Private Property Regimes Research Articles

Rethinking Trans Trajectories via Life History

This article provides a life history analysis of Pepa Moreno, a transgender individual from Puebla, Mexico. The life events that she narrated in the interview conducted at her home and business—her move out of street sex work and her start as a business and property owner—offer a glimpse into the intertwining of personal/familial history and the processes unfolding in the spaces of society and economy. The article employs a critical realist framework around identity, based on life history as method, setting the scene around major restructurings of economy that private property regimes, urban transformation, morphing class realities, and capital investment (under neoliberalism) effected over her life: from adolescence into middle age. These transformations conjugate with changes across Pepa's own trajectory; key here are the meanings of “legitimate” work and moral worth that lie at the heart of the moral-legal economies that trans people in town, especially of working-class backgrounds, must confront. Labor status and class deeply intersect with a remaking of herself, which culminates with her naming herself as transgender once she has established herself as property owner and businessperson. However, even while invoking this category, she does not use it in line with the activist and sexological discourses that arose from the late 1990s on in Mexico City and which became prominent in Puebla in the early 2000s. The article thus maps the changing positions—and positionalities—of Pepa, examining the dialectics between lived experience and social structure, and the spaces of agency achieved through identity work.

Community Management of Groundwater under a Private Property Regime: An Example of Institutional Local Adaptation to Overexploitation Problems in the Copiapó Aquifer, Chile

The governance model established in Chilean water law delegates responsibility for groundwater management to private water rights owners. The Copiapó aquifer in the Atacama Region, Chile, has problems of overexploitation resulting from intensive use of the resource. This is explained by the limited information on the water availability in the aquifer and the existence of legally granted water rights whose flows exceed the rate of natural recharge. In this context, water users formed Chile’s first groundwater users’ community in the Copiapó basin for the collective administration of the aquifer. Although this organization is regulated by Chilean water law, the way in which its members participate in decision-making processes and some self-management mechanisms that they have implemented are local institutional arrangements that go beyond the rules established in the Water Code, showing this organization to be an empirical case of institutional adaptation to the overdepletion of an aquifer. The local institutional arrangements include incorporating environmental protection objectives for aquifers and wetlands, establishing an institutional arrangement that guarantees the participation in the decision-making processes of different water uses and users, developing an internal management model that promotes temporary transfers of partial volumes of a water right and carrying out studies to improve water management.

Building programmable commons

ABSTRACT Before rushing into regulating order-enabling computational technologies, is there a different way to think about them? What if power over what can be computed, translates to power over what can be decided? Can we then shape policies for the management of technologies that do not just ‘take’ power, but make it? By reviewing early work of network theorists and Internet scholars as well as literature on the governance of the commons, this paper argues that beyond market, states, and their hybrids and beyond private property and public sector regimes, there exists political space for social practices and transformative legal interventions that can give shape to radically different institutional actions for the management of the world’s infocomputational resources. Programmable commons and the public value of programmability are thus introduced as parts of a broader political project that aspires to democratise access to, and management of these resources. By drawing on the history of a family of commons – namely intellectual commons, infrastructure commons, and global commons – this paper explores the material form and impact of infocomputational technologies and presents a blend of bottom-up and top-down initiatives for their commons-based organisation.

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

The Peasant Question Under Nyerere’s Socialism

This essay is a succinct overview of the manner in which the first president of Tanzania attempted to address the peasant question in the country. In the immediate aftermath of independence (1961–1966), Nyerere’s government bought into the World Bank’s recommendation of village settlement schemes and range development to pull the peasantry and the pastoralist out of the backward, traditional agriculture to modern, more productive agriculture and pastoralism spearheaded by what the WB called progressive farmers. Selected ‘progressive farmers’ would be resettled in new environment administered by hired management which would teach them modern husbandry under close supervision. Village settlement scheme was established at a great cost. By 1966 it was clear that both these projects were disastrous. With the adoption of the country’s socialist blueprint, the government adopted the policy of ‘small is beautiful’, so to speak. Peasant agriculture would be improved through extension services and collective production in Ujamaa villages. Peasants were not particularly enthusiastic about Ujamaa villages. Very few were established making the party diehards, including Nyerere, exasperated. In 1973 the President ordered that living in villages was compulsory and thus began the forced villagisation from 1971–1974 by which time it was estimated that some five million people were forcefully resettled in the so-called development villages. In hindsight, it can be surmised that this move both discredited the Ujamaa project and Nyerere could have lost his peasant base. Beginning late 1970s and early 1980s the country experienced its worst economic crisis due to a variety of internal and external reasons providing imperialism and internal proto-bourgeoisies an entry point for imposing the notorious structural adjustment programmes. The essay briefly discusses the fate and the fight of the peasant under the subsequent neo-liberal phase predicated on the so-called free market, private property regime and private investment exposing the peasant to the vagaries of capitalism and its crisis. The essay ends with outlining some elements of an alternative discourse to spearhead the peasant struggle for autonomous, sovereign development. JEL Codes: P32, Q15, Q24

“It is the Wild West out here”

This research builds on the emerging body of literature investigating the implications of changing land tenure relations in the Prairie Provinces, where over 70% of Canada’s farmland is located. Through an analysis of survey data collected in 2019 from 400 grain farmers, we address the following research questions: How are farmers experiencing changing patterns of land tenure and control at the local level? What challenges and opportunities do farmers face in these changing farmland markets? And, how has the entry of new actors (farmland investors) changed relationships between landlords and tenants? Our findings suggest that those farmers who are witnessing the financialization of farmland in their regions view this phenomenon with alarm. Furthermore, we show that those who rent from corporate investors are more often subject to landlord influence over production practices and pay higher rental rates than those who rent from other landlord types. Concern about farmland concentration is widespread among Prairie farmers, with a variety of negative effects identified, including increased competition over land and the decline of local communities. We recommend that future research probe how different investor types (individual vs. corporate and/or institutional) engage in land markets, examine the gender dimensions of landlord-tenant relations, and engage in analyses that challenge the current iteration of the private property regime.

Cartographic Enclosure and Urban Cadastral Mapping in the Ethiopian Somali Capital

Cadastral maps, which are designed as comprehensive systems for recording and surveying land relations, are critical for making society legible and governable. However, critical cartography scholarship suggests that exercising power through maps is not straightforward: It is dependent on how maps are created and used during the mapping process. This paper examines cadastral mapping in Jigjiga, a multi-ethnic city in the Ethiopian Somali frontier where state authority over land and people have long been contested among ethnic Somali residents. This paper follows the ruling government’s renewed attempt to establish land control through spatial planning based on document analysis and ethnographic fieldwork. It investigates how urban planners enclose the city’s property landscape cartographically on land use maps and how land surveyors used these maps to georeference property. It demonstrates the critical role of land governance experts in navigating the simplified map and a complex property landscape on the ground. Cadastral mapping is instrumental for state territorialization and land commodification, integrating ethnic Somali property into the sedentary logic of the state. Rather than providing an account of how property is rendered legible, this paper highlights the incomplete and open-ended character of cadastral mapping in the constitution of private property regimes.

Archaeology, land tenure, and Indigenous dispossession in Mexico

In this paper, I examine a case of dispossession that made land belonging to Indigenous Totonac residents of San Antonio Ojital part of the archaeological site of El Tajín. To do so, I examine the failure of a 2016 claim made to Mexico’s Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos. Rather than this being a case of purpose-driven dispossession or an unintended consequence of well-meaning policies, I trace the ultimate causes to multicultural recognition, 19th-century land reforms, and the expansion of archaeological research in El Tajín. Liberal land reforms brought a private property regime into being through enrollment and inscription, and Totonac landowners around El Tajín used the regime to their benefit. As El Tajín expanded though excavation, archaeologists and landowners used the private property regime’s conception of space to address conflicts in El Tajín. The resulting pragmatic accommodations would ultimately fail landowners when an archaeological megaproject came in. Ultimately, I argue for an historical and contextual understanding of archaeology and land tenure to understand the discipline’s diverse relationships with dispossession.

Land governance for agroecology

Agroecological transitions aim to redesign the structure of contemporary global food systems to improve food security, ecosystem health, community development, worker livelihoods, and social and ecological justice. A fundamental principle of agroecology is the responsible governance of land. Yet land—as a concept, resource, and territory—is heavily contested through processes of colonization, enclosure, commodification, and financialization. The governance of land and natural resources is also intimately tied to questions of power and privilege—Who governs land? Who benefits, and who is excluded? These questions presuppose an ontological understanding of land that can also be contested: What is land, what purpose(s) does it serve, and for whom? In this article, we review key concepts at the intersection of land governance and agroecology. We take a case study approach to highlight how tensions around ontologies of land mediate agroecological futures in 2 settler-colonial contexts: Brazil and Canada. We then explore how land governance for agroecology might be experienced and understood across different land governance institutions—including relational and community commons, private property regimes, and new forms of hybrid land relations that challenge land privatization. We discuss how these land regimes influence people, landscapes, and agroecological outcomes and conclude with a consideration of the access, equity, and justice implications of different land governance approaches for sustainable food systems.

Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates

Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates

The Potentials and Occlusions of Zhonghua Minguo/Taiwan: In Search of a Left Nationalism in the Tsai Ing-wen Era

Abstract Tsai Ing-wen has consistently referred to the nation that she governs as 中華民國台灣 (The Republic of China Taiwan), the term representing a major rhetorical feature of her administration. Breaking from the exclusively Taiwan-centered discourse which traditionally defined DPP politics, Tsai has seemingly created an entirely new name for the state she governs. This article examines both the discursive potentials, but also the occlusions, of this newly coined neologism. It argues that the term is defined by a lack of materialist critique, in which essential questions regarding labor exploitation and private property regimes remain unaddressed. While Tsai has successfully combined the ROC’s old Cold War raison d'etre (Chinese humanism as anti-Communism) with the Taiwanese independence movement’s desire for global recognition through the nation-state form, what has been lost is any real commitment to a politics of working-class empowerment, which is reflected in the Tsai administration’s abandonment of progressive labor law reform in 2018, as well as increasing trade liberalization policies with the US introduced in 2020. Returning to the roots of Taiwanese socialist discourse, this article will examine the possibility that “ROC-Taiwan” as a political project could still have a socialist future, despite its markedly capitalist past and present.

Eleven theses on the Fool

Perhaps, today we can reverse Hegel’s objective idealist formula in The Philosophy of History. It is not reason but foolery that rules the world and foolery is the false-true, eternally apparent and the absolutely powerful. The Fool in ‘thought’, orientation, action and expression (destruction of the planet, submission to traditional and modern hierarchies, deification of private property, granting free movement to corporates and capital over beings, mass caging of the vulnerable, populism, virtual lynching, ‘cancel culture’, hoarding toilet paper and canola oil, etc.) poses an existential social and planetary threat. All of this begs the urgent question, who is the being that commits to such acts? And, what social forces, processes and apparatuses give birth to or encourage the emergence of this being? In other words, who or what is the Fool, and what is their tomfoolery? Here via a historical materialist account I put forward eleven ontological, epistemological and ethical theses on what constitutes, manufactures and defines the properties of the Fool. It would seem that foolishness is one subset of the set of alienation derived from statist hierarchical relations and the regime of private property. A Fool is always alienated but an alienated being is not necessarily a Fool.

Property which is the personal private property of the wife, husband

Problem setting. The article examines issues related to property that is the personal private property of the wife, husband. Some problems and contradictions of the legal regime of personal private property are analyzed, according to the results of the analysis of which, one’s own position is stated. The case law on this issue is studied and its key aspects within the topic of the article are singled out. The thesis is proposed and argued that an effective way to establish the legal regime of property, according to which it will be the personal private property of a husband or wife can be a marriage contract. The practical significance of the obtained results is that they can be used: in the research field ‒ for further research on the problems of personal private property of spouses in family relationships; in law-making activity ‒ for improvement of provisions of the current legislation of Ukraine, at creation of new and modification of the operating domestic regulatory legal acts concerning the outlined problem; law enforcement activities ‒ by applying practical conclusions and recommendations in practice in matters relating to personal private property of husband, wife; in the educational process ‒ as a didactic support of certain topics in the discipline «Family Law of Ukraine». Analysis of recent researches and publications in which this problem was considered, showed that, in particular, such scientists as V.K. Antoshkina, V.I. Borisov, L. Vlasenko, E.M. Vorozheykin, N. Zagriya, I.V. Zhilinkova, A.O. Dutko, V.O. Kozhevnikova, L.V. Krasitska, V.A. Kreutor, O.M. Ponomarenko, O.V. Rozgon, O.I. Safonchik, O.V. Sinegubov, I.V. Spasibo-Fateeva, R.O. Stefanchuk, E.O. Fomina, S. Fursa, E. Fursa, E.A. Kharitonov, Y.S. Chervony, V.L. Yarotsky and others paid much attention to its various aspects. Target of research. Research of the legal nature and features of property that is the personal private property of the wife, husband. Article’s main body. According to the Family Code of Ukraine, the personal private property of the husband and wife are: 1) property acquired before marriage; 2) property acquired during the marriage, but on the basis of a contract of gift or by inheritance; 3) property acquired during the marriage, but for funds that belonged to one of the spouses personally; 4) housing acquired by one of the spouses during the marriage as a result of privatization in accordance with the Law of Ukraine “On Privatization of State Housing”; 5) land acquired as a result of privatization, which was in his / her use, or obtained as a result of privatization of land of state and communal agricultural enterprises, institutions and organizations, or obtained from state and communal lands within the norms of free privatization defined by the Land Code Of Ukraine. In addition, the personal private property of the spouses is also things for individual use, ie things that each spouse personally uses daily or regularly. Here it is important to emphasize that there is no clearly defined list of such things in the current legislation. However, as a rule, these include clothing, perfumes, cosmetics, accessories, jewelry, personal hygiene products and more. Such items include, in particular, jewelry, even if they were purchased with common funds. However, in practice there are difficulties in what is to be understood by the concept of “jewelry”, because it is evaluative. In the event that the division of property of the spouses takes place in court, the court must decide in each case whether a particular thing is valuable. Conclusions and prospects for the development. Thus, property acquired before marriage is exclusively personal private property – marriage registration does not change the legal regime of property acquired separately by each spouse before marriage. In addition, such property retains a regime of separation regardless of the duration of the marriage, even if the property was used not only by the owner but by both spouses. As for the property acquired in marriage, it is possible to recognize it as personal private property, but this requires a lot of effort and substantiated evidence that confirms the fact that one of the spouses spent their personal money and specific property. We concluded that an effective way to avoid possible risks and protect spouses from future misunderstandings and disputes over property regimes is to conclude a marriage contract, which can not only resolve the property relations of husband and wife during marriage, but also prevent possible lawsuits. disputes over the division of property in the event of divorce.

Formative encounters: Colonial data collection on land and law in German Micronesia.

Data collections are a hallmark of nineteenth-century administrative knowledge making, and they were by no means confined to Europe. All colonial empires transferred and translated these techniques of serialised and quantified information gathering to their dominions overseas. The colonial situation affected the encounters underlying vital statistics, enquête methods and land surveying. In this paper, two of those data collections will be investigated-a survey on land and a survey on indigenous law, both conducted around 1910 on the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, which had fallen under German colonial influence a decade earlier. Strikingly, there are no enumerators or envoys of the state visiting the doorsteps of Pohnpei. To facilitate the data collection on homesteads, the whole population of the island was called upon to measure their respective plots of land themselves, without resorting to certified land surveyors. The preserved cadastral lists and spreadsheets testify to a rather peculiar contact between the colonizing administration and the colonized peoples. I argue that the production of data made encounters necessary, which are best observed though a methodological focus on data practices. I argue, furthermore, that the Pohnpeians were prompted during the surveys to define their homestead in new terms. This did not only entail new two-dimensional plots but also a new regime of private property. The change in the legal concept can be seen as a continuation of colonial violence by other means, given that it happened in the aftermath of the defeated Pohnpei Rebellion. The argument of the paper is, therefore, that data collection can have formative effects on society, and that measurement and quantified information are often, as Witold Kula argued, a scene of conflict. At its core, the installation of these metric regimes signified a change in patterns of justification, resource management and the unwritten constitution of the Pacific island.

Common asset trusts to effectively steward natural capital and ecosystem services at multiple scales

Ecosystems (natural capital) produce a range of benefits to humans. Natural capital is best thought of as common property since many of the ecosystem services it helps produce are non-rival and/or non-excludable. Private property regimes and markets alone are ineffective and inappropriate institutions to manage them sustainably. These systems can be better managed as commons, using more nuanced private and community property rights and Common Asset Trusts (CATs), with legal precedent in the Public Trust Doctrine. Effective CATs embody a generalized version of Elinore Ostrom's eight core design principles for sustainable commons management: (1) shared identity and purpose; (2) equitable distribution of contributions and benefits; (3) fair and inclusive decision-making; (4) monitoring agreed behaviours; (5) graduated responses; (6) fast and fair conflict resolution; (7) authority to self-govern; and (8) collaborative relations with other groups and spatial scales. Here, we describe a few existing and proposed systems that approximate effective CATs. We also suggest how Costa Rica can transform its existing payment for ecosystem services (PES) scheme into a national CAT. Finally, we describe how CATs can facilitate more fair and effective public/private partnerships (PPPs) to invest in natural capital and ecosystem services.

New Values for New Challenges: The Emergence of Progressive Commons as a Property Regime for the 21st Century

ABSTRACT Property regimes are based on fundamental values of the society or group that designs and reproduces them. This paper analyses the ethical underpinnings of Progressive Commons in comparison to the values underlying private property and traditional Commons. Against this backdrop, we discuss the potential of Progressive Commons to address major challenges in context of the twenty-first century economy. Seed Commons serve as an example. Our analysis shows that Progressive Commons respond to contemporary societal and environmental challenges by re-interpreting the classical values underlying traditional private and common property regimes, turning them to sovereignty, re-democratization, and social-ecological sustainability in the global context.

Discussion about the Privately-Owned and Private Individual

The privately-owned appears in the process of labor division, the capacity and quality are promoted and the assiduous and diligent virtue become the needs and motivations of life. Lazy bad habits appear, causing a social division of labor with antagonistic and magnetic causes to appear. Lazy bad habits appear that make the society with division of antagonistic labor, the private individual appear. The private individual is the strange thing that people need to be abolished, that means eliminating possession outside of labor and division of labor with antagonistic characteristics, the private property regime will be lost. In general, private elimination is not the elimination of division of labor, but the elimination of division of labor in an antagonistic way, which is the abolition of laziness and non-labor.

The changes of property-rights regimes and lake degradation: an institutional analysis of Lake Rawapening

The effects of various property-rights regimes on natural resource systems have long been debated among scholars and practitioners. A large number of studies have investigated the relationship between various property-rights regimes and environmental outcomes and show that public, state, and private property regimes are each capable of producing sustainable environmental outcomes. However, the evidence is very diverse. This study examined how the changes in property rights regimes at the local level have impacted on lake degradation using an institutional economics perspective, specifically the property rights approach, by taking Lake Rawapening as the case. Lake Rawapening is a multifunctional semi-natural lake currently degraded where almost 70% of its surface is covered by water hyacinth and experiencing rapid siltation. This research used a case study method. Data and information were collected from in-depth interviews with key informants, government officials and reviews of reports and documents related to Lake Rawapening. Results of the study reveal that the current property rights regime in the lake and its catchment areas associated with social changes was driving local resource users towards greater lake degradation. There were opportunities to build on existing village-level institutions to develop collaborative management systems to help protect the lake ecosystem.

The role of property rights in shaping the effectiveness of protected areas and resisting forest loss in the Yucatan Peninsula.

The impact of different types of land tenure in areas with high biodiversity and threats of deforestation remains poorly understood. We apply rigorous quasi-experimental methods and detailed geospatial data to assess the role of tenure regimes—communally held lands (specifically, ejidos), private property, and their impact on the effectiveness of protected areas, in reducing forest loss in a biodiversity hotspot- the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. We find evidence that, while protected areas are effective on average, their impact depends on the underlying type of tenure regime and forest, proxied by biomass levels and biome. Protecting communally held land may reduce deforestation, specifically the loss of medium- and high-biomass forests, compared to forests under private property regimes. Our results have important policy implications for the conservation and climate change mitigation efforts on the Yucatan. However, the high variance in forest loss rates among ejidos indicates that other characteristics of ejidos may be central to understanding community-based forest conservation opportunities.

A Nation of Settlers: The Early American Republic and the Colonization of the Northwest Territory

A Nation of Settlers:The Early American Republic and the Colonization of the Northwest Territory Michael Witgen (bio) The Jefferson-Hartley map, drawn to reflect the Land Ordinance of 1784, represented the settler colonial aspirations of the United States (Figure I). The map was produced by Thomas Jefferson as part of his work on a series of congressional committees tasked with creating a system of government for lands from the Appalachian Mountains west to the Mississippi River valley. The ordinance of 1784 was revised into the Northwest Ordinance, the legal mechanism designed by the federal government to transform Native homelands in the newly organized Northwest Territory into the public domain of the United States.1 The map, in effect, performs the ideological work imagined by the ordinances. It erases the presence of Native peoples and inscribes indigenous land with new meaning, as nascent states poised to enter the union on an equal footing with the original thirteen. This vision for the western expansion of the United States hinged on a political imaginary that understood North America as "the New World." This was the New World envisioned by John Locke, who wrote in his Second Treatise of Government that "in the beginning all the World was America."2 Locke, like many of his contemporaries, understood Native peoples in North America to be living in a "state of nature," which he described as a universal commons without any organized system of governance. "Labour, [End Page 391] in the Beginning," he wrote, "gave a Right of Property."3 Native peoples, he imagined, had failed to exercise this right. They were stuck as if at the beginning of time, living as a primitive version of humanity. From this perspective Native peoples had not cultivated the land because indigenous territories in North America were not organized around any private property regime discernable to the peoples of European empire.4 Accordingly, Locke asserted that Native peoples had not established "dominion" or possession over their homelands and therefore had not entered into a social compact establishing a legitimate government and civil society. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure I. Jefferson-Hartley map, 1784. Courtesy, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Conceptualizing North America as the New World, European empires regarded the continent as unsettled land, which allowed them to claim these lands by right of discovery. The Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution granted the Northwest Territory to the United States. Imagining this space not as Native North America but rather as an unsettled [End Page 392] wilderness, the United States set out to transform Native homelands into American homesteads. Under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance, with the immigration of five thousand free white men, a settlement could be organized as a federal territory, with an appointed governor and judiciary and an elected legislative council. With sixty thousand white inhabitants, a territory could draft a state constitution and petition the republic for admission to the union. The explicit goal of the Northwest Ordinance was to establish the civil society of the American Republic in the region.5 The land law represented a social contract between the federal government and white settlers willing to move west to claim what was assumed to be wilderness for the republic. They would not be colonial subjects; rather, they would be citizens of the United States. Jefferson's map reflected this ideology and its assumption that North America and the Northwest Territory existed in a "state of nature."6 In colonial regimes an exogenous power establishes its authority over a subordinated population to extract wealth and resources from the colonized territory. Accordingly, colonialism requires an ongoing political relationship rooted in the structural inequality between the colonizer and the colonized. Settler colonialism, in contrast, seeks an end or completion of the colonial project via the elimination of the indigenous population and its replacement by a settler population. This was the outcome projected by the Jefferson-Hartley map. The colonial project of the United States in North America, conceptualized as an experiment in self-government, would come to an end with the elimination of the uncivilized Indigenous population and the successful creation of the settler state...