| Abstract: | At West Nggela, access to high value marine invertebrate stocks is controlled by consanguineal corporate groups holding primary rights (which include rights of exclusion) over reefs bearing these stocks. Disputes over primary rights appear to result in a breakdown in management practices, resulting in overfishing and severe depletion of stocks. An understanding of the common causes of disputes is therefore of considerable importance to marine resource management, and development, in this region. This paper outlines first the essential, or ‘ideal’, processes of descent reckoning and property transfer that underpin the Customary Marine Tenure (CMT) system at West Nggela as they are presented to ‘outsiders’ such as government officials and anthropologists. It then deals with some of the many exceptions to this norm, and the ways these variations can contribute to disputes over primary rights to property. The pressures of economic development, and the resultant commodification of resources and property, in our view catalyse the conflict between the ideal, simplified model and the complexity of actual praxis in respect to property rights. Recent dramatic increases in the perceived value of many properties as a result of proposed lucrative developments may underlie present day conflicts which in the past would not have arisen. Examples are drawn from interview data as well as case studies of two formal property disputes which were heard in local courts at West Nggela in 1995. |
