Land settlement schemes, sponsored by national governments and businesses, such as the Ford Corporation and the Hudson's Bay Company, took place in locations as diverse as the Canadian Prairies, the Dutch polders, and the Amazonian rainforests. This novel contribution evaluates a diverse range of these initiatives. By 1900, any land that remained available for agricultural settlement was often far from the settlers' homes and located in challenging physical environments. Over the course of the twentieth century, governments, corporations and frequently desperate individuals sought out new places to settle across the globe from Alberta to Papua New Guinea. This book offers vivid reports of the difficulties faced by many of these settlers, including the experiences of East European Jewish refugees, New Zealand soldier settlers and urban families from Yorkshire. This book considers how and why these settlement schemes succeeded, found other pathways to sustainability or succumbed to failure and even oblivion. In doing so, the book indicates pathways for the achievement of more economically, socially and environmentally sustainable forms of human settlement in marginal areas. This engaging collection will be of interest to individuals in the fields of historical geography, environmental history and development studies.

This book analyzes privatization reforms, property rights, and raiders in post-Soviet Russia. The author surveys the existing literature in the context of predatory raiding in Russia and introduces the notion and concept of this phenomena; he suggests that the study may serve as an explanatory model for corporate, property, and land raiding in Russia. Building on previous scholarship, this monograph conceptualizes the predatory character of corporate hostile takeovers in Russia and links it with the coercive nature of the ruling authoritarian regime. This project will appeal to scholars, graduate students, and researchers in Russian and Post-Soviet politics, capitalism, corruption, and property rights.

Land reform has been the most challenging social issue for China, which is in transition from an agricultural society to an industrialized country. As the initiator of "common-ownership trust", the author introduces trust theory into China's land reform, trying to settle the issues of land right verification and land circulation. Firstly, this book reflects on land circulation and common ownership theoretically. Then it reviews China's rural land system transition in history as well as its current circumstances and problems. Based on theoretical thinking and practice, this book proposes land trust and expounds on its nature and content. Lastly, it interprets the "cloud trust + land trust" model which combines science, technology, knowledge and capital with land to realize the intensive and overall development of land. This book attempts to solve China's land problems with financial tools, which provide significant implications for not only land reform but also trust theory study.

The failure to include gender in the economic history of rural development has severely limited our understanding of privatizing, collectivist and colonial economic policies that disrupted and transformed the lives of rural women and men in the modern world. This book is unique in its focus on female economic agency, and in its exploration of the latter virtue in comparative historical perspective. It presents the apparently disparate cases of 17th-century England, 20th-century Russia and the Soviet Union, and 20th-century Kenya, as their top-down modernization projects were implemented in similar fashion --particularly in the case of women. The female half of the population was largely absent from contemporary economic databases, but nevertheless stereotyped as obstacles to rational economic decision-making. Introducing rural women and their innovations into male-centered narratives of economic history lays the foundation for a more demographically balanced and realistic understanding of rural behavior and rural development. In this study, women's labor and land claims are the lens through which both female agency and the delegitimizing of women's land claims become more visible. Both policy-makers and their leading critics deployed virtually identical language to describe backward, unruly and invariably "unsightly" peasant women.

On Thin Ice explores the relationship between the Inuit and the modern state in the vast but lightly populated North American Arctic. It chronicles the aspiration of the Inuit to participate in the formation and implementation of diplomatic and national security policies across the Arctic region and to contribute to the reconceptualization of Arctic Security, including the redefinition of the core values inherent in northern defense policy. With the warming of the Earth's climate, the Arctic rim states have paid increasing attention to the commercial opportunities, strategic challenges, and environmental risks of climate change. As the long isolation of the Arctic comes to an end, the Inuit who are indigenous to the region are showing tremendous diplomatic and political skills as they continue to work with the more populous states that assert sovereign control over the Arctic in an effort to mutually assert joint sovereignty across the region Published on the 50th anniversary of Ken Waltz's classic Man, the State and War, Zellen's On Thin Ice is at once a tribute to Waltz's elucidation of the three levels of analysis as well as an enhancement of his famous "Three Images," with the addition of a new "Fourth Image" to describe a tribal level of analysis. This model remains salient in not only the Arctic where modern state sovereignty remains limited, but in many other conflict zones where tribal peoples retain many attributes of their indigenous sovereignty.

Women's property and inheritance rights are recognised in international law and in a growing number of countries worldwide, yet women in many developing countries do not have the right to own or inherit property. At the same time, women are increasingly heading up households and are in critical need of land and property for economic security, particularly in the context of the AIDS epidemic - in fact, secure property rights are believed to be a factor in reducing women's risk of contracting HIV and in protecting them from domestic violence. To better understand the role of tenure security in protecting against, and mitigating the effects of, HIV and violence, this title explores these linkages in Amajuba, South Africa and Iganga, Uganda. Results from the qualitative study revealed that property ownership, while not easily linked to women's ability to prevent HIV infection, can nonetheless mitigate the impact of AIDS, and enhance a woman's ability to leave a violent situation. A resource for policy-makers, donors, NGO workers and academics, these findings will inform the current land reform efforts, as well as HIV/AIDS and domestic violence policy in both countries, in Africa more generally and beyond.

From a neo-liberal, neo-classical paradigm, secure, formal and private property rights are crucial to fostering sustained development. Institutions that fail to respond to shifting socio-economic opportunities are thus forced to make new arrangements. The enigma is posed by developments on the ground. Why would the removal of authoritarian institutions during the Arab Spring or Iraq War not increase market efficiency but rather cause the reverse, while China and India, despite persisting insecure, informal and common institutions, featured sustained growth? This collection posits that understanding these paradoxes requires a refocusing from form to function, detached from normative assumptions about institutional appearance. In so doing, three things are accomplished. First, starting from case studies on land, it is ascertained that the argument can be meaningfully extended to labour, capital and beyond. Second, the argument validates the 'Credibility Thesis' - that is, once institutions persist, they fulfil a function. Third, the collection studies 'development, broadly construed', by including the modes of production and beyond, the rural and urban, the developed and developing. This is why it reviews property rights from China and India, to Turkey, Mexico and Malaysia, covering issues such as customary rights and privatization, mining and pastoralism, dam-building and irrigation, but also state-owned banks, trade unions and notaries. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Based on a mixture of primary historical research and secondary sources, this book explores the reasons for the failure of the state in England during the twentieth century to regulate, tax, and control the market in land for the common or public good. It is maintained that this created the circumstances in which private property relationships had triumphed by the end of the century. Explaining a complex field of legislation and policy in accessible terms, the book concludes by asking what type of land reform might be relevant in the twenty-first century to address the current housing crisis, which seen in its widest context, has become the new land question of the modern era.

This volume analyses the importance of property rights on land which were transformed by the British in the form of colonial land revenue system in Andhra region of Madras Presidency. It initiates a discussion of the traditional production systems like irrigation, agricultural methods, etc., which were replaced by the colonial ones. It further shows how the small peasantry suffered under the new system. This book also deals with the relations between the colonial state, rich peasants, zamindars and peasants under the ryotwary and zamindary settlements, which were introduced at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It further examines how the peasantry lost their rights on lands and how it went under the control of merchants and rich peasant moneylenders. Consequently, de-peasantization, wage labour, and general agrarian impoverishment followed. The colonial legal system favoured zamindars, landlords and rich peasants against small peasants, who could not go to colonial courts due to heavy legal costs. The volume analyses in minute detail various Acts, which affected the property rights of peasants on their lands. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

In Bearn, a region of south-west France, longstanding and resilient ideas of property and practices of inheritance control the destinies of those living in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Based on extensive fieldwork and archival research that combines ethnography and intellectual history, this study explores the long-term continuities of this particular way of life within a broad framework. These local ideas have found expression twice at the national level. First, sociological arguments about the family, proposed by Frederic Le Play, shaped debates on social reform and the repair of national identity during the last third of the nineteenth century - and these debates would subsequently influence contemporary European thought and social policy. Second, these local ideas entered into late twentieth-century sociological categories through the influential work of Pierre Bourdieu. Through these examples and others, the author illustrates the multi-layered life of these local concepts and practices and the continuing contribution of the local to modern European national history.

Timothy Jenkins was trained in anthropology at the Oxford Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. In 1992, he was appointed a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and in 2001, became an Assistant Director of Research (ADR) at the University of Cambridge; he currently holds these two posts. His interests are in European, particularly British and French, ethnography, as well as anthropological theory and the history of ideas. Among his publications is Religion in English Everyday Life: an Ethnographic Approach (Berghahn Books, 1999)."

Citizenships, Contingency and the Countryside defines citizenship in relation to the rural environment. The book expands and explores a widened conceptualization of citizenship and sets out a range of examples where citizenship, at different scales, has been expressed in and over the rural environment. Part of the analysis includes a review of the political construction and use of citizenship rhetoric over the past 20 years, alongside an historical and theoretical discussion of citizenship and rights in the British countryside. The text concludes with a call to recognise and incorporate the multiple voices and interests in decision-making, that all affect the British countryside.

Land is important to all aspects of human life and has a key role in the economic well-being of society therefore, land tenure, land ownership, and real property law is a critical part of any developed nation. Together, the processes of how land parcels are held; how they are defined, measured, and described to allow economic transactions; how they are marked to allow their use and defense; and how they are legally protected have allowed for the orderly possession and use of land. In doing so, these processes have also provided the basis for the advanced economy of most developed nations. Very often, these processes—land tenure, boundary surveying, and cadastral systems—are considered separately. They are very much interrelated, and none of these processes may be completely understood without an understanding of the others.

Land Tenure, Boundary Surveys, and Cadastral Systems provides an introduction to land tenure, cadastral systems, and boundary surveying, including an understanding of the interrelationship of these areas and their role in land tenure and real property law. This is especially true considering the advent of georeferenced cadastral maps reflecting the location of land parcels relative to many other components of the physical and legal infrastructure. Although intended as a basic text for college-level surveying courses, this book should also be of significant value to cadastral mappers, real property attorneys, land title professionals, and others involved with land transactions.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Land Tenure. Land Tenure in the United States. Subdivision of Land in the United States. Land Descriptions. Land Boundary Surveying. Cadastral Systems.

This volume engages with the topical issue of land rights in neoliberal India. It examines government policies, laws, land governance and land reforms from the perspective of social justice and people's response to dispossession of land. Looking beyond the dominant discourse of land acquisition and the conception of land as a commodity for economic growth, the book explores critical themes including issues of social identity, culture, livelihood and food security through a study of land reform; reviews existing land policies and legal dimensions; and discusses issues and challenges of land governance and land dependents as well as perspectives from people's movements. Lucidly written, based on empirical research, and comprehensive in its treatment of a contentious concern, this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of economics and public policy, development studies, political science, and political economy. It will also interest scholars of South Asian studies and sociology.

This book provides a thorough analysis of the evolution of land property rights and transfer mechanism during the transition of the Chinese society from being a traditional self-sustaining agricultural society to a modern commercialized agricultural society. It provides empirical proof for complicated property rights theories and a solution and path for land capitalization. It discloses that in practice, land ownership may not be the essence and knot of the problem, and that the implementation of land property rights really matters.The book also provides a series of pragmatic solutions and measures to improve the current land law system and land policy in China. It stresses the importance of a pragmatic research methodology that is based on arguments on real life research and evidence, which may help promote a more grounded research atmosphere in the Chinese academia.

This book is a critical examination of the place and role of land in Africa, the role of land in political formation and national identification, and the land as an economic resource within both national economic development and liberal globalization. Colonial and post-colonial conflicts have been rooted in four related claims: the struggle over scarce resources, especially access to land resources; abundance of natural resources mismanaged or appropriated by both the states, local power systems and multinationals; weak or absent articulated land tenure policies, leading to speculation or hybrid policy framework; and the imperatives of the global liberalization based on the free market principles to regulate the land question and mineral appropriation issue. The actualization of these combined claims have led to conflicts among ethnic groups or between them and governments. This book is not only about conflicts, but also about local policy achievements that have been produced on the land question. It provides a critical understanding of the forces and claims related to land tenure systems, as part of the state policy and its system of governance.

In dealing with scarce land, planners often need to interact with, and sometimes confront, property right-holders to address complex property rights situations. To reinforce their position in situations of rivalrous land uses, planners can strategically use and combine different policy instruments in addition to standard land use plans. Effectively steering spatial development requires a keen understanding of these instruments of land policy. This book not only presents how such instruments function, it additionally examines how public authorities strategically manage the scarcity of land, either increasing or decreasing it, to promote a more sparing use of resources. It presents 13 instruments of land policy in specific national contexts and discusses them from the perspectives of other countries. Through the use of concrete examples, the book reveals how instruments of land policy are used strategically in different policy contexts.

Deals with the modern predicament of the Rabha (or Kocha) people, one of India;s indigenous peoples, traditionally practising shifting cultivation in the jungle tracts situated where the Himalayan mountains meet the plains of Bengal. When the area came under British rule and was converted into tea gardens and reserved forests, Rabhas were forced to become labourers under the forest department. Today, large-scale illegal deforestation and the global interest in wildlife conservation once again jeopardize their survival. Karlsson describes the development of the Rabha people, their ways of coping with the colonial regime of scientific forestry and the depletion of the forest, as well as with present day concerns for wilderness and wildlife restoration and preservation. Central points relate to the construction of identity as a form of subaltern resistance, the Rabha;s ongoing conversion to Christianity and their ethnic mobilisation, and the agency involved in the construction of cultural or ethnic identities.

This volume explores the gendered dimensions of recent land governance transformations across the globe, shedding important light on how the intersection of these complex contemporary forces are reconfiguring livelihoods and impacting women s positions, their tenure security and their well-being. It brings together empirical community case studies from around the world that describe, historicize, and situate land (or land-based resource) governance transformation processes as a product of contemporary forces and country/regional specificities.

Each contribution carefully analyzes the gendered dimensions of these transformations exploring how women are impacted by and respond to these processes of change. It is structured around five major contemporary processes of land governance transformations: land registration and distribution initiatives; post-conflict reconstruction and resettlement; large-scale land acquisitions; reforms to common property regimes; and joint titling interventions. Each part includes chapters covering different countries and regions of the world that have undertaken these processes.

This book offers a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of how gender is differentially impacted by tenure transformations and how this is importantly driven by complex and multi-faceted contemporary forces and local specificities. This is an important academic contribution for sociology, anthropology, political science, economy, agronomy, geography, and many other natural and social sciences. It is also a valuable resource for applied fields and development policy as it includes very careful analyses of state of the art tenure programs and experiments being implemented and championed throughout the world.

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In this book, Gopal Sreenivasan provides a comprehensive interpretation of Locke's theory of property, and offers a critical assessment of that theory. Locke argued that the appropriation of things as private property does not violate the rights of others, provided that everyone still has access to the materials needed to produce their subsistence. Given that, the actual appropriation of particular things is legitimated by one's labor. Holding Locke's theory to the logic of its own argument, Sreenivasan examines the extent to which it is really serviceable as a defense of private property. He contends that a purified version of this theory - one that adheres consistently to the logic of Locke's argument while excluding considerations extraneous to it - does in fact legitimate a form of private property. This purified theory is defensible in contemporary, secular terms, since nothing to which Locke gives an ineliminable theological foundation belongs to the logical structure of his argument. The resulting regime of private property is both substantially egalitarian and significantly different from the traditional liberal institution of private property.

A fundamental aspect of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is the territorial dispute which began long before the State of Israel was established. Analysing the land tenure system in Palestine under the administration of the British Mandate, this book questions whether, and to what extent, the land tenure system in Palestine facilitated Zionist land acquisition. The research uses benchmarks elaborated in the guidelines of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme as its analytical starting point, and looks at the formation and implementation of the land tenure system in Palestine. It goes on to place the penetration of Zionism into the land tenure system within the theoretical context of a colonial-settler framework, employing information from land registry records located at the Jordanian Department of Lands. Providing a political-historical analysis of the land tenure system from the end of Ottoman Rule until the end of the British Mandate, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Middle Eastern History, Imperial and Colonial History, and Middle Eastern Politics.

The 1972 Aboriginal Embassy was one of the most significant indigenous political demonstrations of the twentieth century. What began as a simple response to a Prime Ministerial statement on Australia Day 1972, evolved into a six-month political stand-off between radical Aboriginal activists and a conservative Australian government. The dramatic scenes in July 1972 when police forcibly removed the Embassy from the lawns of the Australian Houses of Parliament were transmitted around the world. The demonstration increased international awareness of the struggle for justice by Aboriginal people, brought an end to the national government policy of assimilation and put Aboriginal issues firmly onto the national political agenda. The Embassy remains today and on Australia Day 2012 was again the focal point for national and international attention, demonstrating the intensity that the Embassy can still provoke after forty years of just sitting there. If, as some suggest, the Embassy can only ever be removed by Aboriginal people achieving their goals of Land Rights, Self-Determination and economic independence then it is likely to remain for some time yet.

This book explores the context of this moment that captured the world s attention by using, predominantly, the voices of the people who were there. More than a simple oral history, some of the key players represented here bring with them the imprimatur of the education they were to gain in the era after the Tent Embassy. This is an act of radicalisation. The Aboriginal participants in subversive political action have now broken through the barriers of access to academia and write as both eye-witnesses and also as trained historians, lawyers, film-makers. It is another act of subversion, a continuing taunt to the entrenched institutions of the dominant culture, part of a continuum of political thought and action. (Larissa Behrendt, Professor of Law, Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, University of Technology Sydney)

Comparative Perspectives on Communal Lands and Individual Ownership: Sustainable Futures addresses property and land title as central mechanisms governing access to communally-held land and resources. The collection assesses the effectiveness of property law and tenure models developed around concepts of individual ownership, for achieving long-term environmental and economic sustainability for indigenous peoples and local communities. It explores the momentum for change in the international realm, and then develops a comparative focus across Australia, North America, Africa, Peru, New Zealand and the Pacific region, examining the historical and current impacts of individuation of title on the customary law and practice of indigenous peoples and local communities. Themes of property, privatisation and sustainable communities are developed in theoretical analyses and case studies from these jurisdictions. The case studies throw into sharp relief how questions of land law and resources management should not be separated from wider issues about the long-term viability of communities. Comparative analysis allows consideration of how western models of land tenure and land title might better accommodate the exercise of traditional practices of indigenous peoples and local communities, while still promoting autonomy, choice and economic development. This volume will be of interest to scholars and professionals working in the fields of property law, land reform, policy and planning, indigenous law and customary law, environmental sustainability, development and resource management.

Who has rights to forests and forest resources? In recent years governments in the South have transferred at least 200 million hectares of forests to communities living in and around them. This book assesses the experience of what appears to be a new international trend that has substantially increased the share of the world's forests under community administration. Based on research in over 30 communities in selected countries in Asia (India, Nepal, Philippines, Laos, Indonesia), Africa (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana) and Latin America (Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, Nicaragua), it examines the process and outcomes of granting new rights, assessing a variety of governance issues in implementation, access to forest products and markets and outcomes for people and forests.

Forest tenure reforms have been highly varied, ranging from the titling of indigenous territories to the granting of small land areas for forest regeneration or the right to a share in timber revenues. While in many cases these rights have been significant, new statutory rights do not automatically result in rights in practice, and a variety of institutional weaknesses and policy distortions have limited the impacts of change. Through the comparison of selected cases, the chapters explore the nature of forest reform, the extent and meaning of rights transferred or recognized, and the role of authority and citizens' networks in forest governance. They also assess opportunities and obstacles associated with government regulations and markets for forest products and the effects across the cases on livelihoods, forest condition and equity.

Published with CIFOR.

Water is not only a source of life and culture. It is also a source of power, conflicting interests and identity battles. Rights to materially access, culturally organize and politically control water resources are poorly understood by mainstream scientific approaches and hardly addressed by current normative frameworks. These issues become even more challenging when law and policy-makers and dominant power groups try to grasp, contain and handle them in multicultural societies. The struggles over the uses, meanings and appropriation of water are especially well-illustrated in Andean communities and local water systems of Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia, as well as in Native American communities in south-western USA.

The problem is that throughout history, these nation-states have attempted to 'civilize' and bring into the mainstream the different cultures and peoples within their borders instead of understanding 'context' and harnessing the strengths and potentials of diversity. This book examines the multi-scale struggles for cultural justice and socio-economic re-distribution that arise as Latin American communities and user federations seek access to water resources and decision-making power regarding their control and management. It is set in the dynamic context of unequal, globalizing power relations, politics of scale and identity, environmental encroachment and the increasing presence of extractive industries that are creating additional pressures on local livelihoods.

While much of the focus of the book is on the Andean Region, a number of comparative chapters are also included. These address issues such as water rights and defence strategies in neighbouring countries and those of Native American people in the southern USA, as well as state reform and multi-culturalism across Latin and Native America and the use of international standards in struggles for indigenous water rights. This book shows that, against all odds, people are actively contesting neoliberal globalization and water power plays. In doing so, they construct new, hybrid water rights systems, livelihoods, cultures and hydro-political networks, and dynamically challenge the mainstream powers and politics.

The redistribution of land has profound implications for women and for gender relations; however, gender issues have been marginalised from both theoretical and policy discussions of agrarian reform. This book presents an overview of gender and agrarian reform experiences globally. Jacobs highlights case studies from Latin America, Asia, Africa and eastern Europe and also compares agrarian and land reforms organised along collective lines as well as along individual household lines. This volume will be of interest to scholars in Geography, Womena (TM)s Studies, and Economics.