Indigenous Land Tenure Research Articles

Land tenure and management reforms in East and Southern Africa – the case of Botswana

Since attainment of independence, almost every country in East and Southern Africa has introduced some kind of land reform aimed at reconciling indigenous land tenure practices and those introduced by colonial regimes. The reforms have centred on modification of tenurial rules on access, ownership, administration and transfer of land rights coupled with land redistribution and/or restitution in some countries. With the exception of a few countries, such as Botswana, land reforms have largely remained on statute books with little to show on the ground. The paper gives an overview of land reforms in East and Southern Africa, taking Botswana as a case study. It notes that although Botswana has largely been successful in implementing land reforms, it is currently experiencing land tenure problems, especially in peri-urban settlements and inner city low-income areas, despite government's enhanced control over local land administrative structures. The paper ends with suggestions on how to contain the current problems.

Local perceptions of indigenous land tenure systems: views of peasants, women and dignitaries in a rural province of Burkina Faso

This article is based on the observation that the large debate on the nature and consequences of so-called indigenous land tenure systems does not sufficiently take into account the perceptions and interpretations of peasants themselves. Consequently, its aims are to provide people with a voice and to analyse their assessment of different forms of access to land, of the modifications undergone in recent times, and their adjustments to this change. The results of this qualitative approach are compared with some statistical information gathered by the authors in the study region – three villages in central Burkina Faso – as well as country-wide. As a result, one may conclude that peasants in this area do not feel insecure about their land tenure situation, and this assessment of their own position is confirmed by empirical data.

Colonist Land‐Allocation Decisions, Land Use, and Deforestation in the Ecuadorian Amazon Frontier

As one of the last agricultural frontiers of the humid tropics, Amazonia is the largest area of the world currently undergoing frontier settlement. Although the earliest intrusions of foreign populations into Amazonia date from pre-Hispanic times, the large-scale entrance of peasant colonists into the vast region is a recent phenomenon. Much of this movement represents the spontaneous migration of peoples, but governments in the region have also become increasingly interested in opening up and integrating Amazonia to national and international economies. These actions are frequently seen as potential solutions to a number of national problems, including the need to increase agricultural production, correct spatial imbalances in the distribution of population, exploit frontier lands for reasons of national security, and defuse potentially serious political problems resulting from the existing agrarian structure, landlessness, and unemployment. The upper basin of the Amazon in Ecuador, bordering on the eastern slopes of the Andes, is one such area of frontier settlement. Recent decades have witnessed the rapid conversion of these Amazonian forests to agricultural uses through a series of schemes bearing such labels as land development and colonization. Most forest intervention in the region has come at the hands of colonist farmers attempting to establish land claims along transport routes originally constructed to aid in petroleum exploration and exploitation. These are farmers who formerly have made a living in long-established farmlands and who, for various reasons (population pressures, pervasive poverty, maldistribution of farmland, lack of inputs for intensive cultivation, lack of nonagrarian livelihood opportunities, and generally inadequate rural development) have been increasingly squeezed out of their homelands. A marginal person by virtue of his low socioeconomic and political status, the farmer often perceives

TENURE ARRANGEMENTS AND ACCESS TO CREDIT: THE CASE OF SMALL-SCALE FARMERS IN THE NORTHERN PROVINCE

It has been argued that indigenous land tenure arrangements influence individual incentives to invest in improvements (like watering points) and the ability to finance such investment through access to credit. In this study, data from small-scale livestock owners in the Northern Province are analyzed. The results indicate that those stockowners who operate on communal grazing with restrictions on the use of the common resource, earn more net farm income and invest in watering points. They are also more likely to have access to credit as compared with those stockowners who operate on open access with no restrictions on the use of the commons. The results have some positive implications for the formation of pup schemes to manage livestock production in communal grazing areas in south Africa.

Tourism and Cultural Change in Small-Scale Societies

As tourism increases in small, unindustrialized societies, it is increasingly important to understand its impacts and the primary process by which it produces cultural change. Gaining insight into how tourism leads to major cultural changes (which are often deleterious) will assist applied anthropologists, indigenous governmental departments, and perhaps even tourism agencies themselves in minimizing the damage that touristic activities create. Fieldwork on Yap Island and case study reviews indicate that tourism can increase indigenous jobs, foreign exchange reserves, cultural preservation, and education. Deleterious touristic impacts involve human displacement, subsistence disruptions, social conflict, loss of autonomy, dependency, crime, and other disturbances of the host culture. Analysis suggests that the impacts of tourism are magnified when tourists alter their hosts' economic base, particularly the indigenous land utilization and tenure relationships. Therefore, negative touristic impacts can be mo...

Legacies of territorial reorganization for indigenous land claims in Northern Russia1

Abstract Territorial reorganization of indigenous society in Russia's North during the Soviet period included the disruption of indigenous land tenure mechanisms, sedentarization, and forced relocation. These historical processes now serve as a backdrop for current efforts toward land reform, one alleged goal of which is to increase the potential for indigenous self‐government. This article explores the effects of territorial reorganization on the scope (geographical and functional) of indigenous petitions for land allotments, their gendered nature, and the problems of legitimate ownership rights. 1 map, 1 table, 26 references.

Land Tenure Reform in East Africa: Good, Bad or Unimportant?1

Theoretical arguments lead to the conclusion that there should be more land-secured credit, more investment, a more active land market, and more inequality of land in a community under freehold tenure compared with one in which the state owns and allocates the land. Detailed evidence from two communities in Kenya and Tanzania suggests that none of these conclusions holds because the stated policy differences do not in fact cause the land markets to perform differently in the two countries. These results are in broad agreement with other studies conducted in Africa in recent years that indicate that indigenous land tenure arrangements provide considerable security for investment and continue to have strong impacts on land markets even when they are no longer in effect according to the law. Copyright 1994 by Oxford University Press.

Agricultural reconstruction in a consumer society: The Mboza Village project1

While this paper draws upon research conducted in northern Natal, it has general relevance for rural development debates in South Africa today. The authors argue that it is imperative that agricultural development be located within the context of socio‐economic factors that prescribe relations of consumption and development of labour supply. Agricultural performance and the potential for agricultural development should be assessed within the context of the interrelationship between different spheres of economic exchange as well as the differential management of risk within a narrow range of marginal economic options. Serious attention should be given to the structural causes of rural poverty and the high social and economic costs associated with rural life in South Africa. Such issues are not necessarily addressed in attempts to increase rural productivity through reforming indigenous land tenure systems.

Thermodynamics of electrocaloric phenomena in KCl : OH — Paraelectric cooling

Cumulative environmental impacts driven by anthropogenic stressors lead to disproportionate effects on indigenous communities that are reliant on land and water resources. Understanding and counteracting these effects requires knowledge from multiple sources. Yet the combined use of Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Scientific Knowledge (SK) has both technical and philosophical hurdles to overcome, and suffers from inherently imbalanced power dynamics that can disfavour the very communities it intends to benefit. In this article, we present a ‘two-eyed seeing’ approach for co-producing and blending knowledge about ecosystem health by using an adapted Bayesian Belief Network for the Slave River and Delta region in Canada's Northwest Territories. We highlight how bridging TK and SK with a combination of field data, interview transcripts, existing models, and expert judgement can address key questions about ecosystem health when considerable uncertainty exists. SK indicators (e.g., bird counts, mercury in fish, water depth) were graded as moderate, whereas TK indicators (e.g., bird usage, fish aesthetics, changes to water flow) were graded as being poor in comparison to the past. SK indicators were predominantly spatial (i.e., comparing to other locations) while the TK indicators were predominantly temporal (i.e., comparing across time). After being populated by 16 experts (local harvesters, Elders, governmental representatives, and scientists) using both TK and SK, the model output reported low probabilities that the social-ecological system is healthy as it used to be. We argue that it is novel and important to bridge TK and SK to address the challenges of environmental change such as the cumulative impacts of multiple stressors on ecosystems and the services they provide. This study presents a critical social-ecological tool for widening the evidence-base to a more holistic understanding of the system dynamics of multiple environmental stressors in ecosystems and for developing more effective knowledge-inclusive partnerships between indigenous communities, researchers and policy decision-makers. This represents new transformational empirical insights into how wider knowledge discourses can contribute to more effective adaptive co-management governance practices and solutions for the resilience and sustainability of ecosystems in Northern Canada and other parts of the world with strong indigenous land tenure.