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Navigating rules of ‘the range’ beyond the commons
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Hybrid land governance, mosaics, polycentrism have become ways to describe contemporary rangeland settings-ways of responding to uncertainties through flexible institutions, overlapping boundaries and an assembled, plural bricolage of practices. However, this is frequently thought to be recent, often arising from more formal, regulated systems, whether state, private or communal, and with well-defined land tenure regimes. This paper argues that hybridity (in various forms) has always been present in Amdo Tibet, despite the political changes over time and space. Hybridity is a necessary response to uncertainty and central to the utilisa-tion of variable resources, which is the core strategy of pastoralism. Yet the form of hybridity varies as it must be constructed in particular historical circumstances, constrained by political economic conditions between the feudal, collectivist, liberalised eras. Today's hybridity-and so contemporary rangeland use and management strategies-must be understood in this historical context, as an accretion of practices and strategies that have emerged over different eras.
In East Africa, pastoralist systems are undergoing rapid transformation due to land enclosures, benefit distributions associated with new land uses, shifting social relations, and changing authority and governance structures. We apply a critical analysis of the institutions that mediate access and benefits across a complex mosaic of property relations within Ilkisongo Maasai pastoralist land in southern Kenya. Our analysis elucidates how global and national influences have interacted with shifting dynamics of socio-cultural norms and rules regarding access to create new benefit pathways, cascading patterns of accumulation and social differentiation, and diffuse institutional controls over land.
Throughout Kenya, new governance regimes that are designed to sustain habitat connectivity for wildlife populations outside of national parks have gained increasing prominence. Though these new regimes often center a discursive emphasis on the synergies between wildlife conservation and pastoralist land use, it often remains unclear how they have interacted with colonial and post-colonial legacies that influenced pastoralists' relationships with land. As an effort to gain an improved understanding of the practices that conservation governance regimes deploy, and their underlying rationales, I present an empirically-driven account drawn from ethnographic field work in Kenyan Ilkisongo Maasai land surrounding Amboseli National Park. I argue that to understand recent configurations of land, it is essential to consider the multiple types of interlocking practices deployed by international wildlife conservation NGOs and the Kenyan state. Under a range of pressures to subdivide collectively titled land, a new territorial and governance configuration is emerging where land tenure will retain characteristics of being both private and collective. I argue that a discursive emphasis that frames conservation interventions as producing welfare for populations of wildlife and pastoralists alike has created new potentials to center the concerns of politically marginalized pastoralists, but has also raised risks of an ‘anti-politics’ that can reproduce and reinforce multiple dimensions of power asymmetries.
The current state-induced and top-down-implemented development and modernization of the predominantly rural areas of western China can be perceived as a clear demonstration of Chinese power in Tibetan areas, resulting in the repression of expressions of minority culture. This article argues that the local population’s various practices of traditionalization, as demonstrated through an emphasis on the maintenance or (re)invention of representative cultural forms can be understood as efforts to counteract the socio-economic and cultural assimilation measures or even as a form of political resistance. At the same time, in the context of the economic opportunities brought on by the rapid development, in tourism for example, traditionalization has become an important economic asset for both the state and local Tibetans. These (revived) traditions could enhance cultural awareness among visitors to minority areas and strengthen local people’s sense of cultural security and their self-understanding as Tibetans.
Abstract Livestock mobility is a complex concept holding many different meanings for observers of pastoralism. The movement of African pastoralists with their livestock has historically been seen by outsiders as working against both environmental and development goals. Recently, there has been an embrace of the logics of livestock mobility while uncertainties persist of what it means and how it could be measured. In this void, various unexamined associations circulate tying livestock mobility to features of pastoral cultures, ecologies, and institutions. We review the empirical literature that has sought to measure and document livestock mobility, comparing two parameters of its components: grazing and travel mobility. We find strong similarities of daily grazing movements of herds around base locations (camps, villages, water points) but wide variation in the seasonal travel movement between base locations. This variation reflects the fact that mobility is not a cultural norm but responds to the nutrition needs of livestock. The magnitude of travel mobility parameters is the highest for those transhumance systems moving along latitudinal and elevation gradients, thus moving across variation that is more predictable than is commonly presumed in the pastoral literature. The implications of the observed spatialities of livestock mobility for pastoral institutions are discussed.
Following the National League for Democracy’s landslide victory in the 2015 national election, Myanmar embarked on a series of legal and political transitions. This paper highlights parallel processes alongside such transitions. Linking land governance with the ongoing peace processes, and taking Karen state as a case study, it brings to light how both processes are in fact closely interlinked. Building on legal pluralism research, we argue that in the context of ethnic states, farmers’ strategies to strengthen their land rights resemble the very notion of state transformation.
Abstract This short report describes the PASTRES (Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins) project, its objectives and early implementation. PASTRES investigates the principles inspiring the strategies and the practices applied by pastoralists to tackle and live with and through uncertainties. By engaging in a dialogue with other disciplines, we believe that such principles can be applied to other domains relevant for societal uncertainties, including migration governance, the management of critical infrastructure, financial regulation, epidemic control and others. The project started in late 2017 and this report provides some updates on its development.
As a response to the march of privatization and neoliberal individualism, the commons have recently re-emerged as an attractive alternative. In this article, I bring a feminist political ecology critique to the burgeoning literature on commoning to develop a conceptualisation of how political communities of commoning emerge through socionatural subjectification and affective relations. All commoning efforts involve a renegotiation of the (contested) political relationships through which everyday community affairs, production and exchange are organised and governed. Drawing on critical property studies, diverse economies, feminist theory and commoning literatures, the analysis critically explores the relationship between property and commoning to reveal how the commons emerge from the exercise of power. Central to my conceptualisation is that commoning is a set of practices and performances that foster new relations and subjectivities, but these relations are always contingent, ambivalent, outcomes of the exercise of power. As such, commoning creates socionatural inclusions and exclusions, and any moment of coming together can be succeeded by new challenges and relations that un-common. I argue for the need to focus on doing commoning, becoming in common, rather than seeking to cement property rights, relations of sharing and collective practices as the backbone of durable commoning efforts. Becoming in common then, is a partial, transitory becoming, one which needs to be (re)performed to remain stable over time and space.
While it has repeatedly been observed that pastoralist resource governance systems tend not to conform to the assumptions and principles of mainstream scholarship on property rights and governance of commons, coherent theoretical reasons why this is the case are less common. One exception is the concept of open property regimes. This view holds that the quintessential features of dryland pastoralist systems – limited and highly variable rainfall, low resource density, mobility, and institutions and norms that emphasize flexibility and access – can result in pastoralist herders dynamically distributing and redistributing themselves across a territory without the assumed benefit of clear boundaries or of collective decision-making and rules. However, the open property regimes explanation describes some pastoralist systems better than others. This paper argues that some pastoralist systems are neither conventional commons nor open property regimes. Instead they tend to reflect another model, referred to here as a complex mosaic regime, in which there is gradation of strength and clarity of exclusionary
property rights over different resources, in which property rights are often unbundled and allocated to different actors and governance mechanisms, and in which a prominent role is played by social processes and governance mechanisms other than property rights institutions. Social and biophysical characteristics that may be more conducive to complex mosaic regimes than to open property systems, particularly if all of those characteristics are found together, include a severe and chronic shortage of one or more critical resources, spatial heterogeneity of resources, scalar heterogeneity of interests, and a herd mobility pattern that involves occasional convergence on highly valued key resource areas. In elaborating the complex mosaic regime model, this paper addresses a blind spot in scholarship on property rights and commons, deepening the understanding of why pastoralist systems tend not to conform to mainstream theory, as well as helping
to explain some of the differences among pastoralist systems. Understanding the internal logic of alternative resource governance regime models and the social-ecological conditions that make one model more viable than another can help to guide national policies and the strategies of conservation and development actors.
Across Kenya's arid and semi-arid lands, vast rangelands are being transformed into community conservancies - common property arrangements managed for transhumance pastoralism and biodiversity conservation. The Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) has spearheaded this transformation, promoting community conservancies as a model that conserves biodiversity while developing resilience, improving livelihoods, and promoting security among diverse pastoralist groups in Kenya. Building on recent critical engagement with the NRT model, this article reframes community conservancies as green grabs. In doing so, it makes two overarching contributions to wider debates. The first contribution complicates stereotypes about 'grabbers' and 'grabbees' and unsettles crude distinctions between political reactions to green grabs, social phenomena commonly portrayed as enacted from above and reacted to from below. Using the concept of bricolage, we show how actors at multiple scales with multiple identities participate - consciously and unconsciously - in reshaping institutional arrangements for managing communal lands and natural resources to align with conservation. The second contribution reveals how power works through emergent hybrid institutions, producing undesired and unintended outcomes. With this in mind, the article concludes that green grab by bricolage produces contradictory spaces animated by a seemingly adaptive, innovative, and progressive agenda, but constrained by historical patterns of access, accumulation, and domination.
Within environmental governance scholarship, an increasing interest in integrating the study of power with institutional analysis is generating novel theoretical and empirical perspectives for understanding human-environment relationships. The array of different approaches employed to integrate power into institutionalist work promises a range of insights. However, building a cohesive research agenda depends on efforts to grapple with the conceptual and theoretical diversity that characterizes the study of power. To this end, we introduce a typology of relationships between power and institutions. The typology brings together diverse conceptualizations of power and institutions within a common analytical space and situates them around two overarching research questions: How does power shape institutions? And how do institutions shape power? The structure of the typology aids researchers in generating specific, operationalizable research questions within the broader research agenda on power and institutions. In the paper, we describe the theoretical basis for the development of the typology, which draws on political ecology and Bloomington School institutionalism. Then, we employ the typology to organize a review of environmental governance literature on power and institutions. This exercise demonstrates the utility of the typology not only for organizing the currently disjointed body of work on power and institutions but also for identifying new research questions. Furthermore, it facilitates discussions about deeper ontological, epistemological, and methodological challenges associated with bringing together different theoretical approaches. Ultimately, the typology defines pathways for integrating two important disciplines studying environmental governance, political ecology and institutionalism, and facilitates the accumulation of a coherent body of knowledge. © 2018, Igitur, Utrecht Publishing and Archiving Services. All rights reserved.
In recent years, ‘critical institutionalism’ has emerged as a school of thought in its own right. Among its strengths is a focus on institutions as both complex and embedded, where institutional change is understood as a process of bricolage. Yet a number of distinct challenges follow from this. These include capturing the ‘complex-embeddedness’ of institutions; making critical institutionalism amendable to the world of policy; investigating the more hidden, informal, and everyday dimensions of institutional life; and providing explanations of commons governance that foreground the workings of power and meaning. In this paper, I provide an outline of the Critical Institutional Analysis and Development (CIAD) Framework, designed to explicitly reflect the basic tenets and core claims of critical institutionalism. Whilst it shares similarities with its predecessors – the IAD Framework (Ostrom 1990, 2005) and ‘politicised’ IAD Framework (Clement 2010) – the modifications it has undergone results in a qualitatively different framework geared toward critical institutional research. The paper considers ways in which the CIAD Framework facilitates systematic and critical analyses of commons governance whilst addressing key challenges a critical institutional approach engenders. © 2018, Igitur, Utrecht Publishing and Archiving Services. All rights reserved.
Economic, policy, and climate changes have profoundly influenced pastoral social-ecological systems on the Tibetan Plateau. Climate change is believed to be leading to increasing extreme weather conditions such as snow disasters and droughts, putting a strain on the rangeland resources herders must have to increase income. Market-based economic reforms and interrelated development policies such as the Rangeland Household Contract Policy, the Ecological Construction Project, and herder settlement Initiatives have increased integration of pastoral regions into modern markets with promotion of tourism, expanded livestock markets, and marketing opportunities for rangeland resources. Although allocating common rangelands to households is the foundation of current rangeland management strategies to achieve these goals, it removes important technologies for coping with high variability in rangeland forage production from the traditional rangeland management portfolio on the Tibetan Plateau. These include shared risk, shared labor, seasonal and yearly herd mobility, and access to diverse areas of rangelands and multiple water sources. Field study of two villages in Guinan County of Qinghai Province, and Ruoergai County of Sichuan Province from 2011 to 2014 found that the villages responded to externally driven policy, economic, and climate changes with an innovative locally adapted quota-based grazing management system that preserves valuable management technologies, conserves rangeland resources, and provides individual opportunities for financial gain. In this way the village social-ecological system has exhibited considerable resiliency, maintaining a form of community governance that functions to manage the rangelands, improve well-being as indicated by livestock productivity, and, according to local perceptions, maintain rangeland condition. The community-based grazing quota system devised by the villages occupies a middle ground between common and individual models for resource use because it focuses more on how to equitably distribute services and utilities from rangelands, instead of how to distribute rangelands.
In this paper we propose an ‘undisciplinary’ meeting between Elinor Ostrom and Judith Butler, with the intent to broaden the theory of the commons by discussing it as a relational politics. We use Butler’s theory of power to problematize existing visions of commons, shifting from Ostrom’s ‘bounded rationality’ to Butler’s concepts of ‘bounded selves’ and mutual vulnerability. To be bounded – as opposed to autonomous being – implies being an (ambiguous) effect of socio-power relations and norms that are often beyond control. Thus, to be a collective of bounded selves implies being mutually vulnerable in power relations which are enabling, albeit injurious. A politics of commoning is not a mere technical management of resources (in space) but a struggle to perform common livable relations (in time). We argue that the multiple exposures which produce us are also the conditions of possibility for more just and equalitarian ‘re-commoning’ of democracies around the world.
A new political moment is underway. Although there are significant differences in how this is constituted in different places, one manifestation of the new moment is the rise of distinct forms of authoritarian populism. In this opening paper of the JPS Forum series on ‘Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, we explore the relationship between these new forms of politics and rural areas around the world. We ask how rural transformations have contributed to deepening regressive national politics, and how rural areas shape and are shaped by these politics. We propose a global agenda for research, debate and action, which we call the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI, www.iss.nl/erpi). This centres on understanding the contemporary conjuncture, working to confront authoritarian populism through the analysis of and support for alternatives.
Despite a growing body of research about rangeland degradation and the effects of policies implemented to address it on the Tibetan Plateau, little in-depth research has been conducted on how pastoralists make decisions. Based on qualitative research in Gouli Township, Qinghai province, China, we analyze the context in which Tibetan herders make decisions, and their decisions about livestock and pastures. We refute three fundamental assumptions upon which current policy is premised: that pastoralists aim to increase livestock numbers without limit; that, blindly following tradition, they do not actively manage livestock and rangelands; and that they lack environmental knowledge. We demonstrate that pastoralists carefully assess limits to livestock holdings based on land and labor availability; that they increasingly manage their livestock and rangelands through contracting; and that herding knowledge is a form of embodied practical skill. We further discuss points of convergence and contradiction between herders’ observations and results of a vegetation analysis.
Throughout the world pastoralists today face a particularly daunting challenge of intensified rangeland fragmentation combined with human population growth and climate change. In many pastoral settings, rangelands are undergoing processes of fragmentation due to tenure transformations, as previously communal lands are privatized into individual holdings. Such processes of enclosure have raised concerns over the long-term costs on pastoral communities and on rangeland eco-systems. This paper explores pastoral responses and adaptations to enclosure based on long-term ethnographic engagement in a Maasai community in Southern Kenya that has recently privatized. Detailed family case studies and herd tracking illuminate the ways in which families try to re-create the commons by relying on social networks for free access to resources. In particular, women’s social networks (for example, their kin, affines, friends, or religious associates) seem to play an important role. This paper calls attention to the need to better understand women’s changing roles in pastoral governance and production and the implications these new roles have for women’s well-being and for pastoralism in the face of fragmentation. © 2016, Igitur, Utrecht Publishing and Archiving Services. All rights reserved.
In the literature on the commons, open access is considered the absence of a property regime and equated with a tragedy of the commons. However, a longitudinal study of mobile pastoralists in the Far North Region of Cameroon shows that open access is not the absence of rules and does not lead to a tragedy of the commons. Current theoretical models cannot explain this phenomenon of management of common-pool grazing resources in a situation of open access. Here I propose a new property regime – an open property regime – that solves this paradox. First, I will explain how open property regimes function as complex adaptive systems using our study of mobile pasto-ralists in Cameroon. Second, I will describe four other cases of pastoral systems with similar open property regimes. Finally, I discuss the key characteristics that these pastoral systems have in common and outline a new theoretical model of open property regimes. Acknowledgement: I want to thank Christine Beitl, Elizabeth Gardiner, Paul Scholte, Paul Schure, and the three anonymous reviewers for their critical feedback on this paper. It has much approved as a result.
This paper makes two claims: insights from gender research improve understandings of informal institutions and institutional change, and studying informal institutions helps scholars understand the gap between formal institutional change and outcomes. Informed by institutional analysis and feminist institutionalist scholarship, it explores the relationship between informal institutions, institutional change, and gender equality, using gender equality to scrutinize issues central to institutional change, demonstrating that institutional analyses improve when gender dynamics are incorporated. Showing the gendering of power relations highlights power in institutional change in new ways, improving understandings of why institutional change rarely happens as intended by institutional designers.
This special issue furthers the study of natural resource management
from a critical institutional perspective. Critical institutionalism (CI) is a
contemporary body of thought that explores how institutions dynamically
mediate relationships between people, natural resources and society. It focuses
on the complexity of institutions entwined in everyday social life, their historical
formation, the interplay between formal and informal, traditional and modern
arrangements, and the power relations that animate them. In such perspectives
a social justice lens is often used to scrutinise the outcomes of institutional
processes. We argue here that critical institutional approaches have potentially
much to offer commons scholarship, particularly through the explanatory power
of the concept of bricolage for better understanding institutional change. Critical
institutional approaches, gathering momentum over the past 15 years or so, have
excited considerable interest but the insights generated from different disciplinary
perspectives remain insufficiently synthesised. Analyses emphasising complexity
can be relatively illegible to policy-makers, a fact which lessens their reach. This
special issue therefore aims to synthesise critical institutional ideas and so to lay the
foundation for moving beyond the emergent stage to make meaningful academic
and policy impact. In bringing together papers here we define and synthesise key
themes of critical institutionalism, outline the concept of institutional bricolage
and identity some key challenges facing this school of thought.
Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world’s leading social theorists to how we understand society and the ‘social ‘. Bruno Latour’s contention is that the word ‘social’, as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as ‘wooden’ or ‘steely ‘. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why ‘the social’ cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a ‘social explanations’ of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of ‘the social’ to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the ‘assemblages’ of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a ‘sociology of associations’, has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.
Pastoral livelihoods are presented with new challenges as access to land is altered by climate change and privatization. Pastoralist livelihoods however continue to be reliant on mobility and pastoralists, therefore, continue to negotiate access to land in the privatized and subdivided rangelands. Various dynamics enable and constrain pastoralists’ access under this new form of land tenure, but little work has investigated the underlying power structures of access and the importance of private property for this. Based on field work in the subdivided rangelands of Kajiado county in Kenya, we argue that social structures and formal land ownership both enable and hinder pastoralists’ access to land. Moreover, while social capital is one of the most important factors for accessing pastures in subdivided rangelands, private property rights have an overarching importance for relations of access. As a result, the group ranches’ uneven allocation of land to its members has deepened inequalities in the community.
This article examines the implementation of China’s ongoing program for rangeland protection through the case of Nagchu in the Tibet Autonomous Region. The program's three goals are preventing rangeland degradation, changing ‘the mode of pastoral development’, and increasing pastoralists' income. Based on the belief that overgrazing has caused pervasive rangeland degradation, it compensates pastoralists for losses incurred where grazing is banned and rewards them for maintaining livestock numbers within determined rangeland carrying capacity. In practice, in China’s upwardly accountable system, local officials focus first and foremost on funding-oriented task fulfillment rather than rangeland protection. Consequently, the program ends up having little to do with rangeland protection, serving instead as a monetary-payment and de-stocking program advancing China’s overriding goal of transforming traditional pastoralism.
This paper focuses on how political, economic, and biophysical factors shape institutions that mediate how livelihoods and ecological processes align and interact at Koija, a pastoralist group ranch in Mukogodo Division, Laikipia, Kenya. While there is currently a high-profile emphasis on landscape conservation and maintenance of wildlife mobility in East Africa, pastoralist herding range fragmentation is less often considered within conservation planning or assessments of ecological change. To address this, we asked, how have institutional changes interacted with the alignment of livestock husbandry livelihoods and ecological dynamics? We identified institutional changes that formed due to state intervention during the colonial and post-independence eras, and recent changes that have occurred due to privatized wildlife conservation. We then used ethnographic methods to analyze how these changes have interacted with biophysical conditions and herder agency to shape current livelihoods. We found that recent barriers to seasonal range access have occurred due to policies on private conservation ranches, conflicts between pastoralists in surrounding areas, and recent conservation interventions. While pastoralist households have adapted their livelihood strategies within these constraints on mobility, livelihoods have also been impacted by complex interactions with markets, changes in herding institutions, relations with conservation actors, ecological conditions of currently accessed sites, and biophysical factors related to livestock species. Bringing together political ecology and social-ecological systems literatures, we conclude that efforts to align institutions and ecological processes in favor of wildlife conservation overlook the current institutional and ecological basis of livelihoods and, in so doing, perpetuate a historically-rooted scalar mismatch between pastoralist livestock mobility and ecological variability.
Conventional common property theory does not accurately depict the institutional arrangements that characterize many indigenous pastoral tenure systems in Africa and Asia, nor does it explain why these systems break down when exposed to markets and centralized government control. These theoretical anomalies are caused in large measure by the distinctive ways pastoralists regulate access to resources. The erratic and extensive nature of rangeland resources favours free movement to exploit fluctuations in resource availability and this promotes a degree of open access. In ungoverned or weakly governed areas, access is also regulated by political competition between sovereign territorial groups. External government control renders redundant the internal solidarity of these groups, which fragment rather than becoming officially sanctioned common property regimes. Market exposure exacerbates this process. The development of class interests and private property marks the emergence in these societies of the economy as a distinct sphere of social organization. Grounded in classical economic theory that presumes the prior existence of the economy, common property theory is ill equipped to comprehend this transition.
The paper proposes a practice theoretical conceptualization of commons. The first part of the paper asks the question how a convincing conceptualization of commons could look like. Despite of the increased attention to the concept of the commons different notions thereof exist. Ostrom and her colleagues often define commons as common pool resources, a specific type of good. The underlying classification is based on different degrees of excludability and subtractability. In the paper this is criticized for disregarding the importance of the social processes at hand. It is argued that instead of being a type of good, commons need to be conceptualized taking the relevant social dimensions into account. Commons are hence conceptualized as the social form of (tangible and/or intangible) matter that is determined by commoning. Commoning creates commons. In the second part the social practices of commoning are argued to be voluntary and inclusively self-organized activities and mediation of peers who aim at satisfying needs. The abstractness of the proposed conceptualization allows to aim at the core of the practices, at finding a way to find the common characteristics or dimensions of these practices, without defining away their ever specific way of being and becoming in the concrete.
Many scholars of rangeland institutions have found fertile theoretical and empirical ground in early efforts by the Kenyan government and international development agencies to socially engineer a shift from open range to discrete territories held under collective freehold title. A rich literature on the dynamics of subsequent subdivision of these “Group Ranches” elucidates a complex interplay of exogenous and endogenous drivers. This paper, on the contrary, explores the dynamic tensions between individualization and collectivization of land and related benefit flows in a group ranch that has thus far not undergone formal subdivision. Research was conducted in Koija Group Ranch, one of 13 group ranches located in Mukogodo Division, on the Laikipia plateau. Drawing on key informant interviews and focus group discussions with those differentially positioned relative to the benefits of de facto processes of rangeland exclosure, and household surveys to document trends in participation and perception, we explore how these processes are perceived and governed. Cross-case comparison highlights the suite of factors shaping which forms of enclosure are contested; the diversity of legitimizing tactics that ensue from such contestation; and the balancing act these tactics represent between retention of privilege and restoration of peaceful relations among group ranch members. Full text available for a limited time at: authors.elsevier.com/a/1V9PoVu7-iGWX
This paper studies the regulation of concessions in the global gold mining rush. The liberalization of the gold mining sector has given way to complex forms of regulation where non-state and illegal mining entrepreneurs compete in governing mining extraction. Taking the case of gold mining in Burkina Faso, this paper analyses the conditions and dynamics under which such complex regulation takes place. We draw on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Northern Burkina Faso, in particular the Burkinabè mining sector. We argue that enclave economies in the gold mining sector are co-produced by state and market regulation through a “plurification” of regulatory authority. This “plurification” is the effect of competition among different frontier entrepreneurs, who seek to broker regulatory authority in mining concession sites. We show that concession sites are not discrete extractive enclaves, but are better understood as indiscrete sites that are entangled in local politics and social relations. Rather than thinning social relations, as is often claimed, we observe that enclave economies thicken politics around concessionary regimes, where governmental bodies re-emerge as an arbitrating regulatory force. These findings problematize policy prescriptions to formalize the gold mining sector and draw attention to the role of the state in re/producing frontier entrepreneurs with unequal political rights to claiming concessions.
The dynamics of customary land rights and displacement among east African pastoralists have been the subject of extensive scholarly inquiry. Displacement to make way for other land uses, government-led privatization schemes, endogenous subdivision to defend land against outsiders, and progressive enclosure of private land in the context of the recent ‘land rush’ are some of the documented trajectories of land tenure change. Less explored is how exogenous authority systems gain traction within common property regimes to re-shape the contours of property. Laikipia, Kenya presents an ideal context for this research given the uniquely
ambitious effort to conserve globally significant wildlife on private land. We focus on a group ranch owned collectively by Maa-speaking pastoralists for whom formal title was secured with the support of outside actors vested in conservation, and coupled with efforts to provide financial incentives for conservation. Findings suggest the new governance structure established in the context of land titling has become a pathway
through which outside authority gains traction – with consequences for property, sovereignty and the traction of green agendas. Findings deepen understanding of how shifting authority shapes processes of alienation and legitimation, and contribute to ongoing debates about land grabs, tenure formalization and neoliberal approaches to conservation.
This paper presents some preliminary findings dealing with the change of pastoralists' life in the eastern Tibetan region of Yus hru'u (yushu). The development of its population and livestock numbers point out that many of the region's pastoralist inhabitants can no longer depend on animal husbandry. Major official policies imply transformations or even the breakup of Tibetan nomadic systems, yet it is shown that Tibetan pastoralists are both willing and able to develop their own coping strategies. With a number of examples of how the (former) nomad society in Yus hru'u deals with changes evoked by a globalized economy, we hint at the scope of economic activities and opportunities it is willing to adopt and adjust to.
The so-called global land rush has drawn new attention to land, its uses and value. But land is a strange object. Although it is often treated as a thing and sometimes as a commodity, it is not like a mat: you cannot roll it up and take it away. To turn it to productive use requires regimes of exclusion that distinguish legitimate from illegitimate uses and users, and the inscribing of boundaries through devices such as fences, title deeds, laws, zones, regulations, landmarks and story-lines. Its very ‘resourceness’ is not an intrinsic or natural quality. It is an assemblage of materialities, relations, technologies and discourses that have to be pulled together and made to align. To render it investible, more work is needed. This Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Plenary Lecture uses an analytic of assemblage to examine the practices that make up land as a resource. It focuses especially on the ‘statistical picturing’ devices and other graphic forms that make large-scale investments in land thinkable, and the practices through which relevant actors (experts, investors, villagers, governments) are enrolled. It also considers some of the risks that follow when these large-scale investments land in particular places, as land they must.