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Paper short abstract

In Ghana, land rights are allocated by competing and overlapping normative orders, making areas with high competition for land subject to ever-changing legitimate laws and regulations. Land cultivation becomes a marginal practice for those capable of handling huge levels of insecurity.

Paper long abstract

Contexts of legal pluralism rarely, if ever, offer clear cuts between the various domains regulated by the different normative orders. In peri-urban Ghana, access to land requires not only knowledge and ingeniousness, but also the ability to draw on the competing and overlapping laws and regulations to mobilize strategies of securing land rights. The state lacks the institutional capacity to deal with all aspects of land relations, but its courts of law are overwhelmed by land cases. The World Bank and the main bilateral donors have decided, after the years of structural adjustment and ambitions for land titling and registration, to by-pass the state and shift their support in favour of the traditional leaders. Finally, at local level, customary law, histories and traditions are reinvented and instrumentalized in the struggle for land rights. Not only is property, in its broad sense, a process, but in this instance the process is widened to encompass issues of identity, belonging, power.

Against this background of fluidity and contestation, this paper proposes to investigate the case of a particular group of individuals in an area with high competition for land, with a view to assessing the structures of opportunity available to actors and how they make use of them. For those with very narrow windows of possibility, the solution is to embrace the high levels of uncertainty and compensate for the lack of belonging, knowledge, and/or financial power by living with the insecurity others invest in avoiding.

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Paper short abstract

This paper attempts to explain the consequences of legal pluralism in the forests of Burma / Myanmar, by describing the legal idea of land and property of the people, and the legal framework introduced by the colonial government which is now inherited by the present government.

Paper long abstract

This paper attempts to explain the consequences of legal pluralism in the forest of Burma / Myanmar.

First, using observations in literatures as well as experiences from my own field works (in 1995 and 2001), I will describe the legal idea of land and property of the people since the 19th century. The colonial administrators observed a society which was basically 'swidden / nomadic'; population density was low, land was plenty, and investment on the land was small. People mentioned that 'first come first served' (Dama-Ooja) was still the principle for occupying a land or obtaining a resource.

Second, I will describe the legal framework introduced by the colonial government which is reflected in the various Acts and Rules regarding forests. 'Unused' land was categorised as Wastelands, and whenever it was necessary, wastelands were subsequently classified into other categories such as agricultural lands, Reserved Forests, and others. The clauses were basically designed to sort out the rights over a piece of forest, and define the ownership.

Finally, I will try to explain what is happening in the forests. Officially, all forests are governmental, and people have to obtain permits to utilize forests for certain purposes. However, the people are not aware of forest legislations, and forest administration is not effective throughout the country. As a consequence, people enter the forests according to their principles, in search of agricultural lands or valuable forest resources. Later, when some project starts in the forests, forest administration and the people encounter.

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Paper short abstract

This paper looks at the close relationship between property ownership and kinship grouping.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the close relationship between kinship and landed property claims in a South China village in the post-reform era. In "socialist" China where a market-oriented economy has been developing since the early 1980s, the state-imposed forms of property relations are at odds with local notions of property. Land ownership by the state and the collective is a legal given, but use rights to state-owned land can be sold and transferred in the market. With the political-economic return of overseas Chinese (huaqiao) in the 1980s, the localized kinship group, the lineage, and ancestral worship has extensively been revived.

First, I explore how participation in ancestral worship was used as statements of ownership in the dispute over a piece of "ancestral mountain land". It became a make or break moment for the kinship group. This case illustrates the point that kinship relatedness is dialectically linked with property ownership in contemporary rural China. The second case tracks the history of appropriation and re-appropriation of a vegetable plot by different agents or institutions in the past 80 years. The way land ownership changes have something to do with how it comes to be claimed as unalienable. These acts of appropriation are interwoven with the intra-and inter-lineage tensions. In both cases, the memory of the lineage property has been reactivated by the presence of the overseas Chinese visitors. The interdependency between the local villagers, overseas Chinese and the local state agents have given rise to the fuzziness of ownership of rural property.