'This book debunks in spectacular fashion some of the most treasured, over-inflated claims of the benefits of native title.' Professor Mick Dodson, ANU Centre for Indigenous Studies 'David Ritter's fascinating account of the evolution of the native title system is elegant and incisive, scholarly and sceptical; above all, unfailingly intelligent.' Professor Robert Manne, La Trobe University 'An unsentimental, richly informed account of a fascinating period in the history of Australia's relationships with its indigenous people.' From the Foreword by Chief Justice Robert French After the historic Mabo judgement in 1992, Aboriginal communities had high hopes of obtaining land rights around Australia. What followed is a dramatic story of hard-fought contests over land, resources, money and power, yielding many frustrations and mixed outcomes. Based on extensive research, enriched by intimate experience as a lawyer and negotiator, David Ritter offers both an insider's perspective and a cool-headed and broad-ranging account of the native title system. In lucid prose Ritter examines the contributions of the players that contested and adjudicated native title: Aboriginal leaders and their communities, multinational resource companies, pastoralists, courts and tribunals, politicians and bureaucrats. His account lays bare the conflicts, compromises and conceits beneath the surface of the native title process.

Land reforms are laws that are intended, and likely, to cut poverty by raising the poor's share of land rights. That raises questions about property rights as old as moral philosophy, and issues of efficiency and fairness that dominate policy from Bolivia to Nepal. Classic reforms directly transfer land from rich to poor. However, much else has been marketed as land reform: the restriction of tenancy, but also its de-restriction; collectivisation, but also de-collectivisation; land consolidation, but also land division. In 1955-2000, genuine land reform affected over a billion people, and almost as many hectares. Is land reform still alive, for example in Bolivia, South Africa and Nepal? Or is it dead and, if so, is this because it has succeeded, or because it has failed? There has been massive research on land reform and this book builds on some surprising findings. * Small farms' share in land is rising in most of Asia and Africa. * This is not driven (as widely claimed) by growth in rural population or farm productivity, but by the relative efficiency of small farms, and in some cases by land reform. * Whether land reform helps the poor depends not only on land transfers, but at least as much on its effects through employment, non-farm activity, GDP growth and distribution, as well as the village status and power of the poor. * Avoidance, evasion and even distortion of land reform laws sometimes advance their main aims. * Liberalisation and its accompaniments (such as supermarkets) can be powerful friends or fatal foes of small farms and land reform. This book will be of great interest to students, researchers and consultants working on agriculture, farm organisation, rural development and poverty reduction, with special emphasis on developing countries.

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.

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.

In the context of increasing privatization and land reform these case studies reveal how reforms impact on women's rights to land and how these rights are contested or upheld. This volume focuses on the impact on women's land rights from the contemporary drive towards the formulation and implementation of land tenure reforms which aim primarily at the private registration of land. It is solidly groundedin the findings from seven case studies, all based on in-depth qualitative research, from various regions of Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda. The detailed, local level research in this volume not only challenges the status quo, but demonstrates that another world is possible and documents the many ways women in Eastern Africa are finding to ensure their rights to land. BIRGIT ENGLERT is Assistant Professor in the Department of African Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria; ELIZABETH DALEY is an independent land consultant. Uganda: Fountain Publishers(PB); Kenya: EAEP(PB); Tanzania: E&D Vision Publishing(PB)

Issues such as the patentability of scientific ideas, the market for organs and open source software are hotly debated and yet poorly understood. In particular, there is a great need for sound economic theorizing on such issues.

There is also a need for a clear and concise exposition of the state-of-the-art of the economics of property rights. This book fulfils these various needs.

In a country built on the institution of private property, property-owner rights have been under attack. By arguing that private property is a fundamental liberty whose protection deserves the highest priority, Ellen Frankel Paul challenges one of the dominant trends of the past half century: the erosion of property rights via zoning and land use restrictions, carried on by government exercising its "police power" or promoting "the public interest."

Paul begins by examining the arguments of environmentalists in support of land-use legislation, and explores a few particularly troubling examples of the exercise of eminent domain and police powers. She traces the philosophical arguments for the two powers as well as their tortuous judicial history, the meaning of property rights and investigates how previous thinkers have defended these rights is detailed, and Paul suggests a more adequate defense for them. In the concluding portion of the book, the very legitimacy of eminent domain is questioned and the author offers recommendations for its reform.

This analysis is wide in scope and makes creative use of historical, legal, economic, and philosophic methodologies. It not only gives an account of the present power regulations on land, but also provides an exhaustive history of the development of the law in these two areas and of the philosophical ideas of the thinkers who helped shape this process. This book is distinctive because it places a theory of the just acquisition of property at the heart of the answer to the question of the extent to which governments can rightfully exercise the powers of eminent domain and police.

"Amazingly, in a country built on the institution of private property, the right to property in land has been under increasing assault, and has seldom been defended. Paul's book--by arguing that private property is a fundamental liberty whose protection deserves the highest priority--is a major step toward filling the void."--Robert Hessen, Stanford University

"Ellen Frankel Paul" is Deputy Director of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, and is professor of political science and philosophy at Bowling Green State University. She is also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

The author was the first to forecast (in 1997) the events that ruptured the global economy in 2008 by applying an analysis that exposes the fault lines in the structure of the market economy. Now, he extends his analysis to the future of the West, to evaluate fears from distinguished commentators who claim that European civilisation is in danger of being eclipsed. He concludes that the West is at a dangerous tipping point and provides empirical and theoretical evidence to warrant such an alarming conclusion. But he also explains why it is not too late to prevent the looming social catastrophe. Attributing the present crisis to a social process of cheating, he develops a synthesis of the social and natural sciences to show how the market system can be reformed. He introduces the concept of organic finance, which prescribes reforms capable of delivering both sustainable growth, with a more equitable distribution of wealth, and respect for other life forms. To explain the persistent failure to resolve protracted social and environmental crises, the author introduces a theory of social trauma. Populations have been destabilised by the coercive loss of land to the point where they have lost their traditional reference points. No longer able to live by the laws of nature, they are forced to conform to laws that consolidate the privileges of those who had cheated them of their birthright: access to nature’s resources. Many pathological consequences flow from this tearing of people from their social and ecological habitats. To recover from this state of trauma, the author argues, people need to use the new tools of communication, such as social media, to regain control over their future destiny through a kind of collective psychosocial therapy. The author challenges the view that the West can climb out of depression by applying the financial measures known as “austerity”. He outlines a new strategy that would restore full employment and reverse the decline in middle class living standards in Europe and North America.

Issues such as the patentability of scientific ideas, the market for organs and open source software are hotly debated and yet poorly understood. In particular, there is a great need for sound economic theorizing on such issues.

There is also a need for a clear and concise exposition of the state-of-the-art of the economics of property rights. This book fulfils these various needs.

As a young boy, Raja Shehadeh was entranced by a forbidden Israeli postage stamp in his uncle's album, intrigued by tales of a green land beyond the border.He couldn't have known then what Israel would come to mean to him, or to foresee the future occupation of his home in Palestine. Later, as a young lawyer, he worked to halt land seizures and towards peace and justice in the region. During this time, he made close friends with several young Jewish Israelis, including fellow thinker and searcher Henry. But as life became increasingly unbearable under in the Palestinian territories, it was impossible to escape politics or the past, and even the strongest friendships and hopes were put to the test.

Brave, intelligent and deeply controversial, in this book award-winning author Raja Shehadeh explores the devastating effect of occupation on even the most intimate aspects of life. Looking back over decades of political turmoil, he traces the impact on the fragile bonds of friendship across the Israel-Palestine border, and asks whether those considered bitter enemies can come together to forge a common future.

This collection of cutting-edge articles focuses on recent shifts in thinking about land rights, particularly as they relate to women. Leading feminist scholars in the field provide searching treatment of the long-neglected subject of gender and access to land.

The articles are introduced and contextualized by Shahra Razavi. She weaves together the findings and arguments of contributions which look at the implications of the current neoliberal policy agenda for a number of specific regions. Topics covered range from policy discussions about women's land rights in sub-Saharan Africa to land tenure reforms and women's interests in Tanzania; and from new prospects with respect to gender and land rights in India, to agrarian reform to rural social movements and women's land rights in Brazil.

This is a timely collection, in which careful empirical analysis is presented with analytical power and clarity. The papers are provocative, refreshingly original and richly informative.

How is the legal conception of 'property' working to eradicate the global urban commons? Contemporary capitalism has advanced this process by producing rampant gentrification, socio-spatial stratification, and racial inequality. In Unsettling the City, Nicholas Blomley shows how the concept of 'property' helps to generate and underwrite these pervasive urban processes. But they are not uncontested. Showing how conflicting concepts of property are implicated in a host of social struggles in the contemporary city, he begins his study with the Pacific Northwest. From this base, Blomley moves to Pacific Rim cities in general, looking at gentrification, urban land, and postcolonialism in the Western US, Australia, and Western Canada - areas where one can see the stark collision between Western, neoliberal notions of property and the more egalitarian, communal view espoused by recently displaced (yet still present) native cultures.

Cauca's Indigenous Movement in Southwestern Colombia: Land, Violence, and Ethnic Identity provides a vivid account of how the indigenous communities of Cauca in southwestern Colombia engaged with the Colombian central state. Troyan begins with the question of how 3.4 percent of the Colombian population obtained legal rights to close to a quarter of the national territory. Her in-depth study of the correspondence between the central state and indigenous communities of Cauca reveals that the nation state played a key role in the legitimization of land claims based on ethnic identity. Starting with the indigenous movement led by Manuel Quintin Lame in 1914, this book shows how, in contrast to the local authorities of Cauca, the central state adopted a more sympathetic albeit contradictory approach to indigenous communities' grievances throughout the twentieth century. Land, Violence, and Cauca's Indigenous Movement in Southwestern Colombia presents an examination of state initiatives in the 1930s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s toward indigenous communities in Cauca, which sheds light on the political and social construction of Colombian indigenous identity. Troyan also reveals how violence and the representation of violence shaped the conversations between the central state and indigenous communities of Cauca; the central state's inability to exert a monopoly on violence, Troyan argues, places indigenous communities and their leaders in jeopardy despite the discursive legitimization of land claims based on ethnic identity.

Recent debates surrounding human security have focused on the satisfaction of human needs as the vital goal for global development. Peter Wilkin highlights the limitations of this view and argues that unless we incorporate an account of human autonomy into human security then the concept is flawed. He reveals how human security is a concern with social relations that connect people in local, national and global networks of power, structured through capitalism and hierarchical inter-state systems. Autonomy, as an aspect of human security, depends upon the ability of citizens to gain information about the processes that shape their lives. In this respect autonomy and communication are inherently linked and are prerequisites for the establishment of meaningful democratic systems. To what extent do developments in global communication enhance or undermine autonomy? As the world's media companies continue to merge, we are moving towards an ever more commercially driven system of global information. Wilkin argues that private ownership provides an increasingly powerful obstacle to human autonomy, and that the neo-liberal institutional and policy framework - now a global tendency - raises major problems for the attainment of human security. At the same time it has provided the ideological justification for the extension of private power into ever wider areas of public life. Changes in global communication reflect wider tendencies to enhance the power of global elites at the expense of working people and the author illustrates how and why these changes have taken place and the forms of opposition that have arisen in response to them.

While disappointment with South Africa's land reform program is widespread, the discussions as to why and in what way tend to be too general or shallow to be either fully convincing or useful. "Land Reform and Livelihoods" seeks to sharpen our understanding of how land reform does or does not work. In doing so, it helps us appreciate to what extent land reform is contributing to poverty reduction, and to what extent it might contribute to reduce poverty even more if we approached it differently.

This book is the first in-depth look at the past 120 years of struggle over the Oglala Lakota land base on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. An unholy alliance between the federal government and regional economic interests has led to progressive disenfranchisement of the majority of the Oglala people, and to the development of an ethnically distinct class of Oglala who control the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation land base. The small group of so-called "mixed-blood" Oglala has come to control the grazing land on the reservation, and to exercise a disproportionate control of the Oglala Sioux Tribal Government. Conflicts growing out of that situation are central to understanding of the reservation situation.

Contents:
Part 1: Society, Culture and Rural Land
1. Citizenship and the Countryside
2. Culture, Citizenship and Rural Policy
3. Imagining the Rural
4. Book Structure: Towards Citizenship of the Rural
Part 2: Unpacking Citizenship
1. Introduction: Considering Citizenship
2. Citizenship: Status, Identity and Activity
3. Citizenship Theory and Legitimation
4. Globalization and the Fragmentation of Citizenship
5. (Re)spatialising Citizenship
6. The Land and the Citizen: Citizenship and Private Property Rights
7. Conclusion: Towards Fluid, Post-national Citizenship?
Part 3: UK Politics and the Citizenship Debate
1. Introduction
2. Society, State and Citizenship
3. Political Projects and Citizenship Rhetoric
4. Citizenship and Globalization
5. Conclusions: Alternative Agendas and Citizenship
Part 4: On Being Modern: Consolidating Citizenship in the Countryside
1. Ordering the Countryside, Ordering Citizens
2. The Agricultural 'Revolution' and the Redistribution of Rights
3. Land, Conflict and Citizenship Definition
Part 5: Enacting and Contesting Rights through History
1. Political Action and Citizenship
2. Citizenship, Destabilization and Dissent
3. Citizenship as Manipulating Space and Time
4. Diggers and Invaders
5. Conclusion
Part 6: Political Expediency, Localness and Active Citizenship
1. Introduction
2. Modern State, Postmodern Citizenship?
3. Citizenship and Activity: (Re)mapping and Weaving
4. 'Active' Citizenship: Status, Identity and Activity Revisited
5. Active Citizenship and the State
Part 7: Citizenship and the Countryside as Consumer Space
1. Introduction
2. Postmodern Politics, Media-tion and Communities of Interest
3. Citizenship, Consumers and Space/Place
4. Conclusion: Mobile Politics, Consumerism and the Rural
Part 8: Citizenship, Contingency and the Countryside
1. Multiple, Contingent and Inclusionary Citizenships?
2. Projects and Practices of Citizenship

The author explores how tribal governments have worked through the constraints of their eroded territory and sovereignty to provide effective leadership and governance.

This treatment of the modern predicament of the Rabha of Kocha people deals with their survival in the forest and their quest for identity. Rabhas are one of India's indigenous people, traditionally practising shifting cultivation in the jungle tracts where the Himalayan mountains meet the plains of Bengal. When the area came under British rule ans was converted into tea gardens and reserved forests, Rabhas were forced to become laboureres under the Forest Department. Today, large-scale illegal deforestation and the global interest in wildlife conservation once again jeopardise the survival of the Rabhas in the forest. The Buxa Tiger Reserve has recently become included in a World Bank programme for ecodevelopment. This description of the development of the Rabha peole covers their ways of coping with the colonial regime of scientific forestry and the depletion of the forest as well as with the present day concerns for wilderness and wildlife restoration and preservation. One of the central points of the book relates to the question of identity. The author discusses the Rabha's ongoing conversion to Christianity and their ethmic mobilisation. The main theoretical issue concerns the

Development organizations are searching for concepts and methods that will enable impacts of development co-operation to be recorded and scientifically tenable, transparent and practicable conclusions to be drawn. They expect the cost of evaluations to be proportional to the project budget. While a standardized set of tools is available for the economic and technical evaluation of projects, methods of covering the social dimension - which are of prime importance for impact analysis - have yet to reach maturity.

Development organizations are searching for concepts and methods that will enable impacts of development co-operation to be recorded and scientifically tenable, transparent and practicable conclusions to be drawn. They expect the cost of evaluations to be proportional to the project budget. While a standardized set of tools is available for the economic and technical evaluation of projects, methods of covering the social dimension - which are of prime importance for impact analysis - have yet to reach maturity.

This study presents the story of successes and failures of the treatment of security matters pertaining to territorial and boundary affairs in the maritime areas of the Persian Gulf, and at the same time provides an example of the impact of territoriality on world-wide maritime security.

Property is a common denominator in human conflict as well as a useful tool for international studies. In order to apply property theory as a key to the analysis of human struggle, a broad definition of the term has to be accepted. Property is more than the things people own; it is the mass of rights and duties that associate persons with things, especially land. Arrogation of property is usually the precursor to the violation of human rights, but Geoff Demarest argues that the crusade for human rights has become a chase after symptoms that ignores the calculus of violated property rights underlying most murder and theft. A better understanding of property dynamics can help us achieve strategic designs, pacific or not. He seeks to restart international studies at the point of property, and in so doing, to find a mechanism for interpreting property changes, including those brought about by new technologies.

This study focuses on Amuzgo Indian communities of the Costa Chica of Guerrero state in Mexico in order to analyze the indigenous struggle for land and its relationship to ethnic identity and culture. Primary archival data and field research reveal a historical profile of this multi-ethnic region with a long and fascinating history of resistance to non-Indian control of communal lands and labor. The dynamics of 19th century liberal economic reforms, privatization of Indian lands, militarization, interventions of foreign capital, class conflicts, and impoverishment are reflected in contemporary processes in the Costa Chica. The image of the resilient peasant, or "campesino," masks negative aspects of peasant status in the class structure, including poverty and superexploitation of family labor, and the intra and inter-familial conflicts that are a significant aspect of daily life. Case studies of land conflicts explore these class issues, as well as the relationship between gender inequalities and insecurities of land tenure. Indian communal lands ("ejidos") are more than an economic means of agricultural production; such lands are also the basis of cultural reproduction and provide a framework in which political resistance can emerge. Bibliography. Index