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Contested Lands: Land Disputes in Semi-Arid Parts of Northern Tanzania : Case Studies of the Loliondo and Sale Divisions
Abstract
This study Contested Lands: Land disputes in semi-arid parts of northern Tanzania. Case Studies of the Loliondo and Sale Division in the Ngorongoro District concentrates on describing the specific land disputes which took place in the 1990s in the Loliondo and Sale Divisions of the Ngorongoro District in northern Tanzania. The study shows the territorial and historical transformation of territories and property and their relation to the land disputes of the 1990s'. It was assumed that land disputes have been firstly linked to changing spatiality due to the zoning policies of the State territoriality and, secondly, they can be related to the State control of property where the ownership of land property has been redefined through statutory laws. In the analysis of the land disputes issues such as use of territoriality, boundary construction and property claims, in geographical space, are highlighted. Generally, from the 1980s onwards, increases in human population within both Divisions have put pressure on land/resources. This has led to the increased control of land/resource, to the construction of boundaries and finally to formalized land rights on village lands of the Loliondo Division. The land disputes have thus been linked to the use of legal power and to the re-creation of the boundary (informal or formal) either by the Maasai or the Sonjo on the Loliondo and Sale village lands. In Loliondo Division land disputes have been resource-based and related to multiple allocations of land or game resource concessions. Land disputes became clearly political and legal struggles with an ecological reference.Land disputes were stimulated when the common land/resource rights on village lands of the Maasai pastoralists became regulated and insecure. The analysis of past land disputes showed that space-place tensions on village lands can be presented as a platform on which spatial and property issues with complex power relations have been debated. The reduction of future land disputes will succeed only when/if local property rights to land and resources are acknowledged, especially in rural lands of the Tanzanian State. Väitöskirja Contested Lands: Land disputes in semi-arid parts of northern Tanzania. Case Studies of the Loliondo and Sale Division in the Ngorongoro District tarkastelee Pohjois-Tansanian alueella asuvien karjanhoitaja-maasaiden ja maanviljelijä-sonjojen välisiä maakiistoja muuntuneen tilallisuuden, paikan, territoriaalisuuden, omistusoikeuden ja maalakia koskevan teoriasovelluksen avulla. Maakiistat juontavat juurensa kolonialistisen hallinnon ajoilta, jolloin alkuperäisille asukkaille koko Ngorongoron piirikunnassa joko myönnettiin tai heiltä poistettiin omistusoikeus maahan ja luonnonvaroihin. Kun Tansania itsenäistyi vuonna 1961, valtio panosti maauudistuksiin. Valtion toimenpiteet ovat aiheuttaneet maanomistusoikeudellisia ja tilaa koskevia muutoksia. Tansanian pohjoisosissa painopisteeksi on nostettu luonnonsuojelu, suurriistan metsästys ja turismi. Valtio on vuosikymmenien ajan esimerkiksi perustanut luonnonsuojelualueita ns. abstrakteiksi tiloiksi, joissa maan ja/tai luonnonvarojen käyttöä ja hallintaa on rajoitettu ja määritelty. Tässä maankäytön ja hallintaoikeuksien muutosprosessissa paikallisten asukkaiden historiallisia maanomistusoikeuksia on jätetty huomioimatta. Taloudellis-liberaaliselta 1980-luvulta lähtien maan arvo ja kysyntä on kasvanut luonnonsuojelualueilla. Maankäyttö on kiinnostanut niin tansanialaisia kuin ulkopuolisia sijoittajia. Etnisten ryhmien perinteisten maa-alueiden hallinta on kaventunut. Paikat alueellisine rajoineen, joilla on ollut oma historiansa, ovat muuttuneet ja menettäneet merkitystään. Tämä on vaikuttanut etnisten ryhmien elämäntapaan. 1980-luvulta alkaen Loliondon maasai-karjanhoitajien liikkuva ja yhteisöllinen laidunnus- ja maankäyttö sekä oikeudet luonnonvaroihin olivat uhattuina. 1990-luvulla laidunmaa-ala edelleen kaventui maaluovutusten vuoksi. Perinteisesti hallittu yhteisöllinen karjanlaidunnustapa vaikeutui. Maa- ja luonnonsuojelupoliittiset uudistukset, alati kasvava väestö ja pahenevat kuivuuskaudet ovat myös lisänneet alueen maankäytön ongelmia. Erityisesti tilanne monimutkaistui, kun riistanhoitoalueen metsästysoikeus (1993) annettiin 10 vuodeksi Arabiemiirikuntien kansalaiselle. Mutkallinen maankäytön tilanne johti laillisten maaoikeuksien korostamiseen ja uusien rajojen muodostamiseen. Ristiriidat - rajakiistat, maan- ja luonnonvarojen omistuskiistat tai kiistat luonnonvarojen käyttöoikeuksista - kärjistyivät alueella. Pahimmat ristiriidat ovat johtaneet väkivaltaisiin yhteenottoihin heimojen välillä. Tansanian maaseudun monimuotoisia maakiistoja voidaan vähentää, jos ja kun paikallisten etnisten ryhmien maan- ja luonnonvarojen omistusoikeudet tunnustetaan laillisesti.
... The primary purpose of parcel boundary is to define or demarcate the parcel on the ground according to its shape, size and dimensions. Ojalammi (2006) described that due to the lack of permanent structure or demarcation on the ground according to the parcel dimensions, it is more chance to be a land dispute. So, boundary is a part of the discursive landscape of social power, governance and to control the land disputes. ...
transfer, mortgage their own land. Parcel fragmentation is the division of a parcel into two or more parcels. This research was carried out to analyse the current status of parcel fragmentation in Nepal. According to the findings of this research, parcel fragmentation in Nepal is haphazard mainly focussing on urban and peri urban arears consequently parcel being irregular in shape & smaller in size and ultimately incrementing huge number of land owners with in fixed area. In the context of Nepal, factors that drive parcel fragmentation are cultural, social, legal, economical, frequent disasters, geographic variations, unmanaged migrations, haphazard land use planning amongst others. The uncontrolled and unmanaged parcel fragmentation in Nepal is the major challenge for land use planning and its implementation. Dense parcel fragmentation has created land related disputes. it is recommended that the government should reformulate and implement the proper land use policy as well as its supporting acts that encourage landconsolidation in agricultural zone and reducing haphazard parcel fragmentation in urban and peri urban areas.
... We do not yet know how legal hunting by locals, safari hunters and others affects wildlife in the Serengeti. Maasai informants have complained that hunting and live animal capture by hunters from the United Arab Emirates associated with the Ortello Business Corporation on Loliondo village lands impeded Maasai livestock movements and caused excessive loss of wildlife and tree cutting (Ojalammi 2006). ...
There are three main goals for sustainability of the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem. The first is that of the conservationists, which include local tourism businesses, local and foreign conservationists, national governments and some of the local people. From their perspective, the Serengeti-Mara represents an all-too-rare standard of an ecosystem ‘undisturbed’ by the human hand, a benchmark which is crucial to our efforts to understand how humans are modifying the earth. The system also represents a gold mine of profits for governments, the tourism industry and some local elites. A second perspective is that of many of the Maasai pastoralists living in Kenya and Tanzania: their livelihoods are sometimes threatened by wildlife directly, but even more so by their loss of access to the land they have grazed for centuries as more and more of it has been converted to protected areas. A third perspective is that of the farmers and hunters west of the Serengeti and Mara, many of whose cultures pre-date the Maasai. From their perspective, access to wild meat may be important to sustainability of their households, and thus they may include this access as part of their goals to sustain their livelihoods.
... Sundet (2006: 10) describes the outcome of the Tanzania's Village Land Act of 1999 a "tokenistic devolution of partial authority to village level" that he links to the devaluation of the customary traditional sector as opposed to the modern statutory sector. 9 See also Skarstein in this volume. 10 This is exemplified by the Loliondo land case, which reached a point of intense contestation in the early 2000s(Igoe 2003;Ojalammi 2006; Nordlund 2013). 11 In 2012, the Tanzanian government, among other African governments, signed a cooperation agreement frameworks with the G8 and was supported by the African Union's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) to facilitate the acquisition by private investors of agricultural land for large-scale agro-industrial farming(Stein 2014). ...
... We do not yet know how legal hunting by locals, safari hunters and others affects wildlife in the Serengeti. Maasai informants have complained that hunting and live animal capture by hunters from the United Arab Emirates associated with the Ortello Business Corporation on Loliondo village lands impeded Maasai livestock movements and caused excessive loss of wildlife and tree cutting (Ojalammi 2006). ...
The word ‘sustainability’ evokes multiple meanings to different people and this is the essential complexity of attaining sustainability: we need to address multiple goals and understand the trade-offs among them. In this chapter, we use sustainability to mean the long-term maintenance (and hopefully improvement) of linked ecological, social and economic systems. In the context of the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem (Fig. 24.1), conservationists from Tanzania, Kenya and elsewhere have the goal to maintain the grand wildlife populations, including the wildebeest migration, and the savanna ecosystem that supports those populations. To this end, the governments of Kenya and Tanzania created a set of core protected areas including Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve and Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park, Loliondo Game Controlled Area, Ngorongoro Conservation Area, as well as Grumeti, Ikorongo and Maswa Game Reserves. It would simplify our discussion of sustainability if we focused only on the part of the ecosystem that resides within the boundaries of these core protected areas; the goals of those protected areas would then take precedence. However, the ecosystem, defined by the movements of the wildebeest, goes beyond this core to some of the farming land to the west and the grazing lands to the north, east and south of the protected areas (Sinclair and Norton-Griffiths 1979; Thirgood et al. 2004). The ecosystem also extends far upstream to the headwaters of the Mara River watershed in Kenya, which starts at the top of the Mau Forest Complex, extends....
... The magnitude of the money and the size of these land deals makes it nearly impossible for local authorities to protect land rights against external threats (Nelson et al., 2012). In addition, in some cases local authorities collude in alienating land from communities to enable private investment, such as the establishment of wildlife conservation areas (Nelson and Makko, 2005;Ojalammi, 2006). These concerns have been further highlighted in the advent of new climate change mitigation projects, such as United Nations REDD+. ...
This paper interrogates the framings and priorities of adaptation in Tanzania’s climate policy and examines the implications for the role of local institutions and differentiated rural populations in climate change adaptation. Although Tanzania lacks a “stand alone” climate policy, Tanzania’s National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA) and National Climate Change Strategy (NCCS) provide the most comprehensive statements of the central government’s framing of adaptation and its priorities with regard to adaptation. In assessing discursive framings of adaptation, we find that the dominant policy discourse constructs an anti-politics of adaptation through its framing of climate change as an urgent and generalized threat to development while failing sufficiently to address the complex governance and social equity dimensions of climate change adaptation. The technocratic prescriptions of Tanzania’s NAPA and NCSS converge with similar prescriptions found in Tanzania’s national development policies, such as the major agricultural development initiative Kilimo Kwanza. Adaptation challenges identified by communities in Mwanga District demonstrate complex local institutional and resource tenure questions that are not addressed in climate policy but which require policy attention if social equity in climate change adaptation is to be achieved.
This tourism case study pays attention to natural resource management conflicts surrounding the Loliondo Game-controlled Area which encompasses 4000 km ² adjacent to Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania. Maasai, the largest nomadic pastoralist ethnic group in Tanzania, accounts for the overwhelming majority of the population residing in the Loliondo Game-controlled Area. The Loliondo Game-controlled Area has suffered from land-use and property-right conflicts among stakeholders despite establishing a series of wildlife management policies concerning the area. Trophy-hunting tourism has been operated in the Loliondo Game-controlled Area by a transnational private corporation with the Tanzanian government’s exclusive permission. Trophy hunting conflicts with other land uses in the Loliondo Game-controlled Area, including non-consumptive tourism, pastoral livelihoods, and crop farming. Although the Village Land Act 1999 recognizes customary rights vested with local villages to wildlife management in the Game-controlled Areas, the Maasai communities in the Loliondo Game-controlled Area have yet to reap benefits from trophy hunting or photography tourism. To identify an alternative wildlife management option preferred by the Maasai communities, a community survey was conducted in 2018. A sample of 330 households was surveyed, with 55 in each of the six selected villages in the Loliondo Game-controlled Area. The survey confirmed that the Maasai communities were not involved in the decision-making process for wildlife management. This study has found that the Maasai communities strongly support establishing a Joint Venture Wildlife Management Area of 1500 km ² within the Loliondo Game-controlled Area, with the remaining 2500 km ² being allocated to grazing, farming, and human settlements. Under the Joint Venture Wildlife Management Area scheme, local villages would jointly manage wildlife and be entitled to rights to manage and use wildlife and other natural resources in the region. The overwhelming majority of the participants in the community survey were optimistic that the co-management scheme would help enhance natural resource management efficiency and social equity.
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This study focuses on wildlife management in the Loliondo Game Controlled Area (LGCA) in the northern region of Tanzania. There are ongoing concerns surrounding wildlife management in the LGCA including an acute lack of community involvement in the wildlife management planning and decision-making process, poorly defined property rights, and the unequitable distribution of the economic benefits generated from the ecotourism and trophy hunting schemes being implemented. Employing multi-criteria analysis techniques, this study explores and evaluates the alternative wildlife management options for the wildlife tourism site at issue. The joint venture wildlife management option has been identified as the most preferable. Under a joint venture wildlife management scheme, trophy hunting and ecotourism is allowed in the area designated for conservation, while livestock grazing, agriculture, and village settlements are permitted in the remaining area of the LGCA. Under this scheme, a community-based organization (CBO) is granted user rights to wildlife and other natural resources in the conservation area. A joint venture programme is established between commercial investors and a CBO. The study argues that joint venture wildlife management should be introduced to ensure well-defined property rights, implement efficient wildlife conservation, and the equitable share of economic benefits across the various stakeholders.
People in sub-Saharan Africa rely on a variety of informal mechanisms to gain access to land for urban farming. However, the literature on land tenure focuses on gaining access to land for housing, whereas farming, which is highly visible in the urban landscape of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, requires farmers to negotiate their access in ways distinct from housing. A close examination of four open-space farms in Dar es Salaam reveals that there are different methods of gaining access to land for farming as opposed to housing. Additionally, theorising this access reveals that the landowners who allow farmers on their land for food production also derive benefits. This can provide a framework for current efforts to integrate urban agriculture into the city zoning plans.
This paper reviews the key issues with regard to land resource governance and its dimensions in terms of sustainability and
rural development. It explains the links between these areas and the related research and policy implications. It concludes
by recommending the required priority actions at the global and country level to move the land resource governance agenda
forward within the perspective of promoting sustainability and development of the rural areas and communities. The paper presumes
that the land resource governance is expected to remain a key area of national and international engagement in the near future,
especially in the context of climate change and food crisis, because the access to land is becoming ever more relevant for
livelihood enhancement, food security, and rural development. Moreover, the poor land governance and policies that undermine
tenure security often tend to diminish investments and encourage unsustainable practices of land management that generate
short-term gains at the cost of social and environmental balance. Based on this, pro-poor, democratic and sustainable governance
solutions are urgently required that respect and strengthen the tenure rights and security for smallholder farmers, pastoralists,
forest dependent people and indigenous people.
The phenomenon of territoriality is often conceptualised with emphasis on boundary. This study concentrates on the social practices that produce territoriality. Bureaucratic administration is taken to be inherently involved in territoriality, the phenomenon itself being thus attributable to particular spatial and historical contexts.
The structure of the study is threefold. Firstly, dimensions of space and philosophies of science are analysed so as to arrive at a method supportive of the study. The idea of social construction of space together with constructivist epistemology is presented as a constructivist conception of space.
Bureaucracies emerge with the introduction of writing as a means of coordinating objects, people and events into a co-synchronous event-universe. Taxation and censuses being the most significant forms of horizontal administration, the first context of territoriality is the pre-modern city. The historical consolidation of administrative power takes place as 'system integration', while 'national integration' denotes the homogenisation of space (standardisation of norms, language etc.). These modes of integration coincide in the modern nation-state.
Finally, the modernisation of traditional Romanian village communities is analysed in the framework of territoriality. In the beginning of the twentieth century state administration still remains at a distance from the everyday village life. The consolidation of the state socialist system, however, culminates on 'systematization' - a centrally planned rearrangement of the rural settlement in the 1970's.
State boundaries have constituted a major topic in the tradition of political geography. Boundary analysis has focused on the international scale, since international boundaries provide perhaps the most explicit manifestation of the large-scale connection between politics and geography. The past decade has witnessed a renewed interest in boundaries, both within geography and from the wider field of social theory. Geographers have sought to place the notions of boundary within other social theoretical constructs, while other social scientists have attempted to understand the role of space and, in some cases, territory in their understanding of personal, group, and national boundaries and identities. Recent studies include analyses of the postmodern ideas of territoriality and the ‘disappearance’ of borders, the construction of sociospatial identities, socialization narratives in which boundaries are responsible for creating the ‘us’ and the ‘Other’, and the different scale dimensions of boundary research. These can be brought together within a multidimensional, multidisciplinary framework for the future study of boundary phenomena.
The concept of society is of fundamental importance in social science research. Yet there is little explicit theorization among the mainstream social sciences of how society should be conceived of geographically. The dominant tendency is to take a state-territorial definition of society for granted. While an increasing reflexivity has recently emerged regarding the relationship between social science discourses and the states' agency and projects, the role of state territorial boundaries in structuring the production of knowledge of society has not received equal attention. This article seeks to make a contribution to ongoing work which focuses explicitly on the interrelationships between governmental practice, bodies of knowledge, and territory.
geoplitical division;geoplitics;political geography;borders;power
Ngorongoro Conservation Area in the heart of Maasailand is one of the world's most important conservation heritage areas. This book centres on a field study of the Ngorongoro Maasai and their herds, around which present knowledge of African rangeland, wildlife, livestock and pastoralist ecology is brought together and analysed. Management problems in Ngorongoro encapsulate many of the major debates in the ecology and conservation of African savannas. This book explores perceived problems, ecological facts and possible management solutions. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the authors argue a highly charged issue in terms of ecological fact and theory. This is an essential book for all those interested in the interface between wildlife conservation and human land use, whether professional ecologists or biologists, conservationists or resource managers, development workers or rural planners, and more generally, all those concerned with the ecological facts behind environmental and development issues.
This book provides a new inter-disciplinary look at the practice and policies of conservation in Africa. Bringing together social scientists, anthropologists and historians with biologists for the first time, the book sheds some light on the previously neglected but critically important social aspects of conservation thinking. To date conservation has been very much the domain of the biologist, but the current ecological crisis in Africa and the failure of orthodox conservation policies demand a radical new appraisal of conventional practices. This new approach to conservation, the book argues, cannot deal simply with the survival of species and habitats, for the future of African wildlife is intimately tied to the future of African rural communities. Conservation must form an integral part of future policies for human development. The book emphasises this urgent need for a complementary rather than a competitive approach. It covers a wide range of topics important to this new approach, from wildlife management to soil conservation and from the Cape in the nineteenth century to Ethiopia in the 1980s. It is essential reading for all those concerned about people and conservation in Africa.
The focus of this chapter is a society-centred view of the state; it identifies the state as necessary to the operations of society and develops an understanding of state operations accordingly. Other approaches - state-centred rather than society-centred - are possible. A full analysis of the state and political geography requires equal treatment of the state-centred and society-centred approaches. Here, the latter gets virtually all of the attention, in a brief overview that focuses on why we have states in modern societies and why those states are necessarily territorial institutions. The first section considers the need for the state in conflict-ridden capitalist societies and the territorial requirements of the roles that it must play. After this, attention turns to the autonomy of the state, and then to the concept of the state apparatus and to the running of the state. A final brief section deals with the pattern of states and geopolitics. -from Author
Despite significant advances in theorizing the nature of state functions and state institutions like law, geographers have neglected law as a mode of discourse. Studies of the spatial impacts of law ignore some of the deeper and potentially rich interrelationships between geographical and legal reasoning. An important goal of this chapter is to prompt recognition of the links between these reasonings. The reader is introduced to theories of law, and the possible roles of the social sciences in studying law and legal reasoning. A second goal of the chapter is to describe the essential elements of current approaches to the geography of law. Through a critique of this literature, an agenda for future research is developed. In the third section, emphasis is placed on the methods of law, and the ways in which "Law's Empire' is legitimized. It would be a mistake, though, to image that there is a hidden agenda in this chapter for replacing geographical reasoning with legal reasoning. -from Author
When first published in 1988, this classic study was the first to relate the dynamics of the Maasai age organisation to the tensions within the family. Together, these provide the twin strands of a man's career, opposed ritually and reflecting a fundamental ambivalence in Maasai thought. The analysis is illustrated with extensive case material from the the Matapato, selected for this study as a typical Maasai group.
Short and accessible, this book interweaves a discussion of the geography of property in one global city, Vancouver, with a more general analysis of property, politics, and the city.
Across the whole of our modern world, territory is directly linked to sovereignty to mould politics into a fundamentally state-centric social process, so much so that conflicts not involving the state are often seen as outside politics as generally conceived. The State's "capture' of politics, and much else besides, in the modern world is premissed upon territoriality. When we look at the 20th-century state in the core of the modern world-system we are immediately impressed by the sheer magnitude of functions it has acquired. They can be reduced to just four basic tasks: states wage war, they manage the economy, they give national identity, and they provide social services. As strategies of territoriality these amount to containment of power, wealth, culture and society. -from Author
In its broadest sense environmental planning is an attempt to balance and harmonise the various enterprises, which man, for his own benefit, has superimposed on natural environments. Although these enterprises are often designed to complement one another, possibilities for conflict and imbalance can arise at many levels. On the global scale, some observers fear that our present commitment to industrial growth will lead to increasing environmental damage and resource depletion, and result eventually in the collapse of society (Meadows, et al., 1972; Goldsmith et al., 1972). Economists see an equal danger in the incomplete industrial growth characteristic of many developing countries. They point out that industrialisation at this level frequently creates problems of rural depopulation and loss of food production, without sufficiently increasing prosperity to allow food supplies to be purchased from other countries (Mountjoy, 1975). Whatever the validity of these somewhat pessimistic assessments, and certainly there are some dissenting voices (Maddox, 1972), they are not the subject of this book. Here it is our intention to concentrate on the prospects of successfully integrating different enterprises at the more restricted, regional level.
The Kenyan Government introduced group ranches in Kajiado District in the 1960s. They were aimed at addressing the problem of overgrazing and land degradation, said to be occurring in the pastoral arid and semi-arid areas, by converting communal to group tenure.This was expected to encourage the Maasai nomadic pastoralists to confine their livestock within ranch boundaries and reduce their livestock numbers. Although group ranches in Kajiado failed to meet these expectations, they secured the Maasai's traditional land against alienation by non-Maasai. Thereafter, the Maasai continued using their land along traditional lines, which is increasingly being recognized as the most efficient and sustainable use. Group ranch sub-division into individual plots in Kajiado began in the 1980s with government support. Further fragmentation of plots and sale, in many cases to non-Maasai, followed sub-division. Average plot sizes have decreased, while the number of fenced properties and the levels of cultivation have increased. Due to sub-division, the Maasai are gradually losing their best land and are being pushed into the drier areas. Sub-division will threaten continued extensive nomadic livestock production by decreasing mobility and the carrying capacity of group ranch land, increase the potential for land degradation and crop failures, and interfere with traditional wildlife migration patterns.
If we want to explore the social dimensions of property, we need to think of it not only historically but also geographically, entailing both practices in and representations of social space. The concept of landscape is a useful bridging device here, given its double meaning as both a material space and as a particular way of seeing space. Landscapes, in both senses, can serve to reify and naturalize dominant property relations but can also serve as spaces of contestation. Such landscapes, however, cannot be disentangled from the places in which they are positioned. I use this framework to make sense of resistance to gentrification in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada, a poor neighborhood with a rich history of activism. A collective property claim by the poor has been staked out through the material use, production, and representation of an urban landscape. Such local meanings and practices, however, are threatened by "outsiders," who are seen to map and use this landscape in very different ways.
Despite wide interest expressed in indigenous farmer-managed small-scale irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa, there are relatively few studies of such systems. This paper offers a preliminary description of that practised by the Sonjo in northern Tanzania. Sonjo irrigation involves simple canals carrying water diverted by stone and brushwood dams from spring-fed streams and rivers. Land is irrigated on floodplain and piedmont slopes, and a wide variety of crops is now grown. There is an established system of water allocation. Sonjo irrigation is an example of hill-furrow irrigation of a kind occurring in several places in East Africa. Fuller information of the extent, organization, management and agronomy of these systems is vital as development initiatives are established which attempt to 'improve' or replicate 'indigenous knowledge' about irrigation.
This paper outlines the linkages between population pressure and common property resources availability in Tanzania. It examines on whether population pressure has an influence on diminishing common property resources at the local level and establishes the coping mechanisms of the local communities in response to new circumstances and changing environment. In the course of discussion, an attempt has been made to assess the extent to which population pressure have influenced availability of common property resources at the local level; and identify policy implications and alternatives strategies to cope with diminishing common property resources. Further analysis have been made of the extent to which poverty alleviation strategies at the local level influence non-sustainable use and degradation of common property resources. These issues require a closer examination of the circumstances under which population; development and environment linkages manifest themselves. Whereas the population has shown a continuous increase, there is less information about the rate at which the common property resources are diminishing in response to changing demographic conditions. Similarly, the impacts of various poverty alleviation strategies on diminish common property resources at the local level are not well documented. Small and large-scale mining operations in Mabuki and Maganzo villages has been used as an example to illustrate the transformation in the way local communities use and manage common property resources. The identified long-term implications of the various practices to include increased environmental degradation; accelerated food insecurity, increased poverty, diminishing common property resources, increased land use conflicts, and creation of a landless class at the village level. These implications require policy commitment and support to enable sustainable utilization of common property resources.
Place and space are treated as the fundamental concepts for answering where and what questions. Their relationship is defined as a tension with places tending to be enabling and spaces dis-enabling in progressive political practice. The political geography of this position is explored through identifying nation-state and home-household as exemplary examples of place–space tensions. The addition of nation to state and home to household is interpreted as necessarily resulting from the social turmoil that is modernity. While nation turns state space into place, states remain major space producers of the modern age. The way in which home turns household space into place is derived from the identification of three modernities within which this new place–space tension was created. For both nation-state and home-household their treatment as place–space tension highlights their ambiguous political roles. A final place–space tension is identified at the global scale between a geoecology place and a globalization space.
This article considers how researchers can negotiate encounters with postmodernisms in ways that enrich our capacities to understand and contest prevailing power relations and struggles in and against patriarchal, capitalist legal systems. Radical research on law and legal struggles is considered. It is that, while very promising in many respects, debates about ways forward in theory and method have been unduly constrained by characterizations of the current "intellectual crisis' that limit engagement not only with postmodernisms but also with critical traditions like feminism. A geographic approach to law and legal struggles is proposed which is materialist, feminist and Marxist; a perspective designed explicitly to face the conceptual, epistemological and methodological challenges of radical research in the age of the "posts'. -from Author
In our efforts to strengthen the conceptual tools we use to understand society, the ways we treat the spatial units that frame our empirical analyses are of obvious importance. To present them as something more than static compartments requires an explicit concern with the dynamics of regional formation and a substantive engagement of humanist concerns with regional ideology and territoriality. Questions of history, scale and meaning are raised. Most importantly, focussing on the functional and ideological dimensions of the regional formation process directs attention not only to the role of regions in social processes, but to the meaning and significance of regions themselves. -after Author
In this paper I will examine the effects of the implementation of the Gestion des Terroirs approach in several villages in the cotton-growing region of southwestern Burkina Faso, an area of both extensive immigration and fast-paced socioeconomic change. Efforts to restructure land-tenure relations have failed, despite the rhetoric of participatory development, because projects misunderstand the nature of changing land rights, agricultural practices, and village social relations. Failures of efforts to zone land have been exacerbated because land has become a major site of conflict. Population growth and agricultural growth have led to land shortages, intensified competition, and overt conflict. Efforts to restructure landholding by using participatory development methods have had unintended consequences as individuals and groups manipulate meanings and representations about rights to land and land-management strategies in order to lay claim to land. On the one hand some local farmers are attempting to expel migrant farmers from land by invoking notions of who is and who is not using environmentally sound management practices. Migrant farmers, on the other hand, are fearful of leaving land fallow because they fear that the project or their local hosts will take it away from them. Both of these outcomes have increased tension among ethnic and generational groups and fostered mistrust of the motivations of environmental projects. Instead of homogeneous cooperative entities, villages are often based on conflict and competition. Projects, therefore, should focus on conflict resolution and reconciliation when attempting to restructure how natural resources are allocated.