenticating Narratives of Belonging in East Timorese Myth and Ritual

ABSTRACT Customary land tenure claims provide a useful analogy for customary access and usage rights to critical water resources. In an increasingly water‐constrained future, such rights are at risk of political and economic contestation and local communities may find themselves abruptly divested of critical water resources just when they need them most. The new nation of East Timor is not abundantly endowed with water and inland sources are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of reduced rainfall and groundwater contamination. Recently McWilliam (2003) has suggested that in future disputes over Timorese sea tenures, the recognition of customary access or exclusive property rights to specific water resources will depend upon clearly articulated evidence of longstanding cultural associations and interactions with the aquatic landscape. The ethnographic literature provides substantiating accounts of the centrality of water in the local cosmologies of various East Timorese ethnic groups. This paper extends McWilliam's marine argument to inland water resources by reviewing the salient ethnographic evidence for Bunaq, Mumbai and Eastern Tetum populations to show that water is a key organising metaphor in the expression of Timorese kingroup affiliation, social identity and power relations. Local ritual practices further affirm customary rights of access and water use. There is an urgent need for such customary rights to water to be recognized in the current redistribution and demarcation of internal boundaries in East Timor, as well as in future struggles against vested economic and political interests.     

Unravelling Church Land: Transformations in the Relations between Church,State and Community in Uganda

Christian churches control substantial areas of land in Africa. While intensifying struggles over their holdings are partly due to the increased pressure on land in general, they also reflect transformations in the relations through which churches’ claims to land are legitimized, the increased association of churches with business, and churches’ unique positioning as both institutions and communities. This article presents the trajectory of relations between church, state and community in Uganda from the missionary acquisition of land in the colonial era to the unravelling of church landholding under Museveni. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork, the authors argue that claims to church land in contemporary Uganda draw on: 1) notions of belonging to the land; 2) views about the nature of churches as communities; 3) discontent regarding whether customary land owners gave churches user rights or ownership; and 4) assessment of the churches’ success in ensuring that the land works for the common good. The article develops a novel approach to analysing the changing meaning of the landholdings of religious institutions, thus extending ongoing discussions about land, politics, development and religion in Africa.     

Communal Tenure and Rural Poverty: Land Transactions in Svosve Communal Area,Zimbabwe

The idea of communal tenure has formed a key plank in the rural governance of Zimbabwe since independence, but its retention following the Fast Track land reforms of 2000–2002 perpetuates a distinction between ‘commercial’ land governed by a land market and ‘communal’ land on which market transactions are illegal. This article draws on recent research in Svosve Communal Area to examine the dynamics of land access and their implications for rural poverty in Zimbabwe. The authors argue that, as in many other parts of Africa, access to land governed by customary authority in Svosve is increasingly commoditized via informal, or ‘vernacular’, sales or rental markets. In failing to acknowledge and address this commoditization of land, the ‘communitarian’ discourse of customary land rights that dominates the politics of land in Zimbabwe — as elsewhere in much of Africa — undermines, rather than protects, the livelihoods of the rural poor.     

Partnerships for Social Change in the Canadian North: Revisiting the Insider–Outsider Dialectic

In the two decades since Alexander Lockhart's seminal article on the insider–outsider dialectic in native socioeconomic development, a great deal of change has occurred in the Canadian North and new challenges have emerged for community‐based participatory research and development. This is particularly the case in the Northwest Territories, where Aboriginal communities are facing for the first time the triple challenges of Aboriginal land claims implementation, Aboriginal self‐government, and a boom in mining and petroleum development. Increasingly, participatory methods in research and community development are being co‐opted to serve state or corporate interests, far from their radical origins in movements for social change. A historical analysis is called for that accounts for the contradictory and contested social contexts in which participatory activities are imbedded. This article suggests that a return to the roots of the participatory method requires the creation of a new autonomous space of resistance. The academic outsider is uniquely positioned to facilitate critical interventions in both community and university contexts. The resulting convergence of critical outsider and insider has great potential in the forging of new knowledge that can contribute to self‐determination beyond the bounds of the state.     

RE‐INVENTING TRADITIONAL LAND TENURE IN THE ERA OF LAND COMMODITIZATION: SOME CONSEQUENCES IN PERIURBAN NORTHERN GHANA

In northern Ghana periurban areas are encroaching on rural areas and agricultural land ends up being sold for residential purposes mainly by chiefs and “earth” priests. The changing customary land tenure systems have generated a state of uncertainty and tension as the title and responsibilities of titleholders are subject to the interpretation by those who administer custom. Increasing commodification is taking place that benefits an emerging political‐traditional and economic elite. The centralized systems restrict the benefits of the commoditization process mainly to chiefs and their collaborators, whiles acephalous systems allow more space for objections and struggles by those whose land is expropriated. Neoliberal development policies have shaped the commodification of land and entrenched existing socio‐economic inequalities that marginalize the poor who are unable to seize the opportunities of the emerging urban economy.     

The Discourse that Silences: Beneficiaries' Ambivalence Towards Redistributive Land Reform in the Philippines

This article argues that the persistence of non-capitalist dimensions within land relations in the Philippines is basic to rural livelihood strategies, and has been a major but widely-neglected factor in the failure of land reform programmes. Addressing the issue of non-capitalist relationships brings into focus the indigenous or ‘customary’ land tenure relationships that exist in lowland land tenure arrangements, with the result that the conventional dichotomy between lowland and upland ‘cultural minority’ land relations becomes spurious. The article offers some suggestions as to why, for the major part of this century, the indigenous norms of lowlanders have been overlooked, with a discussion which links up to issues of national identity and nation building.     

Environment, race and nation reconsidered: reflections on Aboriginal land claims in Canada

The course of development in Northern Canada has been transformed in the last 30 years by the comprehensive land claims process. For much of the twentieth century, the settlement and development of northern Canada was experienced by Aboriginal people as a continuing process of encroachment on (and sometimes transformation of) their traditional territories, and of restriction of their customary livelihood. Examples of this process included the alteration of river systems by impoundment and diversion, the pollution and contamination of river systems, government restrictions on hunting and fishing and population relocation and sedentarization. Aboriginal political and legal action led, in the 1970s, to the establishment of a formal process for resolving Aboriginal land claims, and to revised judicial interpretation of Aboriginal and treaty rights. The paper describes how geographers have contributed to documenting those claims, and how land claims settlements have altered the land and resource regimes in northern Canada, and concludes with some observations on the effectiveness of those remedies, and on the changes in Canadian perspectives on Aboriginal northerners, the northern environment and northern development .     

Vulnerability,Control and Oil Palm in Sarawak: Globalization and a New Era?

In the post logging era, Sarawak is being restructured to make way for large‐scale oil palm plantations. In this restructuring, the vulnerabilities of particular areas are being used in a wider battle to control production, particularly for export. Native customary lands, considered ‘unproductive’ or ‘idle’ by officials, are the target of oil palm plantation development under a new land development programme called Konsep Baru (New Concept). This article looks at the contradictions generated by the complex process of laying claims to ‘idle’ native customary land and focuses on Dayak organizing initiatives in northern Sarawak, Malaysia.     

Land Tenure Insecurity and Inequality in Nicaragua

This article uses empirical data from a case study in rural Nicaragua to demonstrate the need for a conceptualization of tenure security as seen from the perspective of the landholder. A large group of farmers in the case study area perceive their tenure situation as being insecure despite the fact that they possess a legal title to their land. The article argues that more attention must be paid to aspects such as inequalities of wealth and power, lack of enforcement and lack of impartiality on the part of the formal institutions when addressing tenure security in an institutionally unstable setting, such as that found in Nicaragua. The article contributes to the ongoing discussion by arguing that future research on how to increase rural land tenure security should explore the concept of tenure security as experienced by farmers.     

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.     

Land Tenure, Archaeology, and the Ancestral Pueblo Social Landscape

Archaeology relies upon evidence of past human modification of the natural landscape in order to infer past human social dynamics on the site, local, and regional levels. Given the inferential linkages between past landscape use and social relationships, archaeology can benefit from an approach that more explicitly delineates relationships between systems of land use and land tenure, the social means through which people define and assert land use rights. This research outlines a set of methods for modeling prehistoric land tenure systems and developing a middle range theory of land tenure relationships that may assist archaeologists in their investigations of prehistoric resource access systems. Land tenure systems are complex risk-buffering strategies that are conditioned by the labor invested in food production, the size of groups holding direct access to productive lands and resources, and the temporal duration of land access rights. The role of these variables is supported by cross-cultural data from a worldwide sample of food-producing societies. The land tenure model is applied to data from the prehistoric Southwest to help explain local and regional changes in food production, settlement size, and community organization in southwest Colorado between 900 and 1300 A.D.