Scaling up Civil Society: Donor Money,NGOs and the Pastoralist Land Rights Movement in Tanzania

Tanzania's pastoralist land rights movement began with local resistance to the alienation of traditional grazing lands in Maasai and Barabaig communities. While these community–based social movements were conducted through institutions and relationships that local people knew and understood, they were not co–ordinated in a comprehensive fashion and their initial effectiveness was limited. With the advent of liberalization in the mid–1980s, they began to gain institutional legitimacy through the registration of pastoralist Non–Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Registered NGOs provided community leaders with a formal mechanism for co–ordinating local land movements and for advocating for land rights at the international level. The connections of pastoralist NGOs to disenfranchised communities, and their incorporation of traditional cultural institutions into modern institutional structures, resonated with the desires of international donors to support civil society and to create an effective public sphere in Tanzania, making these NGOs an attractive focus for donor funding. In spite of their good intentions, however, donors frequently overlooked the institutional impacts of their assistance on the pastoralist land rights movement and the formation of civil society in pastoralist communities. NGO leaders have become less accountable to their constituent communities, and the movement itself has lost momentum as its energies have been diverted into activities that can be justified in donor funding reports. A political movement geared towards specific outcomes has been transformed into group of apolitical institutions geared toward the process of donor funding cycles.     

Optimal Allocation of Land between Productive Use and Recreational Use

Abstract This paper is an inquiry into the optimal allocation of time and natural areas to recreational uses, which have the feature of being a pure and continuous public good. We address this issue with a comprehensive approach. A static rational general equilibrium framework is developed in which heterogeneous agents allocate land and time endowments between alternative uses. This modeling has important advantages. First, Pareto‐optimal and voluntary‐contribution equilibrium allocations are obtained in a unified set‐up. Second, the suboptimality result of the decentralized equilibrium, the free‐rider problem on the provision of this nonexcludable public good, and different mechanisms to return the economy to its first‐best are analyzed. Finally, a methodological critique is made of some empirical literature, and it is suggested that our theoretical microeconomic‐based structure seems to be a suitable starting point for empirical research.     

Rethinking Overdetermination, Structural Power, and Social Change: A Critique of Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff

Working in the wake of theoretical tendencies that became prominent within geography during the 1980s, many studies of resistance have either bracketed or ignored structural power, with some versions of poststructuralism simply denying that structural power is a useful concept in a world where power is putatively highly fluid and dispersed. These sorts of approaches, exemplified by the recent works of J K Gibson-Graham, Stephen A Resnick, and Richard D Wolff (GGRW), limit the ability of studies of resistance to articulate the conditions under which political and social struggles might transcend resistance and succeed in liberating groups of humans from the oppressive conditions against which they struggle. In this paper, I discuss issues surrounding analysis of structural power in the wake of poststructuralist critiques of "structural Marxism," presenting an alternative to GGRW's interpretation of Louis Althusser's concept of "overdetermination." Overdetermination is a crucial concept, because it is rightly seen as the key to a noneconomistic Marxism and has been championed as such by GGRW. I re-examine the roots of Althusser's concept in the writings of Lenin and Mao, arguing for a way of reading overdetermination that is both noneconomistic and compatible with a notion of structural power.     

From golden hills to sycamore trees: pastoral homelands and ethnic identity in Irish immigrant fiction, 1860–75

The prose fiction that remembers the trials of starvation and eviction of the Great Famine (1845–50) often juxtaposes representations of blasted, infertile land with images of a green, idyllic Erin. Through a discussion of Mary Anne Sadlier's Bessy Conway (1861), Elizabeth Hely Walshe's Golden Hills: A Tale of the Irish Famine (1865) and John McElgun's Annie Reilly (1873), this article reveals that immigrant writers of the Famine generation often negotiate depictions of Famine-stricken wasteland with evocations of a pastoral homeland. In the case of the two Catholic novels, Bessy Conway and Annie Reilly, the pastoral becomes a point of ethnic identification through which the immigrants can recollect and reconstruct a sense of Irishness in exile. By contrast, Golden Hills, which focuses on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, does not lament the mass exodus of afflicted Irish: the novel rather envisions emigration as a way to regenerate Ireland as locus amoenus.     

Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa

This article, which forms the introduction to a collection of studies, focuses on processes of state construction and deconstruction in contemporary Africa. Its objective is to better understand how local, national and transnational actors forge and remake the state through processes of negotiation, contestation and bricolage. Following a critique of the predominant state failure literature and its normative and analytical shortcomings, the authors identify four key arguments of the scholarly literature on the state in Africa, which concern the historicity of the state in Africa, the embeddedness of bureaucratic organizations in society, the symbolic and material dimensions of statehood and the importance of legitimacy. A heuristic framework entitled ‘negotiating statehood’ is proposed, referring to the dynamic and partly undetermined processes of state formation and failure by a multitude of social actors who compete over the institutionalization of power relations. The article then operationalizes this framework in three sections that partly conceptualize, partly illustrate who negotiates statehood in contemporary Africa (actors, resources and repertoires); where these negotiation processes occur (negotiation arenas and tables); and what these processes are all about (objects of negotiation). Empirical examples drawn from a variety of political contexts across the African continent illustrate these propositions.