Collective Land Research Articles

A “Region-Specific Model Adaptation (RSMA)”-Based Training Data Method for Large-Scale Land Cover Mapping

An accurate and historical land cover monitoring dataset for Alaska could provide fundamental information for a range of studies, such as conservation habitats, biogeochemical cycles, and climate systems, in this distinctive region. This research addresses challenges associated with the extraction of training data for timely and accurate land cover classifications in Alaska over longer time periods (e.g., greater than 10 years). Specifically, we designed the “Region-Specific Model Adaptation (RSMA)” method for training data. The method integrates land cover information from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD), LANDFIRE’s Existing Vegetation Type (EVT), and the National Wetlands Inventory (NWI) and machine learning techniques to generate robust training samples based on the Anderson Level II classification legend. The assumption of the method is that spectral signatures vary across regions because of diverse land surface compositions; however, despite these variations, there are consistent, collective land cover characteristics that span the entire region. Building upon this assumption, this research utilized the classification power of deep learning algorithms and the generalization ability of RSMA to construct a model for the RSMA method. Additionally, we interpreted existing vegetation plot information for land cover labels as validation data to reduce inconsistency in the human interpretation. Our validation results indicate that the RSMA method improved the quality of the training data derived solely from the NLCD by approximately 30% for the overall accuracy. The validation assessment also demonstrates that the RSMA method can generate reliable training data on large scales in regions that lack sufficient reliable data.

Collective Processes in Land Crafting

This article is based on the 3-day workshop, “Botanical Colour Laboratory”, which mapped the colours of the landscape of Osterøy, Norway, through land crafting with natural dyes. Land crafting builds an understanding of, and connection to, the land. This article discusses the multi-sensorial aspects and the relations between humans and non-humans in the process of collective plant dyeing. The terms: situated knowledge, orientations, the unruliness of things, production of locality and mujaawarah (neighbouring) are used to reflect on the workshop and its entangled relationships to matter, landscape, crafting and knowledge. These terms are woven together with the experiences of the “Botanical Colour Laboratory”. The research is conducted as a creative practice with an ethnographical approach. By combining written texts with video and drawings, I have made new multi-modal field notes. These field notes give a glimpse into the multifaceted processes of plant dyeing. The research shows that projects like “Botanical Colour Laboratory” are highly relevant and can influence orientations to our surroundings through collective land crafting processes with our living and non-living neighbours.

Sovereignty and Human Rights: Examining Sustainable Plantation Enterprises in Indonesia

The Sovereignty Principle in the Plantations Law legalizes dynamics that disproportionately empower plantation companies while disenfranchising indigenous peoples. Under this principle, plantation permits are granted to companies, not indigenous communities, limiting the latter's involvement in mandatory deliberations set by the law. Consequently, indigenous peoples are coerced into relinquishing their lands in exchange for compensation, leading to the erosion of their collective land rights. This practice is at odds with the protections intended under Article 28D Paragraph (1) and Article 28H Paragraph (2) of the 1945 Constitution of Indonesia, which safeguard collective rights to property. The lack of political will to recognize and protect these rights suggests a troubling disregard for the existence and sovereignty of indigenous peoples.

How to Conserve the Biodiversity on Collective Land in National Park: Conservation Easements in China

Conservation easements (CEs) are used as a conservation mechanism to conserve the biodiversity and ecosystem on private land, and are receiving increasing attention around the world. Most of the literature mainly focused on the contribution of CE to private land conservation in the U.S. and other countries, while its role in collective land conservation remains underreported. China planned to build the world’s largest national parks (NPs) and faced the conflict between nature conservation and social development. As a private and voluntary conservation tool, CEs have the potential to fill the conservation gap, reduce conservation costs, promote adaptive management, and incentivize sustainable national park construction. We reviewed the recent CE practices in Qianjiangyuan, Wuyishan and Nanshan National Parks. The local government and NP administration drove its practices in China’s NPs, whereas non-profit organizations have few opportunities to participate. Furthermore, due to the current legislation’s lack of explicit specifications regarding CEs, the provisions outlined in the CE agreement were insufficiently constructed and did not align with the unique circumstances of the park. Thus, the implementation of the National Park Act serves as a fitting means to introduce the CE in China.

‘We are the roots!’ Decolonial practices of local tourism

The roots of ancestral legacy persist entangled with the currents of modern globalisation. While the global tourism market promotes corporate ventures and international travel, rural and Indigenous communities confront the challenge of adapting amidst hegemonic influences. In coastal communities of Ecuador, the juxtaposition of pre-colonial belonging and contemporary tourism development exemplifies this tension. Drawing on decolonial perspectives, this paper investigates how rural Indigenous communities on the Pacific coast of Ecuador have navigated their tourism ventures, negotiating notions of private property, access to credit, and business administration formalities, while upholding traditional Indigenous values and collective land property needs—what we term decolonial practices of local tourism. Moreover, the emergence of proximity tourism offers a promising avenue for advancing decolonial practices within the global tourism market, prioritising geographical and cultural closeness over conventional distance-focused approaches. Employing a collaborative approach, the research integrates Indigenous methodologies with conventional research methods, bridging diverse backgrounds within the research team, including academia, consultancy, and Indigenous leadership. The analysis underscores the pivotal role of collective land ownership in preserving cultural identity and fostering resistance to capitalist encroachments. The study concludes with a call to amplify Indigenous voices, cultivate solidarity, and advocate for more inclusive and equitable approaches to tourism development. This imperative stems from the need to decolonise and promote culturally sensitive local tourism practices, urging a reconfiguration of the tourism industry towards a more equitable and respectful engagement with Indigenous communities.

The effectiveness of voluntary collective action in China's rural land development

China is gradually and directly making rural collective land available on the land market. It is important to understand how stakeholders collectively treat and manage this land, and if this collective action leads to effective and sustainable results. This paper, however, revises Ostrom's framework of collective action by constructing the joint analysis of social capital, trust, and cooperation performance, in order to better capture the distinction between voluntary action and enforced action of stakeholders towards a sustainable goal. We analyze the role of voluntary collective action through higher-order structural equation modeling (HSEM), applied to a database consisting of 324 households in Jiangsu Province, China, collected in 2022 and 2023. The results suggest that social capital effectively promotes villagers' trust in policy implementers by establishing new institutions, increasing actors' trustworthiness, and improving channels of information exchange, and the first two means are more effective than the latter. We also demonstrate the significant positive effect of trust on cooperation performance, with trusting relationships with familiar groups and the credible behavior of policy implementers affecting performance outcomes of collective action. Moreover, social capital drives cooperation performance through the mediating effect of mutual trust that it breeds. With this revised framework and verified hypotheses one can thus create more effective policies to avoid inequality and informality in the land marketization process in China.

Tenure Security Perception Patterns among Amazonian Communities in Peru: Gender and Ethnicity

This study delves into perceptions of land and forest tenure (in)security among Indigenous and mestizo populations in the Peruvian Amazon. Despite all having collective lands, the selected communities vary in their formalisation processes. This research seeks to enhance comprehension of tenure security perceptions in the Peruvian Amazon by investigating sources of security and insecurity across key tenure components. A combination of descriptive, bivariate, and multivariate analyses is employed, based on fieldwork conducted between July 2015 and December 2017 in 22 Native and Peasant Communities in Loreto and Madre de Dios, utilising 1006 intra-household surveys, 52 in-depth interviews, and 44 focus group discussions. The results reveal similarities and differences in (in)security sources between titled and untitled communities. The study also explores the influence of gender and ethnicity on these perceptions, finding ethnicity-based variation in security perception over the past 20 years (1995–2015). Recognising these differences in perception is critical for assessing the robustness of exercising acquired collective rights.

Combination of Cultural Heritage and Hotel Tourism: A Case Study of Fabric Culture in Wufeng Village, Guangzhou

The Wufeng Village is an urban village that located in Haizhu District, Guangzhou city. Urban village is a special product of rapid urbanization since reform and open up of China. It’s the village (collective land) left in the city (state-owned land), wrapped up by the modern city. However, Wufeng Village has a long history and is one of the two largest textile cluster bases in China. Guangzhou Textile Trading Park, Yangtze River International Textile City, Dazhong Fabric Market, Zhongdajiangnan Textile City is located there, is the world’s fabric distribution center. The people there rely on the fabric industry for their livelihood. But in recent years, due to the deterioration of the economic environment, the rise of international competition, the rise of systematic risks in the industrial chain, and the impact of the pandemic, the industry of Wufeng Village needs an opportunity to upgrade and innovate.

Theoretical Logic and Implementation Path of Comprehensive Land Consolidation for Promoting Common Prosperity: A Case Study of Ningbo City

Eliminating poverty and achieving social justice are global concerns. China has focused on common prosperity. Comprehensive land consolidation is a potential policy tool that can contribute to common prosperity, but its effectiveness and implementation methods are yet to be verified and discussed. Therefore, we construct an analytical framework to understand how comprehensive land consolidation promotes common prosperity. The pilot area for comprehensive land consolidation in Ningbo City is used as a qualitative case study. The research results indicate that comprehensive land consolidation focuses on development and sharing to promote high-quality socio-economic development, social fairness, and justice. The paths for achieving development included the following: (1) a network governance structure consisting of multiple entities to enhance land governance; (2) various consolidation activities were conducted at the town scale to optimize the functionality and spatial pattern of public spaces; and (3) enabling the flow of urban and rural factors for improved resource allocation efficiency and providing an impetus for industrial development. The paths for achieving sharing included clarifying collective land ownership and promoting land transactions to provide diverse land values and ensure a shared distribution. This research provides new insights applicable to other Chinese cities and numerous developing countries engaged in land consolidation to address social distribution issues.

Collective land arrangements that decommodify land for agroecological transformations

Collective land arrangements that decommodify land for agroecological transformations

Displacement through the Commons: Community and Spatial Order in Bangkok

AbstractThis article investigates the relationship of discourses around community to larger urban processes of development and displacement in Bangkok, Thailand. It focuses on two sites located along a major commercial corridor. The first, undergoing a process of relocation that involves establishing collective land tenure, goes by the Thai term for community, chumchon, though architects and planners frequently refer to it as a “slum.” The second site, an upscale “community mall” called the Commons, is a newly constructed open‐air commercial space built to serve Bangkok's young, hip creative class. The eviction of the poor chumchon residents in favor of wealthy café‐goers may look like a prime example of larger structural forces of what is often called “gentrification” or “accumulation by dispossession.” However, these sweeping narratives around global capitalist processes miss critical aspects of how the discursive construction of community around these two sites has enabled their physical construction and deconstruction. We demonstrate that rhetorics, imagery, and practices of community serve to valorize the existence of one site while justifying the removal of the other. This analysis demonstrates this outcome was not just the inevitable result of impersonal structural forces. It was displacement through the commons, fueled by discourses around community.

How Do Farmers Realize Their Rights on the Collective Land in Rural China? An Explanatory Framework for Deconstructing the Subject of Collective Land Ownership

This study aims to deconstruct the collective, the subject of collective land ownership. With respect for the logic of the formation of collective land ownership, we propose the “transfreserve” mode to portray the division of rural land rights between the members and the organization in the transformation from private ownership to collective ownership. This idea can be expressed as, prompted by the public power of the state, each farmer as the owner of rural land having to transfer part of his/her rights to the organization when associating, meanwhile each one still reserves part of his/her rights. We term the rights transferred to the organization as special legal person ownership, while the rights reserved by each farmer are called membership rights. The rights exercised by all members on the basis of membership rights are the autonomous rights. In terms of the property rights, such as the distribution right of the collective income, farmers have to participate in decision-making to determine how to form the allocation scheme in a fair and reasonable way by exercising autonomous rights; then, organization fulfills the collective will to meet the needs of its members by exercising special legal person ownership. As for the right to use public infrastructure on the collective land, farmers, as the members, can use it reasonably by its own will, which is the process of exercising membership rights. If farmers’ rights are infringed by other members, they can choose to negotiate with other members in a proper way. If farmers’ rights are infringed when the organization carries out operation activity in the land market, they can obtain compensation from the organization, and the compensation standard is determined by the decision-making.

How do China's villages self‐organize collective land use under the background of rural revitalization? A multi‐case study in Zhejiang, Fujian and Guizhou provinces

AbstractAs land is one of the most important production factors in rural areas, it is becoming an important challenge for rural revitalization strategy to realize land value and promote the socioeconomic development of villages through the collective action of self‐organized collective land use. Various studies have discussed the relationships among land governance, rural revitalization and self‐organization, but few studies have focused on village cadres' roles and village rules. This paper aims to establish an analytical framework to explore these two operating mechanisms of self‐organization in collective land use. Two villages in eastern China and one village in western China are selected as typical cases to demonstrate how collective land use is self‐organized by village cadres' roles and village rules. The results indicate that village cadres play roles in the entrepreneurial spirit and resource access capacity to promote village economic and social development. In the utilization of collective land for farmers to live in peace and work happily, the configuration of rules at the village level to regulate the behaviour of villagers is a qualification on demand and “see who can take part”, cost sharing and benefit sharing, graduated sanction and supervision. The analysis in this article may provide an understanding of the mechanism driving the promotion and improvement of land self‐organization, which has important policy implications for China and other developing countries adopting this mode to promote regional economic development in rural areas.

Indigenous collective land titling and the creation of leftovers: Insights from Paraguay and Cambodia

AbstractCollective land titling often drags on for decades, while private land concessions and holdings do not face the same problem, creating ‘leftovers’ of land available for Indigenous peoples to attempt to collectively title. In two ethnographic case studies in Cambodia and Paraguay, we analyse community‐based Indigenous land titling by focusing on the on‐the‐ground dynamics of property relations, Indigenous livelihood shifts and ecological change. In both countries, large agricultural players implemented a staggering change in local landscapes through deforestation, configuring new realities that in turn feed into local environments and titling processes. Adapting their livelihoods to living in the leftovers, in Cambodia, the Indigenous Bunong shifted from rice to rubber as they navigated the slow titling process. In Paraguay, some Indigenous Guarani shifted from corn to cattle by renting out their collectively titled land. The case studies show that the liberal titling approach to secure Indigenous lands overestimates the ability of title to remove land from capitalist logics such as the push to rent or sell, while some spaces of autonomy are opened. We critique the liberal approaches to formalising title, where Indigenous struggles for their ways of life are funnelled into fighting for collective property.

Time as the Enemy? Disjointed Timelines and Uneven Rhythms of Indigenous Collective Land Titling in Paraguay and Cambodia

Indigenous Land law reforms in Paraguay and Cambodia proposed collective land titling to secure land tenure through community ownership. When we look at land formalization through a temporal lens, we see the on-the-ground dynamics of how communal title may or may not be achieved by examining the ethnographic case studies of Guarani and Bunong land titling. We argue that the temporality of land titling processes creates disjointed, shifting timelines mediated by relationships of power and disrupted by fast-tracked private and state concessions. This uneven relationship between time and titling interrupts, undermines and fragments Indigenous land possession with serious ecological and livelihood impacts.

Struggles for recognitional justice through payments for ecosystem services contracts in Ecuador’s Andes

Programs based upon payments for ecosystem services may carry pervasive attitudes, ideas, and language that confront pre-existing institutional arrangements for land management and local concepts of socio-environmental relationships. Through an empirical case study of a water trust fund payments for ecosystem services model in the Ecuadorian Andes, this research examines contracts as an important component of conservation incentive projects that can reveal contention over the representation of human-environment relationships and environmental governance institutions. The study highlights how neoliberal visions of environmental management are challenged and reworked by communities in an effort to gain justice through recognition and visibility for pre-existing collective land management practices. While this analysis demonstrates how underlying neoliberal assumptions about socioenvironmental relationships may inform water trust fund conservation interventions, it also shows the role of local agency in co-constituting landscape management outcomes and underscore the unevenness of neoliberalism present in the various components of a payments for ecosystem services model operating at different sites and scales.

A regularização fundiária como instrumento de efetividade do direito à moradia e do desenvolvimento econômico e social

The right to worthy housing. Scope of the right to worthy housing. Housing and human dignity. Housing to meet the postulates of the dignity of the person must be a dignified dwelling. The right to worthy housing and land tenure regularization. Land tenure regularization is an instrument of economic and social development. Land tenure regularization instruments. Usucapion as the most traditional instrument of land tenure regularization. Collective land tenure regularization instruments. Urban land tenure regularization – Reurb. land tenure regularization in state lands. Land tenure regularization programs in the State of São Paulo.

Why Agree to a Forest Easement? Perception of the Residents about the Adaptation of the Conservation Easement in Qianjiangyuan National Park

Conservation easements (CEs) were introduced in the Chinese context to resolve the conflict between rural land use and area-based conservation measures. As conservation easements are usually set on private lands, little is known about their adaptation to the collective land tenure. We introduced a social-psychological aspect to sustainable livelihoods (SL) for an integrated decision-making mechanism to assess rural residents’ motivations for granting CEs. We surveyed farmers in the Qianjiangyuan National Park pilot area in order to explore how tangible factors, i.e., the livelihood assets, and intangible factors, i.e., farmers’ perceptions of the livelihood environment, affected their true feeling of conservation easements. Results suggested that CEs that were adapted to the collectively-owned forestland followed a well-established grassroots democracy but sacrificed the CE’s diversity in restricted uses tailored to specific landowners and properties. Institutional capital and perception of the economic environment appeared most important to affect farmers’ acceptance of CEs. Furthermore, the livelihood assets affected farmers’ perception of the livelihood environment, and their acceptance of CEs affected the perception of policy outcomes. Overall, our findings demonstrate the acceptance of conservation easements as a livelihood strategic choice and strengthen the importance of securing economic rights in the changing institutional environment.

The Protection, Ownership, and Return of Cultural Property: A Surinamese Law Perspective

This article explores the ownership of cultural objects within national and traditional customary law in Suriname, with the aim to provide a legal context to the issue of claims for the return of some of these cultural objects from the Netherlands. The discussion of the legal regime for exporting cultural objects examines the National Ordinance of 1952 on Provisions for the Preservation of Objects with Historical, Cultural, and Scientific Value; the Movement of Goods Act of 2003; and the Monuments Act of 2002, which protects immovable objects, objects of archaeological excavations, and discoveries. This is followed by a short overview of the legal regime relating to the ownership of cultural property under the Surinamese Civil Code. Next this article outlines the property law of cultural objects under customary laws of Indigenous and Tribal communities in Suriname and how these may be included in the Draft Civil Code and the Draft Legislation on Rules Concerning the Collective Land Rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples. The article concludes that neither the existing legal framework nor the draft legislation provide answers on dealing with cultural objects acquired in a colonial context and the possible repatriation of such objects.

Collective forest land rights facilitate cooperative behavior

AbstractThe introduction of formal collective property rights to forest lands appears to have improved both environmental and economic outcomes, but there is limited evidence on how these reforms affect cooperative behavior among local resource users. We propose that when national governments issue collective land rights, they strengthen the collective psychological ownership among coowners and produce increased levels of cooperative behavior. Analyzing data from 213 forest user groups in 10 countries, and a framed field experiment in a subset of sites, we find that collective land titling is associated with significantly higher levels of cooperative behavior including increased levels of trust, more frequent interpersonal interactions related to both forestry and nonforestry activities, more self‐governing institutions, and greater equality in resource extraction patterns.