Right Of Access To Land Research Articles

Land access rights in minerals’ responsible sourcing. The case of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Artisanal miners' access to economically and geologically viable lands in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)'s Copperbelt region is a core limitation to responsible cobalt sourcing programs. First established to respond to sourcing risks such as child labor and poor working conditions, responsible cobalt sourcing programs need to increase their scope to root causes. In this article I argue that with the increased attention on responsible sourcing of cobalt, actors across the supply chains should address land access rights issues to effectively tackle reputational risks. These risks affect the image of brand companies which then trickle the responsibility of addressing them down their supply chains. Commodified lands, distributed to private actors through concession-making, led to a highly competitive relationship between artisanal and industrial miners. The absence of available land now prevents the establishment of sustainable responsible sourcing programs. Building on Hilson, Sauerwein and Owen's concept of autonomous coexistence and recognizing the importance of context-sensitivity, I introduce the possibility to define autonomous cohabitation as an avenue for ensuring that artisanal miners securely access economically and geologically viable areas on industrial concessions in the DRC. I argue that companies involved in responsible sourcing programs should aim to develop autonomous cohabitation between ASM and LSM, in which long-term agreements, secured by the DRC state and its newly establish monopoly, the Entreprise Générale du Cobalt (EGC), ensure that land could be shared under specific legal terms, while the production would be sold to the monopoly established by EGC. Taking the example of two responsible sourcing programs, the Mutoshi Pilot Project (now inactive) and Better Mining, I argue that the current interest in visible risks hinders the capacity of these programs to successfully tackle root causes, including land access rights.

Variability is not uncertainty; mobility is not flexibility: Clarifying concepts in pastoralism studies with evidence from Tajikistan

As the “new rangeland paradigm” took shape in the 1990s, climatic variability in pastoral ecosystems was often discussed as “uncertainty”, and the essential mobility of pastoral systems was argued to be possible only with flexible land access rights. These context-specific principles have increasingly been globalized in analyses of diverse pastoral systems. While new understandings of the role of uncertainty and flexibility in pastoral systems have been unquestionably beneficial for particular contexts, uncertainty has been problematically embraced as intrinsically central to pastoral systems.This paper combines a critical review of the literature and field work in Tajikistan’s Rasht Valley to bring into clear relief differences between variability and uncertainty, on the one hand, and mobility and flexibility, on the other. This allows us to see that livestock mobility is a strategy to cope with environmental variability in all pastoral contexts. Flexibility, however, is a strategy to cope with environmental uncertainty that is only present in a subset of pastoral contexts. Importantly, flexibility is not a required precondition for mobility. These realizations carry important implications for governance in pastoral settings. Due to the many challenges of building flexibility into property systems, pastoral land governance should be developed by looking for predictability, and efforts to maintain flexibility should be judicious and empirically well-justified.

Women, Land Tenure Dynamics and Land Sales in Rural Areas. The Case of Syukula Village, Tanzania

Abstract Women’s engagement in rural land sales has been a significant aspect of land tenure dynamics with varied implications to their livelihoods and wellbeing. However, the factors that influence women’s decisions and the modalities of such engagement have not received much attention in social analysis, specifically with regard to women’s perceptions, responses and actions towards land sales, especially in situations of land shortage. In the context where multiple and interacting factors are continuing to transform rural land tenure patterns, this article discusses the varied implications of recent land sales to women, with possible extension of their vulnerabilities, yet also re-invigorating women’s agency regarding land ownership rights. Using a feminist political-ecological perspective, this article shows how women act under constraining circumstances to transform gender relations and patterns of land ownership with varying outcomes to their wellbeing. The findings also suggest deeper interrogation on the capacities of grassroots structures obligated to oversee land tenure security for communities and upholding women’s rights of access to land.

Gender of the family head and food insecurity in urban and rural Nigeria

PurposeAre the urban and rural male-headed households (MHHs) or female-headed households (FHHs) poorer and food (in)secured? Such question is of very important policy concern in the drive towards achieving the first two of the Sustainable Development Goals.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses 2010–2012 waves of General Household Survey cross-sectional panel data to investigate food (in)security and poverty dynamics amongst MHHs and FHHs in Nigeria, with particular attention to rural and urban dimensions.FindingsApplying the tobit and probit regressions while controlling for poverty and other household characteristics, we observed that female-headed families are more vulnerable to higher incidences of food insecurity than male-headed ones and with an overall significant urban food security advantage compared to rural areas. Comparing urban and rural results in terms of land access rights, urban food insecurity manifests more amongst urban FHHs non–Agri-land owners which however falls as food expenditure rises. However, the rise in per capita food consumption, agricultural characteristics and years of schooling reduces the likelihood of food insecurity for all households.Originality/valueThis study, therefore, offers relevant policy inputs towards addressing poverty and food insecurity in a typical developing country such as Nigeria.

Transitional Justice as a Path to Distributive Justice: A Jurisprudential and Legal Case for Land Restitution in Kenya

Rawls’ theory of distributive justice may serve as a useful model in conceptualizing a model of the ideal political economy – one that seeks to keep inequalities that have come about as a result of natural accident to a minimum. Moreover, his principles of justice can be used correctively, to address institutional inequalities that have the effect of entrenching social dislocation. Kenya has, over the decades up until now, been riven by injustices relating to land. This has led to the development of a small cluster of landed elites while the majority of citizens are effectively denied land access rights. This is regardless of the fact that most of the land so acquired by the former was acquired irregularly and with disregard of bona fide title of the original occupants. The concept and process of transitional justice may be viewed as the vehicle toward attaining corrective justice and accountability for offences committed in times of national crisis as a restorative measure.

Measuring community dividends for oil and gas projects—an emerging approach

The development of Australia’s CSG resources brings into sharp focus the realities of achieving a social licence to operate. It often hinges on balancing strong stakeholder interests with hotly contested issues such as land access rights. A disciplined, stakeholder-centric approach for measuring shared value can demonstrate the merits of arrangements agreed between stakeholder groups and could ultimately form part of the solution to what will be one of the defining social licence to operate issues in Australia this decade. Resource companies are making substantial investments to earn, maintain, and enhance local and wider communities as part of establishing their social licences to operate. Understanding and measuring the value created by community investments (part of the wider investments made by companies through areas such as taxes, royalties, development, and employment) drives more transparent and effective outcomes for companies, communities, and other stakeholders. While there is an expectation that community investments deliver value for money, this is difficult to demonstrate without measuring both financial and non-financial impacts. Companies that can measure the value of their community investments can make better investment decisions for the benefit of all stakeholders. Measuring the value of direct corporate investments in local communities draws on social evaluation and engagement methodologies as well as economic-valuation techniques. Considerations include on-the-ground engagement, understanding perceptions of value, understanding the major contributors to value, and alignment with community sentiment. With a knowledge of the value created by particular investments, companies can undertake an analysis to help optimise future investments. There are measurement challenges in this process; however, measuring value can bring about profound insights that strengthen company and community relations. Advantages include: yielding robust data on the costs and shared value of the arrangements by stakeholder group; identifying and quantifying value in all its various forms, such as value protected (through risk mitigation investments) as well as value created; providing a basis for communicating shared value to stakeholders in the common language of dollars; promoting an understanding of how the relevant investments drive value for stakeholders and using this information to encourage community buy-in; and, creating a framework and a process for bridging the divide between stakeholder groups with diverse and opposing views.

Wild food plant use in 21st century Europe: the disappearance of old traditions and the search for new cuisines involving wild edibles

The aim of this review is to present an overview of changes in the contemporary use of wild food plants in Europe, mainly using the examples of our home countries: Poland, Italy, Spain, Estonia and Sweden. We set the scene referring to the nutrition of 19th century peasants, involving many famine and emergency foods. Later we discuss such issues as children's wild snacks, the association between the decline of plant knowledge and the disappearance of plant use, the effects of over-exploitation, the decrease of the availability of plants due to ecosystem changes, land access rights for foragers and intoxication dangers. We also describe the 20th and 21st century vogues in wild plant use, particularly their shift into the domain of haute-cuisine.

Land Tenure, Archaeology, and the Ancestral Pueblo Social Landscape

Archaeology relies upon evidence of past human modification of the natural landscape in order to infer past human social dynamics on the site, local, and regional levels. Given the inferential linkages between past landscape use and social relationships, archaeology can benefit from an approach that more explicitly delineates relationships between systems of land use and land tenure, the social means through which people define and assert land use rights. This research outlines a set of methods for modeling prehistoric land tenure systems and developing a middle range theory of land tenure relationships that may assist archaeologists in their investigations of prehistoric resource access systems. Land tenure systems are complex risk-buffering strategies that are conditioned by the labor invested in food production, the size of groups holding direct access to productive lands and resources, and the temporal duration of land access rights. The role of these variables is supported by cross-cultural data from a worldwide sample of food-producing societies. The land tenure model is applied to data from the prehistoric Southwest to help explain local and regional changes in food production, settlement size, and community organization in southwest Colorado between 900 and 1300 A.D.