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.     

Land as fictitious commodity: the continuing evolution of women's land rights in Uganda

In sub-Saharan Africa, colonial influences have altered traditional practices as a way to manage that which Polanyi labeled as ‘fictitious commodities’ of land, labor, and money. Land has now become a highly marketable commodity and an intrinsic part of the global economy. Over the past century, Uganda's land rights have evolved from communal rights to that of male-dominated, individual ownership practices that have excluded women. Despite constitutional provisions, which confer title of both a deceased husband's property rights and equal rights to property within a marriage to a wife, postcolonial patriarchal tradition prevails. This article examines historical changes in land rights in Uganda and discusses the impact of shifts in land rights from communal ownership to individual tenure, altering power structures and attempting to create marketable land title. The Ugandan women's movement's opposition to policies and implementation of laws that exclude women has been unable to facilitate the required changes in unbiased access to land rights, despite apparent victories in revisions to the letter of the law. Situated within contemporary interpretations of tradition and pressures of market demand, this article shows that women's access to landownership and use are restricted by misinterpretation of traditional law and a lack of enforcement of contemporary legal rights. To illustrate the impact of a lack of access to land, this article examines an empirical case study of widowed subsistence farmers in southern Uganda. Women in Uganda continue to lose ground, quite literally, decreasing the possibility of gender equity in terms of land.     

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.     

The Right to the City and Critical Reflections on China's Property Rights Activism

Wholesale clearance and eviction that typify China's urban development have often resulted in discontents among urban residents, giving rise to what critics refer to as property rights activism. This paper is an attempt to critically revisit the existing debates on the property rights activism in China. The paper refers to the perspective of the “right to the city” to examine whose rights count in China's urban development contexts and proposes a cross‐class alliance that engages both migrants and local citizens. The alliance itself will have substantial political implications, overcoming the limited level of rights awareness that mainly rests on distributional justice in China. The discussions are supported by an analysis of empirical data from the author's field research in Guangzhou, which examines how local and non‐local (migrant) residents view nail‐households resisting demolition and forced eviction.     

Real Estate FDI in Chinese Cities: Local Market Conditions and Regional Institutions

Two China-based geographers test the importance of market conditions and local institutions in determining the locational pattern of foreign direct investment in real estate development (FDIRE), a major component of China's urban growth since the 1980s. Using data from 35 major Chinese cities, they trace the diffusion of FDIRE from a concentration in China's major coastal cities in the late 1990s to a more dispersed pattern including large inland cities in 2008. In addition to investigating the general association between FDIRE, local market opportunities, and liberalized economies/more developed land markets, the authors assess differences in the locational behaviors of developers from Hong Kong-Taiwan-Macao and foreign countries. A concluding section explores the implications of FDIRE activity for the restructuring of China's urban system. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F210, L850, O180, R330. 3 figures, 7 tables, 35 references.     

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.     

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.     

The State and Financialization of Public Land in the United Kingdom

There exists an influential and growing political‐economic literature on the treatment of land—urban and rural—as a financial asset. But this literature pays little attention to the role of the state, beyond its obvious significance in the formalization of tradable property rights. In particular, the issue of the state's own land, i.e. public land, has been afforded scant scrutiny. Has the state, like other actors, increasingly come to treat the land it owns as a form of financial asset? And if so, how, and with what implications? This article addresses these questions by way of an empirical focus on the history of the UK public estate since the beginning of the 1980s.     

Information for Authors, 2001

The paper assesses the urban base for rapid economic development and urbanization projected for western China under the most recent central government policy of "grand development of the western region." It focuses on the socioeconomic characteristics, receptiveness to innovation, and linkages of western China's cities to the world, by utilizing data from government documents and census publications. The analysis reveals remarkable differences among the main urban nodes, raising questions about existing urban and regional development theory and practice in China. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O18, O20, R12. 2 figures, 7 tables, 33 references.     

John Locke on Native Right,Colonial Possession,and the Concept of Vacuum domicilium

The early paragraphs of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690) describe a poetic idyll of property acquisition widely supposed by contemporary theorists and historians to have cast the template for imperial possessions in the New World. This reading ignores the surprises lurking in Locke’s later chapters on conquest, usurpation, and tyranny, where he affirms that native rights to lands and possessions survive to succeeding generations. Locke warned his readers that this “will seem a strange doctrine, it being quite contrary to the practice of the world.” His doctrine of native right is equally strange to recent scholars who see in Lockean theory the ideological prototype for England’s colonial expropriation in the “vacant lands” of North America. This interpretation, dignified by the elusive principle of vacuum domicilium, is considerably weakened when Locke’s arguments are placed in the historical context of the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century English colonial experience. Locke’s Second Treatise, with its literary flourish of a vast and idyllic state of nature, was written in the full appreciation of Amerindian agriculture, its established populations, the acknowledgement of native property rights, and the policy and practice of purchasing land from the native inhabitants.     

From Idealism to Pragmatism: An Analysis of China's Policies toward the Middle East

After World War II, the Middle East stage attracted Beijing's attention. While Israel and China proved at that time to be too diverse, through the 1950s China made inroads with Arab countries. Egypt became the first to recognize the P.R.C., which, however, suffered rebuffs as anti-Communist forces generally prevailed in the Middle East. Beijing supported the people of Palestine. After the Soviet Union had become China's enemy, China tried to unite the Third World against the two superpowers. With Deng in 1978, China's Middle Eastern policy became more pragmatic, tilting toward the developed countries and economic cooperation rather than ideology (e.g., with Yemen). China enhanced relations with Gulf states; cooperated with the United States in supporting the Afghan mujahedin; and declared neutrality in the Iran-Iraq War, although economic alliance with Iran grew. The Gulf War affected Beijing's attitudes toward weapons technology and toward the United Nations and China's role in it. Israel is currently viewed as a channel for possible influence with the West. Overall, China's basic policy now is to watch and wait.     

The ‘Society’ at Bora Ceremonies: A Manifestation of a Body of Traditional Law and Custom in Aboriginal Australia relevant to Native Title Case Law

Anthropologists working on native title cases in Australia are commonly asked to identify the Aboriginal ‘society’ that holds the body of laws and customs that confer land ownership rights on certain groups of people. In this paper I investigate how the early documentation of bora initiation ceremonies is relevant to understanding contemporary Aboriginal societies and the normative laws and customs that give rise to rights and interests in land. The vast ethnographic oeuvre of R.H. Mathews (1841–1918) includes detailed documentation of bora gatherings, which allows the reconstruction of the wider social reaches of people's networks in the lower Darling Downs of eastern Australia, and can in turn be understood as the ‘society’ so often sought in current native title case law.     

How the other half live in modern China

China's economic development over the past decade has captured the world's imagination. But this has largely been an urban phenomenon. While the current Chinese government has lifted more people out of poverty than any other in history, there have still been a huge number of losers in the reform processes of the last three decades, many of whom are based in the countryside. Chen and Wu's study of the situation in the central province of Anhui for peasants raises some uncomfortable questions for anyone looking at the long‐term sustainability and stability of China's economic development.     

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.     

Está listo (Are you ready)? Gender,race and land registration in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve

Geographers and political ecologists are paying increased attention to the ways in which conservation policies disrupt indigenous customary tenure arrangements. However, much less attention is given to the particular ways protected area management shapes natural resource access for indigenous women. With this in mind, this article examines how a recently proposed state land project in Honduras, Catastro y Regularización, requires that Miskito residents individuate collective family lands in the interests of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘biodiversity protection’. In the debates that followed the project's announcement, Miskito women feared that such measures would erase their customary access to family lands. As the state's project seeks to re-order Reserve land, intra-Miskito struggles intensified among villagers. Such struggles are not only gendered but are shaped by longstanding processes of racialization in Honduras and the Mosquitia region. Drawing upon ethnographic research, I argue that Miskito women's subjectivity and rights to customary family holdings are informed by their ability to make ‘patriarchal bargains’ with Miskito men inside the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve. Such findings suggest that scholars and policy makers continue to reflect on the ways global conservation and sustainable development practices may undermine indigenous customary tenure securities, whether intentionally or not.     

Reassessing Human Geography in the Wake of China's Rise

A prominent human geographer, introducing a series of papers in a Eurasian Geography and Economics mini-symposium devoted to China's emergence, surveys the myriad global impacts of that country's rapid recent rise. The topics covered include the economic (i.e., rapid growth in the size of China's economy, preeminence as an exporter of manufactured goods, and role as a major natural resource consumer, overseas investor, and purchaser of U.S. debt obligations), the geopolitical (increasing involvement in international organizations, rising assertiveness in defense of territorial claims), and the environmental (e.g., carbon footprint, accelerated urbanization, dam building), as well as the implications of China's rise for the study of geography and development. He argues that assessment of the consequences of the country's emergence should not be based on simple extrapolation of present trends, but must take into account a number of looming questions relating to the competitiveness of China's manufacturing labor force (vis-à-vis other developing countries), capacity to innovate (as well as imitate), and transformative societal impacts of modernization and development.     

Classifying Like a State: Land Dispossession on Eastern Crete’s Contested Mountains

Despite the widespread attention to capital investments in land and property around the globe, the active re-regulating role of the neoliberal state in processes of “accumulation by dispossession” remains underexplored. Through an in-depth look at the dispossession of highly fragmented and loosely regulated private land for windfarm investments on Crete’s eastern corner, Sitia, this paper re-affirms the political nature of the forcible appropriation of land for large-scale investments; dissects the specific mechanisms in which the state dispossesses land on behalf of investors and promotes the forcible appropriation of land from below; and problematises the dialectic relationship of both rupture and continuity between crisis and inherited, path-dependent relations embedded in land. The transformation of Sitia’s loosely regulated, informal relations on land is made possible through the mobilisation of the state’s bureaucratic and normalising powers, which redefine the concept of forest and dispossess through classifying land as such.     

A China Paradox: Migrant Labor Shortage amidst Rural Labor Supply Abundance

A U.S. geographer and noted authority on China's urbanization seeks to explain the apparent paradox between reported recent shortages of migrant labor in cities in eastern China's export-oriented manufacturing belt and the abundant supply of labor in China's rural areas. He examines important socioeconomic contexts often overlooked in the debate over whether China has reached the Lewis turning point (when dual rural-urban labor markets begin to merge and a labor surplus economy is transformed into a full-employment economy), which make possible the existence of such shortages over the short term and in local areas. These include the special characteristics of China's export industrialization (e.g., preference for workers in the age category 16-30); its immense migrant labor force, constrained under the hukou system; the short-term impacts of China's economic stimulus program launched in early 2009 in the wake of the global economic crisis; and cycles in the global economy that support or impede export production.     

China's strategic partnership with Latin America: a fulcrum in China's rise

China has over the last two decades been committed to creating a strategic partnership with Latin American states by persistently extending its economic and political involvement in the continent. China's efforts in this regard reflect not only its desire to intensify its economic cooperation and political relations with nations in Latin America, but also its strategic goals of creating its own sphere of influence in the region and enhancing its ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power in order to elevate China's status at the systemic level. With access to Latin American markets, resources and investment destinations, China may sustain its economic and social progress that bases its long cherished dream of restoring its past glory of fuqiang (wealth and power) and rise as a global power capable of reshaping the current world system. The enormous economic benefits deriving from their economic cooperation and trade may persuade Latin American nations to accept the basic premise of China's economic strategy: that China's rise is not a threat, but an opportunity to gain wealth and prosperity. This will help China gain more ‘soft’ power in and leverage over its economic partners in Latin America, and thereby help it to rise in the global power hierarchy.     

The Chinese Hukou System at 50

A noted American authority on urbanization in China presents a retrospective analysis of China's hukou (household registration) system on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of its promulgation, reviewing the history of that system from a broad socio-political perspective. More specifically, the paper focuses on revealing trends in the development of the system over time and identifying many of its important ramifications for modern Chinese society, as well as on the impact of hukou on the country's industrialization, urbanization, and social and spatial stratification. The author argues that the hukou system now presents a major obstacle to China's quest to become a modern, first-world nation and global leader. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O180, O530, P200, R120. 2 figures, 3 tables, 111 references.