Abstract
Statutory recognition of rural communities as collective owners of their lands is substantial, expanding, and an increasingly accepted element of property relations. The conventional meaning of property in land itself is changing, allowing for a greater diversity of attributes without impairing legal protection. General identified trends include: (1) declining attempts to deny that community lands are property on the grounds that they may not be sold or are owned collectively; (2) increased provision for communities to be registered owners to the same degree as individual and corporate persons; (3) a rise in number of laws catering specifically to the identification, registration and governance of community property; and (4) in laws that acknowledge that community property may exist whether or not it has been registered, and that registration formalizes rather than creates property in these cases. The research examined the laws of 100 countries to ascertain the status of lands which social communities, either traditionally or in more contemporary arrangements, deem to be their own. Sampling is broadly consistent with numbers of countries per region. The constitutions of all 100 countries were examined. The land laws of 61 countries were scrutinized. Secondary sources were used for 39 countries, mainly due to laws not being available in English. The main secondary source used was LandMark, whose data is publicly available at www.landmarkmap.org.
Highlights
IntroductionThe Long Evolution of Property in Land
The goal of this study is to examine this development as it exists today, and the form which reforms take in respect to community landholding, whether this has been customary and of long-standing, or more contemporarily constructed
What are the contexts through which recognition of community lands as property are provided?
Summary
The Long Evolution of Property in Land. As Earle in 2017 analyses, using ethnographic and archeological evidence in the absence of written records, identifiable property goes back 40,000 years [1]. Villages were the dominant landholding units in both the Old and New Worlds. After 10,000 BCE, population growth, intensification of land use, and more settled lives heightened territoriality and needs to defend valuable lands against outsiders. Earle writes ‘For property in land, a local group held by cooperative defense the inalienable rights inherited through group membership. Households that improved land and houses retained some right of personal property, but without the rights to transfer except through inheritance. Regularly alienated by conquest, whereby a group and its chief asserted direct control by seizure’. Regularly alienated by conquest, whereby a group and its chief asserted direct control by seizure’. (Earle 2017, p. 23)
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