Land Tenure (land + tenure)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences

Terms modified by Land Tenure

  • land tenure security

  • Selected Abstracts


    EXPLORING THE CONNECTIONS: LAND TENURE, SOCIAL IDENTITIES, AND AGROBIODIVERSITY PRACTICES IN GHANA

    GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 2 2009
    Louis Awanyo
    ABSTRACT. This article employs qualitative and quantitative evidence from primary social research in Ghana to examine the link between land tenure security and social identities (of wealth/income and gender), and how they condition farmers' investments in practices that contribute to the rehabilitation of tree biodiversity (agrobiodiversity). Statistical analyses of the significance of the effects of farmers' de jure land tenure security regimes, and income and gender on agrobiodiversity practices were inconclusive. The conventional causation link between investments and more secure formal land tenure rights, for instance, was confirmed in investments in four out of eight agrobiodiversity practices. Testimonial-based evidence of farmers provided a clearer concept of land tenure security and an explanatory framework about the interacting and complex effects of income and gender on land tenure security. The theoretical and empirical argument developed from these testimonies portrays land tenure as embodying negotiated social processes, influenced by gender and income of individuals, whereby breadth of land rights, duration of rights over land, and assurance of rights are established, sustained, enhanced or changed through a variety of strategies to shape tenure security. These processes , tenure building and renewal processes , are critical because all farmers have lingering anxiety about land tenure rights, even among farmers with more secure formal rights. Investments are made in agrobiodiversity practices as a strategy to strengthen land tenure security and thereby minimize anxiety, leading to reverse causation effects between land tenure, social identities, and investments. [source]


    The Relationship of Land Tenure to Agricultural Practices and the Environment in El Salvador

    CULTURE, AGRICULTURE, FOOD & ENVIRONMENT, Issue 1 2000
    Samuel A. McReynolds
    First page of article [source]


    Land Tenure and Legal Pluralism in the Peace Process

    PEACE & CHANGE, Issue 3 2003
    Jon D. Unruh
    Land tenure has proven to be one of the most vexing issues in a peace process. The disintegration of land and property rights institutions during armed conflict yet the importance of land and property to the conduct of conflict present particular dilemmas for a peace process attempting to reconfigure aspects of societal relations important to recovery. In this regard understanding what happens to land tenure as a set of social relations during and subsequent to armed conflict is important to the derivation of useful tools for managing tenure issues in a peace process. This article examines the development of multiple, informal "normative orders" regarding land tenure during armed conflict and how these are brought together in problematic form in a peace process. While there can be significant development of tenurial legal pluralism during armed conflict, it is during a peace process that problems associated with different approaches to land claim, access, use, and disputing become especially acute, because an end to hostilities drives land issues to the fore for large numbers of people over a short time frame. [source]


    EXPLORING THE CONNECTIONS: LAND TENURE, SOCIAL IDENTITIES, AND AGROBIODIVERSITY PRACTICES IN GHANA

    GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 2 2009
    Louis Awanyo
    ABSTRACT. This article employs qualitative and quantitative evidence from primary social research in Ghana to examine the link between land tenure security and social identities (of wealth/income and gender), and how they condition farmers' investments in practices that contribute to the rehabilitation of tree biodiversity (agrobiodiversity). Statistical analyses of the significance of the effects of farmers' de jure land tenure security regimes, and income and gender on agrobiodiversity practices were inconclusive. The conventional causation link between investments and more secure formal land tenure rights, for instance, was confirmed in investments in four out of eight agrobiodiversity practices. Testimonial-based evidence of farmers provided a clearer concept of land tenure security and an explanatory framework about the interacting and complex effects of income and gender on land tenure security. The theoretical and empirical argument developed from these testimonies portrays land tenure as embodying negotiated social processes, influenced by gender and income of individuals, whereby breadth of land rights, duration of rights over land, and assurance of rights are established, sustained, enhanced or changed through a variety of strategies to shape tenure security. These processes , tenure building and renewal processes , are critical because all farmers have lingering anxiety about land tenure rights, even among farmers with more secure formal rights. Investments are made in agrobiodiversity practices as a strategy to strengthen land tenure security and thereby minimize anxiety, leading to reverse causation effects between land tenure, social identities, and investments. [source]


    Customary Law in Common Law Systems

    IDS BULLETIN, Issue 1 2001
    Gordon R. Woodman
    Summaries How can the idea of the ,rule of law' be made a reality for ordinary people in African countries where customary law still underpins popular experience of ,law as practice'? It is argued that the idea of law itself should include all non-state ,normative orders' that are known, acceptable and pre-determined, as well as state law. What is called customary law is often closer to observed social norms (practised law) than the state law imported by colonialism, and indeed evolves in line with social and economic change, particularly in the field of land tenure. Any notion of the rule of law must support the institutions of customary law. One problem, however, is that in any country there are many different bodies of customary law particular to different localities, regions, cultures. This diversity must be both researched and recognised. [source]


    Changing Patterns in Family Farming: The Case of the Pampa Region, Argentina

    JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE, Issue 3 2009
    CARLA GRAS
    In the past few decades, Argentine agriculture has been significantly reorganized. Changes include the marked growth of export production, the need for an increasing level of capital investment and technological incorporation into farms and the restructuring of public intervention. This paper examines the dynamics of farm exit and the adjustments made by capitalized family farmers in the Pampa region. We suggest transformations in family farms are the result of a substantial shift in their main characteristics which historically combined the use of family labour, a certain accumulation capacity and ownership status. In particular, we will discuss the different and changing patterns of farm operations and the adjustments made with respect to work and land tenure. [source]


    Land and Social Change in a Tanzanian Village 1: Kinyanambo, 1920s,1990

    JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE, Issue 3 2005
    Elizabeth Daley
    This article (in two parts) traces the historical development of land tenure in Kinyanambo village, Mufindi District, Tanzania. It suggests a gradual commoditization of land and the evolution of a predominantly individualized land market, processes influenced by the long-term commoditization of agriculture and social reproduction more generally. Local land tenure practices evolved more or less independently of national land tenure policy until 1974, when villagization altered the evolutionary path of local land tenure, marking a fundamental turning point in people's understandings of their land rights. Together with the simultaneous establishment of Mafinga town, it created conditions for the rapid and more spatially concentrated growth of the local population, for urbanization, and for associated changes in livelihoods, land use, and relations between people and land. As a result, and following the economic reforms of the current period of structural adjustment and liberalization, by 2000 Kinyanambo had a deep-rooted, widespread and socially legitimate market in land. [source]


    Expansion of human settlement in Kenya's Maasai Mara: what future for pastoralism and wildlife?

    JOURNAL OF BIOGEOGRAPHY, Issue 6 2004
    Richard H. Lamprey
    Abstract Aim, Wildlife and pastoral peoples have lived side-by-side in the Mara ecosystem of south-western Kenya for at least 2000 years. Recent changes in human population and landuse are jeopardizing this co-existence. The aim of the study is to determine the viability of pastoralism and wildlife conservation in Maasai ranches around the Maasai Mara National Reserve (MMNR). Location, A study area of 2250 km2 was selected in the northern part of the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem, encompassing group ranches adjoining the MMNR. Emphasis is placed on Koyake Group Ranch, a rangeland area owned by Maasai pastoralists, and one of Kenya's major wildlife tourism areas. Methods, Maasai settlement patterns, vegetation, livestock numbers and wildlife numbers were analysed over a 50-year period. Settlement distributions and vegetation changes were determined from aerial photography and aerial surveys of 1950, 1961, 1967, 1974, 1983 and 1999. Livestock and wildlife numbers were determined from re-analysis of systematic reconnaissance flights conducted by the Kenya Government from 1977 to 2000, and from ground counts in 2002. Corroborating data on livestock numbers were obtained from aerial photography of Maasai settlements in 2001. Trends in livestock were related to rainfall, and to vegetation production as indicated by the seasonal Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. With these data sets, per capita livestock holdings were determined for the period 1980,2000, a period of fluctuating rainfall and primary production. Results, For the first half of the twentieth century, the Mara was infested with tsetse-flies, and the Maasai were confined to the Lemek Valley area to the north of the MMNR. During the early 1960s, active tsetse-control measures by both government and the Maasai led to the destruction of woodlands across the Mara and the retreat of tsetse flies. The Maasai were then able to expand their settlement area south towards MMNR. Meanwhile, wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus) from the increasing Serengeti population began to spill into the Mara rangelands each dry season, leading to direct competition between livestock and wildlife. Group ranches were established in the area in 1970 to formalize land tenure for the Maasai. By the late 1980s, with rapid population growth, new settlement areas had been established at Talek and other parts adjacent to the MMNR. Over the period 1983,99, the number of Maasai bomas in Koyake has increased at 6.4% per annum (pa), and the human population at 4.4% pa. Over the same period, cattle numbers on Koyake varied from 20,000 to 45,000 (average 25,000), in relation to total rainfall received over the previous 2 years. The rangelands of the Mara cannot support a greater cattle population under current pastoral practices. Conclusions, With the rapid increase in human settlement in the Mara, and with imminent land privatization, it is probable that wildlife populations on Koyake will decline significantly in the next 3,5 years. Per capita livestock holdings on the ranch have now fallen to three livestock units/reference adult, well below minimum pastoral subsistence requirements. During the 1980s and 90s the Maasai diversified their livelihoods to generate revenues from tourism, small-scale agriculture and land-leases for mechanized cultivation. However, there is a massive imbalance in tourism incomes in favour of a small elite. In 1999 the membership of Koyake voted to subdivide the ranch into individual holdings. In 2003 the subdivision survey allocated plots of 60 ha average size to 1020 ranch members. This land privatization may result in increased cultivation and fencing, the exclusion of wildlife, and the decline of tourism as a revenue generator. This unique pastoral/wildlife system will shortly be lost unless land holdings can be managed to maintain the free movement of livestock and wildlife. [source]


    Productivity in Malagasy rice systems: wealth-differentiated constraints and priorities

    AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, Issue 2007
    Bart Minten
    rice productivity; poverty; technology adoption; Madagascar Abstract This study explores the constraints on agricultural productivity and priorities in boosting productivity in rice, the main staple in Madagascar, using a range of different data sets and analytical methods, integrating qualitative assessments by farmers and quantitative evidence from panel data production function analysis and willingness-to-pay estimates for chemical fertilizer. Nationwide, farmers seek primarily labor productivity enhancing interventions, e.g., improved access to agricultural equipment, cattle, and irrigation. Shock mitigation measures, land productivity increasing technologies, and improved land tenure are reported to be much less important. Research and interventions aimed at reducing costs and price volatility within the fertilizer supply chain might help at least the more accessible regions to more readily adopt chemical fertilizer. [source]


    Land-use and cover changes (1988,2002) around budongo forest reserve, NW Uganda: implications for forest and woodland sustainability

    LAND DEGRADATION AND DEVELOPMENT, Issue 6 2008
    E. N. Mwavu
    Abstract Land-use and cover changes around Budongo Forest Reserve (BFR) were analysed from multi-temporal LandSat images (1988 and 2002) and associated field-based studies in 2003,2004. Three major land-use and cover classes: forest/woodland, sugarcane plantations and grassland/shifting-cultivation/settlements were clearly discriminated. The area under sugarcane cultivation increased over 17-fold, from 690,ha in 1988 to 12729,ha in 2002, with a concomitant loss of about 4680,ha (8·2 per cent) of forest/woodland, mainly on the southern boundary of BFR. Land-use and cover changes were a result of (a) agricultural expansion, (b) increasing human population, exacerbated by large influxes of refugees, (c) conflicts of interest and political interference in the management of BFR and (d) unclear land tenure. Agriculture is the main land-use practice and source of income to local people, with commercial sugarcane and tobacco as the primary cash crops. Individual smallholder sugarcane plantations covered distances ranging from 30 to 1440,m along the BFR edge, with no buffer zone, resulting in direct conflicts between farmers and forest wild animals. There is an ever-increasing need for more land for agricultural expansion, resulting in continued loss of forest/woodland on private/communal lands and encroachment into BFR. This unsustainable agricultural expansion and the local people's perception of BFR as an obstacle to agriculture, threatens the conservation of its threatened wild plants (e.g. Raphia farinifera) and the endangered chimpanzees. Therefore, their sustainable management for both development and conservation will require strong and incorruptible institutions that will seek a balance between resource exploitation and conservation. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


    Evolution of the Minangkabau's shifting cultivation in the West Sumatra highland OF Indonesia and its strategic implications for dynamic farming systems

    LAND DEGRADATION AND DEVELOPMENT, Issue 1 2005
    A. Dendi
    Abstract This paper explores the evolution of the shifting cultivation of the Minangkabau, the biggest matrilineal society in Indonesia, and examines factors underlying the instability and vulnerability of farmers' livelihoods and the degradation of their resource base using an extended factor analysis technique, in order to understand how development strategies might be modified towards a more dynamic farming system. The study distinguished three main phases of the farming system's changes and found that these changes highly corresponded with the emerging market and institutional incentives. Furthermore, the factor analysis generated a six-factor model suggesting strategic interventions to foster the improvement of farmers' livelihoods and environment in future. In addition, consistent with the results of these factors analysis, we argue that, provided land tenure is conducive, there are substantial possibilities for policies and interventions that focus first on agricultural diversification and then on organization building, to assist in dealing with farmers' vulnerability and environmental degradation in the uplands. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


    Potentials and constraints of the farmer-to-farmer programme for environmental protection in Nicaragua

    LAND DEGRADATION AND DEVELOPMENT, Issue 2 2003
    S. Hawkesworth
    Abstract The natural environment in Nicaragua has been damaged by rural development policies geared for the export of cash crops, by uneven land distribution and the near absence of concerns about the environmental effects of the prevailing model of development. The demands made by market forces for the export of primary materials have been reasons for land degradation in the big farms, and the need to survive a poverty stricken existence has forced the peasantry to damage the marginal and fragile land they worked. Successive governments did not address these underlying causes of environmental degradation, and even the opportunities afforded by the environment programme that resulted from the 1979 Sandinista revolution, did not result in significant environmental improvements. The paper briefly considers the constraints faced by the Sandinista administration and how the farmer-to-farmer programme (Campesino-a-Campesino) was brought about as a result of the impacts of the Sandinista era. The substantive part of the paper considers PCAC's significance as an agroecological programme and its advantages and limitations for improving peasants' livelihoods via dissemination of land-protective measures. The viability of the programme is assessed by field work carried out examining in detail the case of three communities, and the paper concludes that the gains made in environmental protection and conservation are in jeopardy without structural policy changes. The paper proposes that for the programme to improve its potential, adequate political will, power and organization are necessary to facilitate greater access to secure land tenure among the peasantry. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


    Tales of Deviance and Control: On Space, Rules, and Law in Squatter Settlements

    LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 2 2010
    Jean-Louis Van Gelder
    In Latin American cities, around a third of the urban population lives in tenure situations that can be designated as informal, yet variation in the ways and extent to which these arrangements do not comply with law is extensive. Furthermore, informal dwellers often employ a variety of strategies to legitimize and ultimately legalize their tenure, implying a dynamic rather than a static relationship between illegality and legality. Conceiving of land tenure in dichotomous terms, as simply being either legal or illegal, therefore, fails to reflect this diversity, nor does it capture the evolving nature of the relationship between informal settlements and the state system. Drawing from the development of squatter settlements in Buenos Aires, this article proposes an alternative perspective and shows how settlements alternate strategies of noncompliance with adaptation to the state legal system to gradually increase their legality. [source]


    Land Tenure and Legal Pluralism in the Peace Process

    PEACE & CHANGE, Issue 3 2003
    Jon D. Unruh
    Land tenure has proven to be one of the most vexing issues in a peace process. The disintegration of land and property rights institutions during armed conflict yet the importance of land and property to the conduct of conflict present particular dilemmas for a peace process attempting to reconfigure aspects of societal relations important to recovery. In this regard understanding what happens to land tenure as a set of social relations during and subsequent to armed conflict is important to the derivation of useful tools for managing tenure issues in a peace process. This article examines the development of multiple, informal "normative orders" regarding land tenure during armed conflict and how these are brought together in problematic form in a peace process. While there can be significant development of tenurial legal pluralism during armed conflict, it is during a peace process that problems associated with different approaches to land claim, access, use, and disputing become especially acute, because an end to hostilities drives land issues to the fore for large numbers of people over a short time frame. [source]


    Land Tenure and Naming Systems in Aboriginal Australia

    THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2002
    Mark Harvey
    Naming systems play a prominent role in discussions of land tenure by Aboriginal people. Reference to one area of land and its owners is most commonly in terms of name ,X', whereas reference to another area of land and its owners is most commonly made in terms of name ,Y'. Much of the analytical literature examines how these names refer to groups of people. There is considerable dispute as to whether the reference of these names suffices to determine disjoint groupings of owners that can be described by the term ,clan'. This paper proposes that the analysis of linkages between names and areas of land should have priority over the analysis of linkages between names and groups of people. The evidence shows that the attachment of names to areas of land is more stable and consistent than their attachment to groups of people. There are differences in the ways that names attach to the landscape, and these differences are significant,they determine whether or not more than one name from the same system may be attached to an area of land. This paper focuses on two areas of Australia: the northern Kakadu-Oenpelli area and the Timber Creek area (both in the Northern Territory). It shows that naming systems identify disjunctive areas of land as the targets for claims of primary ownership in both areas. These disjunctive areas may reasonably be described with the translation term ,estates'. In the northern Kakadu-Oenpelli area, corresponding to these estates, there are disjunctive groupings of owners, which may be termed ,clans'. However, groupings of owners are not clearly disjunctive in the Timber Creek area, and there is little motivation for using the term ,clan'. This paper proposes that this difference reflects a general pattern in Aboriginal Australia, with naming systems stably and consistently identifying ,estates' across much of the continent. They do not identify ,clans' with equivalent stability and consistency. [source]


    Protocols, particularities, and problematising Indigenous ,engagement' in community-based environmental management in settled Australia

    THE GEOGRAPHICAL JOURNAL, Issue 3 2010
    JENNIFER CARTER
    Many Aboriginal Australians in regional and urban Australia hold attachments to their homelands that have been compromised by policies of removal and dispossession. Government agencies and community groups have ,protocols' for engaging with Aboriginal communities, but these protocols have been transferred from remote parts of Australia where land tenure and rights are relatively secure and people can readily claim their community of belonging. The efficacy and applicability of engagement protocols are rarely evaluated, and have not been evaluated with respect to the differing tenure regimes of settled Australia under which rights to land and its resources remain contested and unfolding. This paper describes research conducted in three study areas of regional Australia, where resource management practitioners apply projects according to engagement protocols transferred from remote Australia. Analysis of government and community-based documents, and interviews with agency staff and Aboriginal people, identifies that genuine participation, cultural awareness, agreement-making, appropriate representation and the unique place-based factors affecting engagement remain key barriers to effective engagement with Aboriginal people by institutions in urbanising Australia. In particular, appropriate representation and a need for place-based approaches emerge as critical to engagement in settled Australia. This paper recommends that engagement be considered as a multi-layered approach in which generic ,engagement' threads are selected and re-selected in different combinations to suit contexts, places and purposes. Thus each place-based engagement initiative is not readily typified at the local scale, but taken together, make up a regional mosaic of different engagement structures and processes. [source]


    Policy and practice in karst landscape protection: Bohol, the Philippines

    THE GEOGRAPHICAL JOURNAL, Issue 4 2001
    Peter B. Urich
    The karst landscape in the interior of the Philippines' Bohol Province represents one of the world's premier kegelkarst (cone karst) environments. Government efforts to protect some of this karst, exemplified by the establishment of the Rajah Sikatuna National Park and the Chocolate Hills Natural Monument, have proven to be significant catalysts of social conflict. In Bohol there is a long history of traditional land tenure, which has recently been supplanted by a Westernized model. Protected area establishment is a response to deforestation, agricultural exploitation and uncontrolled quarrying. However, the imposition of protective legislation to prevent further degradation has disenfranchized and marginalized many local farmers and residents. The conflict between the obligation of the State to ensure environmental protection and the perceived property rights of landowners and farmers has provoked an escalation in civil unrest and armed conflict. [source]


    Property rights for social inclusion: Migrant strategies for securing land and livelihoods in Papua New Guinea

    ASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 1 2009
    Gina Koczberski
    Abstract This paper examines the broad range of informal land transactions and arrangements migrants are entering into with customary landowners to gain access to customary land for export cash cropping in the oil palm belt of West New Britain, Papua New Guinea. Whilst these arrangements can provide migrants with relatively secure access to land, there are instances of migrants losing their land rights. Typically, the land tenure arrangements of migrants with more secure access to land are within a framework of property rights for social inclusion whereby customary landowners' inalienable rights to land are preserved and the ,outsider' becomes an ,insider' with ongoing use rights to the land. Through socially embedding land transactions in place-based practices of non-market exchange, identities of difference are eroded as migrants assume identities as part of their host groups. This adaptability of customary land tenure and its capacity to accommodate large migration in-flows and expanding commodity production undermines the argument common amongst proponents of land reform that customary tenure is static and inflexible. Before such claims are heeded, there must be more detailed empirical investigations of the diverse range of land tenure regimes operating in areas of the country experiencing high rates of immigration. [source]


    Bounding the Commons: Land Demarcation in Northeastern Nicaragua

    BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 3 2009
    MARY FINLEY-BROOK
    In north-eastern Nicaragua, territorial titling of communal lands conflates particular notions of ethnicity with proprietary conceptions of space to generate new forms of conflict within and between indigenous and black communities, and with mestizo migrants. Notions of rights between competing groups, or within conflicting normative frameworks, become increasingly polemic during demarcation. While analysis of three land titling case studies demonstrates that results are socially contingent and place based, trends include: (a) power disparities; (b) tension between ,traditional' and ,modern' patterns of land tenure and resource rights; and (c) contradictions fed by international conservation agendas and neoliberal economic reforms. Combining critical actor-based analysis with practical policy critique our work illuminates how contestations over the bounding of communal territories contribute to social injustice. [source]