PERSPECTIVES ON THE SAGEBRUSH REBELLION

The Sagebrush Rebellion began in the late 1970s with the objective of transferring various categories of federally owned lands to the states. The movement was centered in western “public lands” states, where nearly half the total land area is in federal ownership. Within a relatively short period of time this objective was changed to one of “privatizing” federal lands, of selling these land into private ownership. While the Sagebrush Rebellion has been highly political in its activities, the movement can be viewed in the perspective of historical land disposition policies in the U.S. These policies were changed near the turn of the century from alienating public lands into private ownership to their retention and management by the federal government. Confusion over the economics of building a free enterprise system based on private property rights, and the costs associated with building such as system, appear to have been major factors in changing land policies. Two important aras in which this occurred were the Homestead Act of 1862 and timber. The provisions of the Homestead Act imposed heavy costs on settlers, and these costs caused a reaction against the economic system that was being built.     

‘We Live Like This’: Local Inequalities and Disproportionate Risk in the Context of Extractive Development and Climate Change on New Hanover Island,Papua New Guinea

This study examines the local processes, effects, and responses to large‐scale logging and agricultural development efforts in subsistence communities on New Hanover Island, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Recently, New Hanover became the site of three special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover approximately 79% of the island. The proliferation of SABLs within PNG is an outcome of recent national development initiatives promoting a significant increase in the production of commercial agricultural crops such as oil palm and biofuel. Accordingly, SABLs are designed to facilitate the development of long‐term commercial agricultural industries in rural locations across the country through the conversion of forested lands and the simplification of communal land tenure, for the purposes of private lease. However, SABLs have simultaneously provided a convenient loophole around more restrictive national forestry policies and thereby become attractive to traditional logging interests in the Asian/Pacific region. Consequently, many SABLs across PNG have failed to produce viable agricultural development or broad local benefit. It is within this context, that this study pays particular attention to the experiences of women and lower‐status landowners living through the processes of SABL conversion, during the El Nino drought of 2015. The study details the statuses and roles of these groups within the overall development process, the ways in which their social relationships changed in the context of development, why these groups were particularly vulnerable to the broad livelihood effects of forest conversion and drought, how they adapted to these effects, and what their hopes were regarding the future of the development project and life on the island. This study adds to current theoretical interests on emerging neoliberal frontiers of land and resource control by examining these SABL landscapes on New Hanover as contemporary examples of land grabs and documenting the very real local level consequences of this phenomenon. The study is also particularly significant in light of the growing threats to forests and forest‐dependent livelihoods and the recognition of the importance of local forest practices to global sustainability.     

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

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

Unpacking the ‘Emergent Farmer’ Concept in Agrarian Reform: Evidence from Livestock Farmers in South Africa

South Africa has historically perpetuated a dual system of freehold commercial and communal subsistence farming. To bridge these extremes, agrarian reform policies have encouraged the creation of a class of ‘emergent’, commercially oriented farmers. However, these policies consider ‘emergent’ farmers as a homogeneous group of land reform beneficiaries, with limited appreciation of the class differences between them, and do little to support the rise of a ‘middle’ group of producers able to bridge that gap. This article uses a case study of livestock farmers in Eastern Cape Province to critique the ‘emergent farmer’ concept. The authors identify three broad categories of farmers within the emergent livestock sector: a large group who, despite having accessed private farms, remain effectively subsistence farmers; a smaller group of small/medium‐scale commercial producers who have communal farming origins and most closely approximate to ‘emergent’ farmers; and an elite group of large‐scale, fully commercialized farmers, whose emergence has been facilitated primarily by access to capital and a desire to invest in alternative business ventures. On this basis the authors suggest that current agrarian reform policies need considerable refocusing if they are to effectively facilitate the emergence of a ‘middle’ group of smallholder commercial farmers from communal systems.     

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Deuteronomy and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Abstract

Deuteronomy portrays itself as Moses's speech at the edge of the promised land. This article examines the book's attitudes towards the other within this rhetorical setting by concentrating on the indigenous peoples, also in contrast to those outside the land of Israel. It is pointed out that the ideology of Deuteronomy is very exclusive, and its treatment of indigenous peoples compatible with ideologies that accompany genocides and conquests. Mitigating such exclusive thinking can serve as a model for human interactions today, and this would also seem to be compatible with the overall thinking of the New Testament canonical documents.     

British Imperialism and Cyprus 1878–1914: The Inconsequential Possession

In recent decades historians have devoted considerable attention to the historical treatment of indigenous title in Anglophone settler colonies. These scholarly accounts have tended to emphasise the role metropolitan legal and intellectual discourses played in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. In this article I present a critical analysis of an influential example of such work in respect to the British denial of Aboriginal rights in land in the colony of New South Wales before providing an alternative account of the manner in which Aboriginal title was treated, which focuses on the nature of the relations on the ground between sojourners, settlers and Aboriginal people, the ways in which these encounters were represented by the British and the local practices regarding the transfer of land.     

The Second Time as Farce: Archaeological Reflections on the New New Deal

Many connections have been made between the Great Depression and the current crisis in neoliberal capitalism, and many solutions proposed by the Left hearken to FDR’s New Deal programs. While New Deal policies had real benefits, assuming that they were uniformly beneficial to all lower class individuals is shortsighted. This is clear from the vantage point of our research in the Finger Lakes National Forest. The New Deal’s Resettlement Administration purchased these farms when implementing land-planning policies to move farmers off “sub-marginal” land to save families “stranded on sub-marginal farms.” Our research demonstrates that governmental land-use programs saved some farms by sacrificing others. This case makes it clear that solving current crises need more than nostalgic yearning for a mythic past. Solutions must come from a thorough examination of the “real concrete” past, not simply the past as imagined.     

WHOSE WOODS ARE THESE? COUNTER-MAPPING FOREST TERRITORIES IN KALIMANTAN,INDONESIA

This paper examines the politics of land and forest rights in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). Forest mapping by government forestry planners allocates rights of resource use and land access according to forest types and economic objectives, only rarely recognizing indigenous occupancy rights or forest territories customarily claimed or managed by local people. As maps and official plans based on them ignore, and in some cases criminalize, traditional rights to forest, forest products, and forest land for temporary conversion to swidden agriculture, indigenous activists are using sketch maps to re-claim territories - a process that requires re-defining many traditional forest rights. The paper considers the political implications of mapping and the implications of a focus on land use rather than forest use.     

Rule of Law Expedited: Land Title Reform and Justice in Burma (Myanmar)

Abstract

The development of rule of law is touted as one of the most important considerations in Burma (Myanmar) today, yet its meaning is highly contested after fifty years of military rule. This paper will examine how the rule of law in Burma’s transitional political environment has been influenced by the legacies of military rule and the government’s development policies since 2011. A series of laws introduced by the Thein Sein government under the rubric of rule of law and good governance had a significant impact upon small hold farmers across the country. While some laws specifically related to farmers and their land, others encouraged private investment in the land used by farmers. The combined effect of these laws was to formalise the pattern of land grabbing that had developed under the previous government and to encourage land speculation. Moreover, they show how an expedited procedural rule of law incited conflict and further injustice. Any progress towards substantive justice and a more democratic rule of law must keep pace with improvements in the country’s limited administrative and judicial capacities. Whether, and how far, Burma can develop and move beyond a thin or procedural rule of law will be tested as the country experiences life under the NLD government.     

Women’s gender role attitudes and fertility intentions of having a second child: survey findings from Shaanxi Province of China

China is a country with a unique history of gender traditions and birth-control regulations. Traditional gender role attitudes, closely related to son preference, exert entrenched influence on the fertility intentions and behaviours of women in China. In recent years, despite the fact that employment characteristics and educational attainment of women have caught up with men, China has witnessed a resurgence of patriarchal Confucian tradition. Gender relations in the private sphere are increasingly regulated by traditional gender norms. Considering the declining fertility in China and recent fertility policy adjustments, this paper analyses the varying effects of gender role attitudes on fertility intentions of women under different birth control policies, utilising data from 1,422 questionnaires conducted in 2015 in the Shaanxi Province in northwestern China and using the Multinomial Logistic Model. Our findings imply that the relationship between women’s gender role attitudes and fertility intention differs between women affected by different birth control policies. We find that among married women with one child who are restricted to one child, the more egalitarian the gender role attitude, the more likely they intend to have a second child. Among married women who have had one child and are allowed to have two children, the more egalitarian the gender role attitude, the less likely they intend to have a second child. The results also indicate that traditional gender role attitudes and norms still play an important role in Chinese women’s fertility intentions.     

Pastoralism and politics: reinterpreting contests for territory in Auckland Province, New Zealand, 1853–1864

As colonial frontiers expanded in the nineteenth century, contests over access to land suitable for farming between pastoralists, small farmers and indigenous populations were the inevitable result. In colonial Auckland, this contest was particularly vigorous, firstly because the young settlement's economic survival was at stake, since environmental constraints largely prevented its participation in the lucrative New Zealand wool industry, and secondly, because the economic and military prowess of indigenous Maori meant that settlers had little room to move in. Auckland's wealthy pastoralists pinned their hopes on the occupation of Maori land to the south of Auckland, since this was more suitable for sheep than the settlement's immediate environs, but this required dispossessing the Maori population by force. Initially, this obstacle gave small farmers a political advantage over the pastoralists, but as firstly arable markets, and then plans for small farmers and Maori to rear sheep themselves, all faltered, the pastoralist cause became increasingly difficult for colonial authorities to resist. When these authorities finally turned against the Maori communities south of Auckland, and launched an imperial war against them, the pastoralists successfully lobbied for the lands they most coveted to be confiscated from Maori, an event that radically altered New Zealand's future economic geography.     

Sustainable management of metallurgical forest on Mont Lozère (France) during the Early Middle Ages

Mont Lozère, located in the French Massif Central region, provides an exceptional context in which to research the impact that charcoal production and metallurgy had on woodlands, along with the role that these activities played in changing the mountain landscape. This study provides an insight into the land use, forest management methods and metallurgical practices in the area during the Middle Ages (11th to 15th centuries). Medieval charcoal burning platforms, archaeological remains that have often been neglected in the past as a source of historical information, along with nearby smelting sites, were identified, sampled and analysed. In this paper, spatial analyses, radiocarbon dating and anthracological and dendro-anthracological studies have been combined in a unique manner. The results reveal that charcoal burners practiced beech coppicing, where the species and diameter of wood used remained the same over a period of four centuries. It is proposed that this form of metallurgical forest management be considered an early example of a sustainable utilisation of natural resources.     

Relational Economies,Social Embeddedness and Valuing Labour in Agrarian Change: An Example from the Developing World

A relatively neglected area of research on agrarian and economic change is the role of indigenous concepts of labour value in the transition from subsistence to market production. In West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea, the presence of a migrant population on an oil palm land settlement scheme (LSS) in close proximity to village‐based oil palm growers, provided an opportunity to examine changing notions of labour value through the lens of smallholder productivity. Voluntary settlers on the LSS are experiencing population pressure and are highly dependent on oil palm for their livelihoods. In contrast, customary landowners in village settings produce oil palm in a situation of relative land abundance. By examining differences in how these two groups practise and value commodity production, the paper makes four key points. First, concepts of labour value are not static and involve struggles over how labour value is defined. Second, the transition to market‐based notions of labour value can undermine labour's social value with a consequent weakening of social relationships within and between families. Third, Theories of Value developed in western contexts and used to frame development policies and projects in the developing world are often inappropriate and even harmful to the welfare of communities that have different registers of value. Fourth, in response to Point 3, and following Rigg (2007), there is a need for ‘theorising upwards’ using empirical data from the developing world to inform theory rather than applying to the developing world models of sociality and economy developed in western contexts.     

Land Policy and Farming Practices in Laos

The government of Laos has identified the eradication of poverty as a priority. Given the primarily agricultural character of the country, it has selected land reform as a core policy to reach this goal. The policy has two major aims: to increase land tenure security in order to encourage farmer involvement in intensive farming, and to eliminate slash‐and‐burn agriculture to protect the environment in a country still rich in forest resources. State intervention takes the form of land allocation, a process which combines the protection of some areas of village land with the formal recognition of private ownership in authorized farming areas. In a country with different types of geography, the effects of the policy are variable, but the research presented in this article demonstrates that the land laws have shortcomings which allow for differing interpretations depending on the local social relationships. Since local specificities are not taken into account, the reform is proving counterproductive for both forest protection and agricultural modernization, as well as having a negative social impact by marginalizing the poorest farmers.     

The Wrong Terms of Reference

Abstract

Agriculture in Alaska is beginning to expand. The approach used to facilitate this expansion may serve as an example for other regions where the pressure for development stems from public interest groups. Alaskan agricultural development is tied to the disposal of government-owned land. If agriculture is to develop according to the United States farm production model, then large quantities of agricultural land must be sold to private citizens. Past federal policy in Alaska has not led to this outcome and thus the present-day development efforts spring from state government leadership. This has led to the recent undertaking of three state agricultural projects which have in common low cost land, low cost financing, and planning by people trained in agricultural disciplines. The pivotal aspect of agricultural development efforts in the state of Alaska is the successful transfer of research and technology to private sector farmers. If this can be accomplished, then Alaskan agriculture is likely to flourish.     

KHAT EXPANSION AND FOREST DECLINE IN WONDO GENET, ETHIOPIA

This study analyses the expansion of khat production in relation to forest decline in the Wondo Genet area in south-central Ethiopia. By assessing spatial variables and social factors, and using remote sensing and social survey techniques, the extent to which this new cash crop contributes to deforestation is explored.
The results indicate that khat has expanded rapidly in terms of land area used for its production at forest frontiers, in isolated forest patches and within farmland since the mid-1980s. This is mainly due to high economic advantage, high market demand and favourable means of transport as well as the existence of a cohesive trade network. Moreover, the properties of the crop also facilitate expansion. The increased production of khat appears to be a result of conscious choice and rational decisions made by male farmers, regardless of religious, cultural and policy discouragement and despite khat's possible negative impact on livelihood security.
Although it is found that khat expansion does not explain forest decline in the study area per se, it plays an important role in enhancing multifaceted interaction between people and forest. The expansion influences forest decline directly by conversion, and indirectly through increased human activity in proximity to forests. The conversion has resulted in a reduction of forest area, resilience and regeneration. Khat production has changed human settlement patterns, suppressed production of other crops and influenced women's income negatively. These aspects increase the demand for wood and it renders the forest an important source of supplementary incomes. Khat production may create tension, resulting from a conflict in interest between sustaining the native forests, with subsequent environmental benefits for the larger social group, and the economically driven choice land use made by khat farmers.     

Timber and Town: Post-War Federal Forest Policy, Industrial Organization, and Rural Change in Oregon's Illinois Valley

In the recent political furor over disposition of the remaining old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, focus has been directed at the ecological shortcomings of the federal sustained yield forest management doctrine. This has occurred in part at the expense of evaluation of these policies based on social criteria. Yet the sustained yield paradigm and the post-war compact between private capital and federal forest agencies were justified in part to foster stable rural timber economies. Nowhere has this compact been more significant than in rural Oregon. And yet nowhere are its failings more apparent. The central argument of this paper is that the failure of federal sustained yield policies to sustain rural communities stems from an implicitly naive model of industrial capitalism. By ignoring the inherently destabilizing character of capitalist industry, by further failing to refine the notion of community stability, and by failing to take genuine steps to defend rural society from the upheavals of industrial change, the United States Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have allowed community stability to languish in the dogged pursuit of accelerated cutting rates. This paper explores industrial change in Oregon's forest products sector in the post-war era of federal sustained yield management, looking specifically at southwest Oregon's Illinois Valley.     

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.     

‘Vague Native Rights to Land’: British Imperial Policy on Native Title and Custom in New Zealand, 1837–53

What is often referred to as a common law doctrine of aboriginal or customary title neither underpinned imperial policies towards Māori property rights in the 1830s and 1840s nor was it viewed as a settled or broadly accepted legal doctrine. Rather, critics of imperial policies applying to New Zealand deployed these legal sources in order to challenge and influence the workings of imperial policy on British settlement within New Zealand. The particular emphasis of such policy was on disciplining the extent of such settlement and providing a land fund from crown grants. Imperial policy-makers did not endorse these legal sources despite their use in the decision of the New Zealand Supreme Court in Regina v Symonds (1847). In this context, there was no consensual legal view or approach as to the nature or content of indigenous property rights. Ultimately, in the face of disagreement, diverse views of the nature and extent of Māori property rights persisted. The perceived non-justiciability of such rights meant that political spaces rather than the courts were of ongoing significance to characterising and debating such rights.     

Chinese capitalism at the crossroads?

China's 30 years of reform are often presented as a seamless progression towards greater liberalization and opening up. This review article of Yasheng Huang's Capitalism with Chinese characteristics shows how the author makes a compelling argument about how radically China's economic reforms changed from before and after the Tiananmen Square incident in June 1989. The 1980s saw the pro-rural, largely equitable, and generally liberal economic policies, with a private sector able to find sources of capital from family or relationship networks, and the creation of a very flexible and largely unplanned town and village enterprise system across China. From the 1990s, however, China has been dominated by pro-urban, less equitable and much more heavily state-led economic policies. Shanghai exemplifies this, with a highly circumscribed non-state sector, stagnation of per capita GDP growth in favour of company growth, and the Pudong development area largely based on land grab, and disrespect for the private property rights of the former tenant farmers based there. China grapples with the legacy of this policy change in 1989 to this day, with an increasingly disenfranchised and impoverished rural population, and cities that are both unsustainable, but irrevocable.