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- Convenors:
-
Tom Lavers
(University of Manchester)
Matt Kandel (University of Southampton)
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- Formats:
- Papers Mixed
- Stream:
- Leadership and the environment
- Sessions:
- Thursday 18 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the political economy and political ecology of land and natural resource tenure. We seek theoretical, empirical and policy-driven papers, analysing the factors shaping change in land tenure and enforcement, and how social differentiation creates scope for new policy leadership.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores the political economy and political ecology of land and natural resource tenure. Access to and authority over land and natural resources remains a key locus for distributional struggles along lines of class, generation, ethnicity and gender. Many working within the fields of agrarian political economy and political ecology have long argued that social differentiation impacts development pathways and interventions. However, this remains underappreciated by many researchers, development actors, and policymakers. Another important gap pertains to understanding what sorts of leadership are needed to address social inequities that are reinforced or exacerbated by land and natural resource policies.
We invite papers that critically engage with the political economy and political ecology of land through theoretical engagement and empirical analysis, as well as more applied, policy-focused treatments. We are particularly interested in contributions that ground their theory and applied research in place-based approaches.
This panel seeks to explore these issues through papers that address the following and related questions:
• What political economic factors shape change in land tenure policy and enforcement and, in particular, what space does this provide for agency and leadership?
• What impacts have changes in land tenure regimes had on social differentiation on community scales?
• Why does social differentiation matter for forest and landscape restoration interventions?
• Do land rights formalisation schemes, focused on customary as well as private titling, resolve extant problems or merely create new pathways for dispossession?
• How can national or devolved land policies better address issues of differentiated access and control over land?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 18 June, 2020, -Matt Kandel (University of Southampton)
Paper short abstract:
I draw on fieldwork in northeastern Ghana to discuss how differentiated access to and control over ecological, political economic, and symbolic resources influences which social groups are most likely to benefit from a restoration intervention and which are more likely to bear costs and risks.
Paper long abstract:
As the UN Decade of Restoration nears, there has been strategic progress on the restoration agenda. This includes the Africa Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) in addition to earlier commitments such as the Bonn Challenge. 'Farmer-managed natural regeneration' (FMNR), an assisted natural regeneration approach to restoration, is increasingly seen as particularly suitable for restoring dryland ecosystems in Africa. However, to date most of the research on FMNR has remained technical in scope, with the few social science inquiries mainly based on the quantitative analysis of household survey data. This has resulted in a gap in the literature in terms of understanding how uneven resource distributions and asymmetries in power influence local adoption of FMNR. This gap in understanding also carries implications for equity and social inclusion in FMNR interventions. Considering how preexisting material and symbolic resource inequalities affects who 'wins' and who 'loses' in restoration lies at the heart of a political ecology analysis. I draw on fieldwork in northeastern Ghana to discuss how differentiated access to and control over ecological, political economic, and symbolic resources influences which social groups are most likely to benefit from FMNR and which are more likely to bear costs and risks.
Johanna Höhl (University of Heidelberg)
Paper short abstract:
Hydropower plant projects in Chile are located in areas claimed by Indigenous people. This restricts land ownership changes due to particular land protection. To ensure access to resources large corporations are acquiring mining concessions. How do Mapuche react to this "undermining" of their land?
Paper long abstract:
Political ecology deals with questions of distribution, control and use of land and resources with the aim of analysing the power relations behind them (Swyngedouw 2011, 2014). As part of its efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, Chile is increasingly focusing on renewable energies, including hydropower. A large number of hydropower projects under construction and in the planning stage are located in the southern Andes and in areas inhabited by Indigenous people, especially the Mapuche. Often, energy projects of national interest require changes in land ownership. But Indigenous land ownership in Chile is particularly protected and cannot be sold or bought. For this reason, and in order to avoid conflicts regarding the development of their projects, such as the laying of the pipes to transport the water to the turbines, large corporations in these areas are increasingly acquiring mining concessions that give them access to underground resources without coming into conflict with indigenous land rights, creating new global power imbalances. How do the Mapuche deal with these developments? How do the leaders articulate their interests in the face of the fact that their land is being virtually "undermined" by global and nationally taken decisions? The panel's contribution is intended to explore these questions and thus contribute to the extent to which fissured rules and rights of differentiated access and control of land and resources further strengthen the position of globally active economic actors while weakening that of local actors.
Julian Goetz (SOAS)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the impact of ASGM on rural livelihoods and poverty reduction in North-West Tanzania with particular attention to the political economy of the sectoral land regimes and labour markets. To uncover this qualitative and quantitative from two mining sites is presented and analysed.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses the effects of artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) on rural livelihoods and poverty reduction in North-West Tanzania with particular attention to the political economy of the sectoral land regimes and its labour markets. The paper draws on literature on the effects of ASM activities on livelihoods in Sub-Sahara Africa as well as on works on waged labour in non-farming activities in rural labour markets. This paper also analyses which actors hold land rights below and above the ground and socioeconomic implications of this. Literature on ASGM in SSA tends to under-explore the role of rural labour markets and waged employment, and the ways in which political and social factors shape distributional outcomes in the sector.
Hence, by addressing the role of labour and land in ASGM, my research explores the hierarchical structure of Tanzania's ASGM sector with a variety of labour and land regimes and its implications for economic agency and poverty reduction. To uncover this, a socioeconomic account, informed by attention to class relations and based on empirical data, is pursued.
Due to the paucity of data, I surveyed 160 households in two mining communities in North-West Tanzania, mapping ASM in the larger context of livelihood activities to assess its contribution to poverty reduction. Additionally, to uncover transmission mechanisms and processes within the ASM labour market in a meaningful way, 39 qualitative interviews with different stakeholders as well as with miners were conducted. All fieldwork was carried out during spring and fall 2019.
Agha Akram-Lodhi (Trent University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is a mixed-methods exploration of the causes of gender gaps in agricultural productivity in eastern and southern Africa.
Paper long abstract:
Rural economies are strongly and pervasively gendered. Women and men farmers do not always face the same production conditions, nor do they always make the same production choices. They consequently do not always have similar levels of agricultural productivity, which can be accentuated by climate crisis. This paper is a mixed-methods exploration of the causes of gender gaps in agricultural productivity in eastern and southern Africa. It begins by presenting quantitative estimates of gender gaps in agricultural productivity, along with estimates of the proximate causes of these gaps, in a region subject to profound climate change. The paper then goes behind the econometrics to present the results of a qualitative investigation into the underlying drivers of these gaps in agricultural productivity in eastern and southern Africa. It is demonstrated that the social norms and values that underpin and sustain gender relations are the principal cause of gender gaps in agricultural productivity in eastern and southern Africa. In particular, women's responsibility to provide unpaid care and domestic work, the economic consequences of gender-based violence, and women's responsibility to provide unpaid contributing farm labour on land that they do not operate for themselves cumulatively create time poverty, which drives gender gaps in agricultural productivity in eastern and southern Africa.
Débora Lima (University of São Paulo)
Paper short abstract:
This article aims to analyze how the agrarian communities in Brazil are struggling to legalize their lands as collective territories and not individual land properties as a strategy to curb land market speculation and land grab process and the recent shifts of the land rights.
Paper long abstract:
Agrarian Brazilian communities, i.e indigenous, peasants, riverine, afro descendants in Amazon and Cerrado biome have been struggling for a land reform and facing the intensification of land grab process, specially after the 2008 financial crisis. The major part of the communities has been occupying their territories hundred years ago, and some of them in Cerrado biome only settled in the past decades, since they were semi-nomads. This relation between the communities and the territory without rigid border created regions where the land was not legalized or just mapped as public lands. With the advance of the land market, for production of commodities, speculation or fictious propose these lands occupied by the communities was expropriated. The State acts as a contradictory agency: at the same time that it has created since 2003 policies for the recognition of traditional communities, it has created land laws that did not guarantee their survival and favored the titling of land for the agricultural land Market. Some land policies were created to 'legalized' zones with the participation of different supranational (ie Word Bank), federal (Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply and Ministry of Environment) and state (Land Institute), agencies. But the major part of the law policies only accept and title individual land, creating difficulties for the identification of agrarian communities. This article aims to describe and analyze different communities in Amazon and Cerrado biome and their struggles to be recognized as an traditional community and have their land communal titles.
Tom Lavers (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
This paper questions the assumed static nature of Ethiopian land tenure since the 1975 nationalisation. Changing development strategies and growing regional autonomy have driven land tenure evolution, new responses to the agrarian question of labour and re-imagining of an agrarian future.
Paper long abstract:
The literature on Ethiopian land tenure frequently presents land law as static since the 1975 land-to-the-tiller reform. While state ownership established at that time has been retained, this continuity masks important changes to the land tenure regime and, in particular, the proposed resolution of the agrarian question embedded within changing national development strategies. This paper is based on ten years of research on land tenure in Ethiopia involving dozens of key informant interviews with politicians, bureaucrats and donors involved in the sector, as well as detailed analysis of land laws. The paper demonstrates that changing development strategies over 30 years of rule by the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front from Albanian socialism to an East Asian-style developmental state to market-led development have vital implications for land tenure and the government's intended response to the agrarian question. Specifically, the last 30 years have seen an end to regular land redistributions, registration of landholding rights, liberalisation of rental markets and, most recently, permission to mortgage land. These legal changes are part of a changing response to the agrarian question of labour, from an attempt to absorb labour into smallholder agriculture to actively promoting the exit of surplus labour from the agricultural sector to an uncertain future in the context of high rates of unemployment. Furthermore, the federal system and growing regional autonomy has introduced a new dynamic whereby regional administrations, rather than the federal government, have led reforms, reinterpreting what is meant by state ownership and re-imagining an agrarian future in Ethiopia.