Communal Land Ownership Research Articles

Establishment of legal regulation in the field of securing the status of territorial communities as subjects of communal land ownership

The article examines the formation of the right of communal ownership of land, the establishment of legal regulation in the field of consolidation of the status of territorial communities as subjects of communal ownership, the impact of decentralization processes on the legal regime of land of territorial communities and united territorial communities, and the definition of scientific approaches to the formation of a model of communal ownership of land in Ukraine. The author highlights the inconsistency of legislators in defining the principles of building the institution of communal land ownership, the lack of a well-grounded concept of communal property rights, and the legislative contradictions in approaches to creating sustainable local self-government in Ukraine based on the priority of land interests of territorial communities. The author pays special attention to the prerequisites for determining the constitutional status of territorial communities, legislative consolidation of the grounds for the formation of communal land ownership in the State and solving the problem of the absence of a definition of “right of communal land ownership” in the current legislation. The author focuses on the legitimization of the powers to exercise the right of communal ownership by addressing the issue of land and legal competence of territorial communities, improving their status as entities exercising the right of communal ownership of land directly or through local self-government bodies, and exercising the right of communal ownership of land in the manner prescribed by land law. The study found that the Constitution of Ukraine has provided the necessary prerequisites for the establishment of a fundamentally new land system in the area of communal ownership of community land. An important scientific task in modern conditions is to improve the legal regulation of the land and legal competence of territorial communities as subjects of communal land ownership for sustainable development of territories. It is determined that acceleration of administrative and land reforms will contribute to the full legitimization of amalgamated territorial communities and the establishment of territorial communities as equal subjects of land ownership.

Gender Perspectives in Namibia’s Communal Land: Exploring Women’s Hindrances to Equitable Land Ownership

Rural communities depend on land for socio-economic livelihoods. However, owning land remains a critical challenge in post-independence Namibia for women, despite institutionalised laws and policies designed to redress gender inequalities. This paper discourses on the hindrances to equitable communal land ownership in nine regions among women aged 18–60 years. Findings reveal a high perception among women themselves that women should own land in communal areas. The study concludes that the struggle for equitable land distribution is far from being over, despite various government interventions to address the status quo, and hence recommends the overhaul of existing legal frameworks.

Characterization of Farming Systems Using Land as a Driver of Production and Sustainability in the Vhembe District, Limpopo, South Africa

South African agricultural farming systems are characterised by a duality in which there exists large-scale commercial farmers and small-scale farmers. Large-scale commercial farmers, historically identified as capital intensive and characterized by the size of the landholdings, are considered as the main drivers of national food security. Small-scale farmers on the other hand are viewed as important drivers of food security at the household level. These two main farming systems can be found within the Vhembe district municipality of the Limpopo Province and are characterised differently according to land descriptors. The study used an analysis of primary data obtained from in-depth interviews and secondary data obtained from an agricultural database to identify and characterize large- and small-scale farming systems within the Vhembe district. The study examined the land resource namely farm size and land ownership, topography and soil description, rainfall and its variability and threats and hazards used under three different high value crop (HVC) commodities, macadamia nuts, mangos and avocado pears. The study further examined yield and income from farming as drivers of production that would ensure the sustainability of long-term food security at both national and household level. The study revealed that gender of farmers within the farming systems was predominantly (79%) male across all commodities. Age distribution results showed an aging population of farmers mostly (90%) above the age of 51. Communal land ownership was the dominant (74%) land ownership amongst participants. Yield is not solely dependent on farm size and requires consideration of a broader array of land management aspects. There was a strong, significant correlation between income and farm size. These factors have implications for sustainability of the two farming systems and illustrate how certain aspects of land as a driver of production such as land ownership, rainfall variability, yield and income from farming can impact sustainability.

Toropets in the Territorial and Administrative System of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Moscow State at the End of the 15th — 16th Century

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the territorial, administrative and settlement structure of Toropets and Toropets uezd at the end of the 15th — 16th centuries. During the period when Toropets was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, it was influenced by its peripheral position and its status as a state settlement, direct tax collection and at the same time maintaining relative independence. Communal traditions inherited from the Old Russian period were also preserved. The involvement of both urban and rural population in crafts activities was recorded, which influenced the formation of special territories (perevaras) in the Toropets uezd. The territories of volosts and a perevaras according to the scribe book of 1540 were localized. The territories of perevaras were within the borders of volosts. The inhabitants of the volosts and the townspeople of Toropets owned the side honey trees. In the city, the yards of shabry are recorded — the collective landowners, and in the county, on the territory of the crossing — the “nest” of settlements under a generalizing name, which served as a means of identifying the object of taxation. After Toropets joined the Moscow state, these features remain. However, the community land ownership and honey craft gradually decline throughout the 16th century.

Latin American Indigeneities through Settler Colonialism, Neoliberalism, and Cyberspace

Latin American Indigeneities through Settler Colonialism, Neoliberalism, and Cyberspace Michelle Vasquez Ruiz (bio) Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State. By Shannon Speed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 176 pages. $27.95 (paper). Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtedness in Mexico. By M. Bianet Castellanos. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 192 pages. $25.00 (paper). Indigenous Interfaces: Space, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America. Edited by Jennifer Gomez Menjivar and Gloria Elizabeth Chacon. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019. 304 pages. $35.00 (paper). Colonization is not a monolithic project. It is a project that is inflicted in varying yet consistently insidious ways. The books under review here explore how colonization in Latin America continues to be deployed through racial and gender violence as well as neoliberal policies and economic structures. They pay close attention to how Indigenous populations experience and address these ongoing structures of oppression. M. Bianet Castellanos's Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtedness in Mexico examines how the mechanisms of neoliberal housing polices uphold settler colonialism in Mexico. Through ethnographic research Castellanos considers how Maya migrant communities in Cancun are disproportionately affected by predatory housing policies that push them to abandon Indigenous conceptions of communal landownership. Her work recognizes how the process of private homeownership attempts to deracialize and dispossess these Indigenous populations. Shannon Speed's Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State, based on interviews with Indigenous women in immigration detention centers, further explores how mechanisms of settler colonialism, [End Page 403] neoliberalism, and gender violence have made Indigenous women vulnerable to different forms of violence and abuse. Their heart-wrenching memories shared throughout the book demonstrate how in their immigration journeys they traverse many layers of gender violence inflicted by family members, by criminal organizations, and by state officials. Jennifer Gomez Menjivar and Gloria Elizabeth Chacon in their edited anthology Indigenous Interfaces: Space, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America challenge the notion that Indigeneity and technology are incompatible. On the contrary, the essays in this collection demonstrate how cyberspace is embraced and utilized as a tool to exercise agency, preserve Indigenous culture and language, and challenge the colonial injustice that Indigenous populations continue to face. Together the books under review offer us new ways to think about how Indigenous peoples are addressing modern iterations of colonial and settler colonial structures. Settler Colonialism and Neoliberalism in Latin American In 2017 American Quarterly presented a forum on settler colonialism in Latin America, edited by Castellanos. Working across the disciplines of Native American studies and Latin American studies, contributing scholars sought to address the utility of settler colonialism as a framework outside the Anglo colonial project. In their contributions to the forum, Castellanos and Speed both outlined the significance and limitations of applying such a theory to the study of Indigenous peoples in Latin America. Their books under review here expand on these original arguments and provide exemplary scholarship demonstrating why this perspective is necessary for future scholarship in the fields of Native American studies, Latin American studies, and American studies. Castellanos's introduction to the 2017 forum expands on Patrick Wolfe's definition of settler colonialism by challenging how "efforts to distinguish regimes of colonialism in the Americas by their method of dispossession, as rooted in either land or labor expropriation," produce rigid binaries that occlude how in Latin America colonialism happens through both the extraction of Indigenous land and labor.1 She argues that "the logics of dispossession and elimination, which are key tenets of a settler colonial model, were not isolated to British imperialism; they were also central to Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects."2 Speed points out that in Latin America labor regimes that exploited Indigenous populations such as the encomiendas, repartimientos, and haciendas in Mexico and Central America also functioned as a "mechanism of dispossession."3 [End Page 404] Her book Incarcerated Stories further details how these structures worked to eliminate Indigenous peoples in the early colonial periods. While independence is thought to have ended these forms of colonization, Speed builds off the work of Richard Gott to outline how settlement actually...

Land Ownership of Territorial Communities

Taking into account the ongoing democratic transformations in our country, the decentralization reform deserves special attention, which is aimed at ensuring broad independence of territorial communities in solving their own socio-economic problems of a particular region. One of the key issues of such a reform is the formation of capable administrative-territorial units, endowed with full power not only in terms of administrative management but as full owners of the relevant resource base grounded on land. Unfortunately, the transformations carried out in Ukraine through privatization in general and privatization of land and legislative consolidation of new forms of land ownership have led to uncertainty about the object composition of communal land ownership, failed to ensure social harmony, creating crisis phenomena of demographic and socio-economic nature, especially in rural areas. As a result, the legal model of state regulation of land relations remains incomplete, in which the balance of private and public interests in land use within territorial communities would be ensured by law, which determined the content of the study. The work analyses the theoretical and normative principles of land ownership, in particular, the conclusion that the form of land ownership due to its functional purpose and special subject-object composition, determines the mechanism of formation and termination of ownership. Scientific conclusions and recommendations are formulated, on which it is expedient to build a modern state policy on the formation and establishment in society of the concept of communal ownership of land as a basis for the effective development of territorial communities. According to the results of the study, the need to change the administrative-territorial division by regulating the community at the constitutional level as the primary administrative-territorial unit, which is the basis for the formation of communal land ownership. Amendments to the Land Code of Ukraine are proposed in order to determine the right of communal ownership of land within territorial communities.

Non‐income effect of land ownership and tenure on subjective wellbeing in South Africa

AbstractAside from the very high inequality of land ownership, South Africa is characterised by a dual land tenure system comprising of private ownership and communal land ownership. Using waves 4 and 5 of the National Income Dynamics Study longitudinal data set, a set of econometric methodologies is employed to quantify the impact of ownership and tenure on an index of subjective wellbeing (SWB) constructed from eight self‐reported responses covering general life satisfaction, contrast, social capital, mental health and hope for future. Controlling for the income effect and other pertinent drivers of SWB, the study highlights the non‐income impact of land ownership and tenure on the subjective wellbeing of individuals. To account for possible endogeneity and self‐selection, instrumental variable and matching method‐based treatment effects are computed. This paper has two main findings in relation to land tenure in South Africa: (a) land owners have on average a higher index of SWB compared to those not owning land, and (b) owning land privately, compared to owning land communally, has a positive impact on subjective wellbeing within land owners. These results are consistent and statistically significant across the various estimation strategies and provide additional motivation for expediting land reforms in South Africa.

The Institutional of Local Community and Stratification of Land Ownership in Surrounding Community Forests in Bogor

Management of forest resources cannot be separated from the character attributes of the community. In the arena of community forest action, access to forest resources, which is a people's livelihood, is an important element. The study aimed to analyze the performance of the local community attributes towards community welfare and examine the stratification of community land ownership. This research was carried out in the qualitative descriptive analysis. The results of the analysis showed that 41.56% of the community forest farming groups classified as land-owners. Based on the strata of land ownership showed that 70% in the third strata, which was land-ownership of less than 0.5 ha. This study concluded that the institutional of local community was relatively low because not effective in regulating community behavior. These indicated by the low performance achieved on the welfare of the community, the low ownership of the area of arable land, and the level of welfare of the local community falls into the category of poor and low community education.

Dependence Level of Rural Landless Households on Allocated Communal Land: Evidences from Kilte Awlaelo and Atsbi Wenberta Districts, Tigrai Region Northern Ethiopia

The problem of landlessness has become one of the major challenges facing rural farmers in Tigrai region since the early 1990s. To address the problem, the regional government of Tigrai started to redistribute degraded communal land to landless farmers by ensuring their participation in soil and water conservation activities and willingness to engage in the programme. Thus, the specific objectives of this study are to examine the livelihood options and analyse their economic dependence level of the rural landless households on the apportioned degraded communal land. Data were collected from randomly selected landless households and analysed using descriptive and econometric techniques. Accordingly, the study identified plantation of timber trees, grass collection, engaging in animal fattening, fruit or vegetable production, beekeeping and poultry production were the major livelihood activities practised in the allocated degraded communal land. The study also indicated that the major factors influencing the dependence level of rural landless households on allocated communal land include gender of household head, marital status of household head, distance to farmers’ training centre, livestock holding, land ownership, experience in the programme, communal land ownership type, financial support and per capita expenditure of the households. Therefore, the study concluded that even if the regional government tried to solve the problem of landlessness through hillside distribution programme, it could not sufficiently support the livelihood of the landless rural households in the study districts.

Communal land and the attitudes of the Bafokeng on benefits from mineral rights

ABSTRACTThis study examines the benefits received by the Royal Bafokeng Nation of northwestern South Africa from mining on their traditional lands, and the attitudes of community members towards those benefits. Key to this discussion is the role of communal land ownership. The author surveyed 493 members of this community to determine if they were satisfied with services provided by the Royal Bafokeng Administration (RBA). The research found that, in a context of severe inequality, widespread unemployment, negative impacts from nearby mines and migrant labour, centralisation of benefits to Phokeng, and perceptions of mismanagement and corruption, there was widespread dissatisfaction among the Bafokeng. Addressing these issues, especially the lack of jobs, could mitigate current negative perceptions about services delivered by the RBA.

Farm-level determinants of access to land by arable crop farmers in Ikwuano Local Government Area of Abia State, Nigeria

This study was carried out to examine the farm-level determinants of access to land by arable crop farmers in Ikwuano Local Government Area of Abia State, Nigeria. A multistage sampling technique was used to select 80 arable crop farmers from four autonomous communities. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and Logit regression model. Result from the descriptive statistics showed that (55%) of the farmers were male headed, majority of the farmers had secondary education; while farm size was relatively low. With respect to the methods of land ownership and acquisition, the result revealed that majority of the lands for arable crop farming were owned or acquired through inheritance (92.5%), communal (72.5%) and purchase (50%) respectively. Consequently, the level of access to land for arable crop farming showed that 42% of respondents had moderate access, 35% had high access, while 22% had low access to land for arable crop farming. The result of the logit regression indicated that age, sex, household size, number of years spent in school, cooperative membership and credit amount significantly influenced access to land by arable crop farmers. Communal land ownership and male dominance were identified as constraints to access to land for arable crop farming in the study area. The study therefore, recommended strengthening of relevant institutions so as to enable farmers’ access required land for arable crop farming without gender disparity. Key words : farm-level, determinants, land access, arable crops and Logit

The Communal Land Ownership Conflict between Lewobunga and Lewonara Villages, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia

In the context of conflict on communal land ownership between Lewobunga and Lewonara Villages, in East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia this article found that not all the western sociological theories are relevant to analyze social conflicts in Indonesia which culturally diverse in the both villages. Generally, this article attempts to examine two main issues. First, to examine the existing sociological theories in relations with the local communal land ownership in Indonesia. Second, to examine the sociological theories in the context of communal land ownership conflict between Lewonara and Lewobunga villages. This is qualitative research with Hermeneutic Reproductive approach and the result of this article obtained from the fieldwork data.

Daniel Bell's Dilemma: Financialization, Family Values, and their Discontents

Daniel Bell's Dilemma:Financialization, Family Values, and their Discontents Stefan Eich Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Basic Books, 1976). Melinda Cooper, Family Values. Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books, 2017). Amassing a mountain of etymological conjectures and anthropological reports that ranged from Iroquois family structures to the communal land ownership of archaic Russian villages, in the last years of his life Karl Marx concluded that Charles Fourier had been right. The modern family, Marx explained in his ethnological notebooks from the early 1880s, "contains in itself in miniature all the antagonisms that later develop widely in society and its state."1 Indeed, the patriarchal family itself had developed historically on the back of slavery. "In its primary meaning," Marx excerpted from the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), "family had no relation to the married pair or their children, but to the body of slaves and servants." Just as Fourier had argued, the status of civilization was mirrored by its family structures and the rise of capitalism had gone hand in hand with a patriarchal revolution against matriarchy and common ownership. This meant inversely, as Fourier concluded, that the surest and most rapid path to social progress was the march of women toward their liberty. In 1968, four years before excerpts from Marx's late ethnological notes were first published, Daniel Bell also turned to Fourier. Bell, like Marx, acknowledged Fourier's prophetic quality. Referring to the sexual revolution [End Page 241] sweeping through American campuses and bedrooms, Bell worried about what he dubbed the "psychological utopia of individual release."2 The prophet of such "orgiastic chiliasm," he declared in the American Scholar in the fall of 1968, had been Fourier. "Family life, the key social institution of the civilized state," Bell explained, "was Fourier's most compelling example of an unnatural institution, holding men in its iron grip, bringing misery to all its members."3 As the journal announced, Bell's next, long-awaited monograph would dissect Fourier's untimely anticipation of the utopia of sexual liberation. Bell was far from alone in his concern about the state of American sexual mores and family structures at the time. Already in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on "The Negro Family" had caused a stir by reframing black urban poverty around "the deterioration of the Negro family."4 Moynihan, a sociologist then serving in the Johnson administration as Assistant Undersecretary of Labor, argued in the report that "the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is to out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well."5 By the early 1970s anxieties about the counter-cultural sexual liberation directly echoed Moynihan's account of black family breakdown. It was during these years that the economist Gary Becker began to extend his account of human capital from education into reproduction to develop an "economic theory of marriage."6 Throughout the 1960s Becker had been Bell's colleague at Columbia, but in the wake of the student protests on Morningside Heights in the spring of 1968 both turned their backs to Columbia. Bell moved on to the sociology department at Harvard. Becker returned to the University of Chicago. In his theoretical papers Becker had largely refrained from spelling out the political implications of his theory of family economics, but as the introduction to his unifying Treatise on the Family (1981) made clear, his account self-consciously tapped into anxieties about divorce [End Page 242] rates and single mothers that had been building up in the course of the 1970s. As Becker declared in the book's opening sentence, "the family in the Western world has been radically altered, some claim almost destroyed, by the events of the last three decades."7 ________ Becker's hyperbolic assessment forms the opening epigraph of Melinda Cooper's brilliant Family Values.8 As Cooper shows in her important revisionist account, financialization and neoliberal depoliticization were never opposed to family values...

Institutions and Rural Stagnation in Eastern Indonesia

This article addresses why agricultural productivity is still very low in peripheral parts of eastern Indonesia. The paper identifies rules and norms underpinning traditionalism. It further addresses how increased land-use efficiency can be supported while maintaining communal land ownership. Information collected from in-depth interviews was analysed based on new institutional economics (NIE) theory. I argue that the government, adat leaders, the Catholic Church, leading businesses, and internationally funded NGOs are organisations contributing to the status quo. Policy recommendations include awareness among international donors of what NGOs really do. Civil society organisations could contribute to a more efficient and democratic government and less feudalist traditional leadership. A government tax on fertile land could form the basis for a cadastre system, secure farmers’ permanent land-user rights, and also enhance land productivity, without reducing the values of a rich culture based on communal land.

Ecological conditions and ecosystem services of wetlands in the Lake Tana Area, Ethiopia

Although wetlands are known to provide vital ecosystem services, the current state of wetlands in Ethiopia in terms of their ecosystem service components remains poorly understood. Wetlands located in the UNESCO Lake Tana Biosphere Reserve have been highly degraded, but possess highly valuable resources. Therefore, this study sought to assess the major ecological states and identify the main ecosystem services (ESs), along with local people's perceptions of wetland management. Nine wetlands were selected from pristine/reference, agricultural and urban land uses of the Lake Tana area. Numerous ESs were identified, categorized into four main ecosystem services, analyzed using a conceptual model adopted for this purpose, and their ecological conditions were assessed using a range of methods. The results revealed that the provisioning and cultural services were found to surpass the regulatory and supporting services of wetlands in agricultural and urban types, as compared to wetlands located in pristine areas. Although most of the local residents positively viewed wetland regulation and supporting services, weak policy and decision support such as wetland use planning, investment interventions and communal land ownership, and poor development of diversified livelihood were found to pose major challenges to sustainable utilization of wetland resources. The range of plant species diversity among the impaired wetlands was observed to be related to the degree of disturbance, with urban and agricultural wetlands being highly degraded as compared to pristine wetlands. Moreover, these impaired wetlands were found to be invaded by upland and exotic weeds, out-competing the socioeconomically and ecologically important native species.

From the seat of a traditional Kingdom to a Garden city: the socio-spatial politics of managing green areas in Kumasi, Ghana

Established in 1817, Kumasi, Ghana’s second largest city was accorded the accolade ‘Garden city of West Africa’ in the 1940s due to its beautiful green areas. Over its 200 years of existence, the city’s development and morphology has been greatly shaped by its strong cultural, traditional and socio-political antecedents, rooted in its establishment as an important fortress of the Ashanti Kingdom. Today, Kumasi has lost its ‘Garden city’ accolade owing to poor management of these ‘green areas’. This paper argues that the challenges of managing open spaces in Kumasi can be explained by the city’s strong historical foundations and socio-political conflicts between indigenous/customary land ownership and state urban planning regime. Situated within the city’s historical and socio-political contexts, the study draws on multiple qualitative methods including: document review, institutional consultations, key informant interviews, and field observations, to gather evidences. The paper reveals, that central to the problem of managing open spaces in Kumasi are the city’s strong customary land ownership structures and socio-political history of conflicts between its traditional set-up and state officialdom. These conflicts are continuously being shaped by a complex state institutional framework, customary and communal land ownership structure.

Traditional Knowledge on The Animal Utilization by The Hatam Tribe of Manokwari, West Papua Province

<p class="IsiAbstrakIndo"><span lang="EN-GB">Animal utilization in traditional community life is an integral part of traditional knowledge itself. This research aims to reveal the Hatam people’s traditional knowledge about the utilization of animals in their lives. The method used is the exploratory survey method. The respondents were determined purposively using the snowball sampling technique. The results showed that there are at least 55 species of animals commonly used by the Hatam people. Based on the forms of utilization, the animals can be divided into six groups: consumption, traditional medicine, specific meanings, traditional technology and arts, significant value, and traditional purposes. Wild animals are most widely used for the living needs of the Hatam people. The traditional hunt that is limited and the communal land ownership system (</span><em><span lang="EN-GB">ulayat</span></em><span lang="EN-GB"> system) practiced by the Hatam people have indirectly helped preserve and ensure the availability of wildlife for the Hatam people’s needs. In addition to being a form of documentation of Hatam people’s traditional knowledge, the results of this research also have significance for the development of science especially in the field of ethnozoology. The form of interaction between Hatam people and animals revealed in this research can also serve as a reference for designing development policies related to the presence of Hatam people in the Arfak mountains. </span></p>

Water Rights on Community Lands: LandMark’s Findings from 100 Countries

This paper analyzes whether national laws acknowledge indigenous peoples and other rural communities in 100 countries as owners of waters that arise within their lands. Results derive from information collected by LandMark to score the legal status of community land tenure. Findings are positive; half of all countries recognize communities as lawful possessors of water on their lands. Three quarters permit communities to manage the distribution and use of water on their lands. While 71 percent of countries declare water to be a public resource, this belies the substantial existence of privately owned water. In 29 percent of countries, private water is an identified legal category, and in many other countries obtainable rights to water are sufficiently substantial to imply lawful possession. Communities are beneficiaries mainly where customary rights are accorded status as property rights, or where ownership of public lands and water are devolved to rural collectives. However, opposite trends of nationalization and regulation of water suggest that while legal recognition of community land ownership may rise in the future, this will not necessarily include waters on the land. Irrespective of tenure, rural communities in 72 of 77 countries (93.5 percent) are legally assured access to water for domestic purposes. This is consistent with the rising definition of safe drinking water as a human right, although access does not necessarily come free of cost.

Enabling Capabilities: Innovation and Development in the Outer Hebrides

The existing challenges to non-profit heritage organisations are increasing in these volatile and austere climates. Particularly, existing organisational and strategic mission developments are needed to enable more resilient organisations. This paper explores the relationship between Ionad Hiort and the Glasgow School of Art’s Institute of Design Innovation (INDI) as a six-month case study for understanding how design innovation can build creative capabilities within this unique partnership. In this case, the “building” of a new type of heritage centre on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis in Scotland. It focuses on the concept of innovation in approaching complex situations as an alternative to existing means of problem solving. Through a series of workshops and engaging informal sessions a new strategy was built, which focused the group’s potential. The outcome being a new way to build confidence within communities and build new relationships, enabling new creative capabilities within a rural island community.

Nation and State-Building in South Sudan: Violence, Development, and Democracy

This paper contributes to the on-going debate about nation and state building projects in Africa by focusing on the case of South Sudan. I discuss South Sudan’s political challenges by analyzing the factors that fuel the problem of violence. This study situates the problem within the socio-historical context of state formation. In the first section, I quantify the determinants of violence, present frequencies and percent distribution of incidents resulting in documented deaths, and tabulate the ratio of person(s) killed to number of incidents in the states most affected by violence. I exposit on the legal dualism of an individual right to land running parallel to communal land ownership, and the tension that exists between the two systems and its relationship to fueling violence over access to land. I then argue that South Sudan must reconcile differences between private, public, state ownership of land (freehold/leasehold land tenure) and communal land ownership. Lastly, I provide a discussion on the New Sudan Framework (NSF), presented as one alternative model for nation building in South Sudan. I conclude the study with a call for a better understanding of the issues that drive violence, and enumerate a number of tentative reforms that may bring peace to a war-torn South Sudan and enable it to build a peaceful society for its citizens.