Search

Copyright of Brazilian Journalism Research is the property of Sur le journalisme, About journalism, Sobre jornalismo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article assesses the effectiveness of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil's (RSPO) Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) policy in respecting customary land rights in Indonesia using a policy implementation framework. The questions addressed are what is the practice of FPIC by oil palm companies? What is the performance of the companies in implementing the FPIC? Data from companies' documents and a survey of oil palm companies in West and Central Kalimantan show that while RSPO members are practicing the FPIC policy, their FPIC performance is inadequate, because of the absence of external monitoring of land acquisition and company reliance on inadequate Indonesian environmental law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on my involvement as a researcher in mining conflicts on customary land in Central Kalimantan, I reflect on my positionality, assumptions, roles, expectations and impacts on social change. Constant re-thinking of my own biases was necessary in order to grasp the nuanced and complex nature of villagers' attitudes towards mining, and their entangled relations with the mining companies. My attempt to act as a process facilitator, by persuading an indigenous rights organisation to support villagers in their dispute over land rights with the mining company, was unsuccessful. I conclude that a constant reassessment of expectations and aims is needed in order to achieve the co-production of knowledge that is relevant for social change and for the attempt to enhance villagers' participation in decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insecure rights tend to lead to land-use conflicts. The literature mainly focuses on the impact of insecure land rights on investment. Regarding the causes, studies mainly focus on the effect of state regulations. Little attention is given to the impact of the extractive economy on land rights security. This article scrutinizes how palm oil expansion manipulates insecure land rights, leading to land-use conflict. We pay attention to a particular land right in Indonesia that is based on the´ land status letter´ (Surat Keterangan Tanah, SKT), an initial proof of land ownership that is widely held by villagers in Indonesia. Studies have neglected this land right, as most attention has been on customary rights (Adat). Our main questions are: How do palm oil companies treat the SKT in their efforts to obtain more land for their plantations, and how do farmers try to fight for their SKT rights? Using a qualitative case study in Indonesia´s Riau Province, we show that because of a shared perception that SKTs offer security, villagers did not attempt to get a full legal land certificate from the Land Agency, and palm oil companies often manipulated SKT land rights to acquire land for new plantations. Limited access to conflict resolution mechanisms hampers landholders' efforts to enforce their land rights, and our study suggests that the security of SKT land rights depends upon landholders' ability to fight for their rights. NGOs did not help empower them in this matter in most cases. • Insecure land tenure is a well-known issue in development. • Agrarian transformation threatens the land-right security of small farmers. • Political economy is needed to explain insecure land rights. • Palm oil expansion manipulates SKT land rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Mundo Agrario is the property of Universidad Nacional de La Plata and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article analyzes the nexus between land and forced migration issues in Mauritania, in the light of recent developments in the agribusiness sector, which have come with new policies of land redistribution that were not necessarily based on ethnicity. In this context, I present the formation and emergence of a protest movement against attempts by the Mauritanian government, between 2011 and 2015, to grant tens of thousands of hectares of land concessions to Arab investors in the Senegal River regions. The analysis of this conflict, which involves, among others, repatriated populations, makes it possible to describe a whole chain of state and non-state actors, and stakeholders at different scales, which have allowed this local conflict to have a national scope.

This article is the results from a research that addresses the conflict over land in Santander in the first half of the 20th century, from an interdisciplinary theoretical approach. For this purpose, a criminal judicial source, notarial, press, regulations, official reports, and bibliography were consulted to reconstruct part of the history of the “El Playón” farm and the operation, purpose, and claims of the “Workers League peasants from Playón.” It is concluded that, at that stage, there was a major problem on the hacienda, within the framework of a generalized panorama of tensions, sometimes confronting landowners and groups of peasants from legality and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate judiciary decision-making patterns regarding property rights conflicts between native Brazilians and rural farmers in the Midwest region of Brazil. Our main contribution is the use of the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) method for the evaluation of the issue. We use QCA to examine a unique database composed of cases heard by a regional federal court in Brazil between 1999 and 2013. Our empirical analysis is based on the outcomes of the individual judicial procedures along with the specific laws and jurisprudences evoked by the federal judges in making their decisions. We find evidence that a major case settled by the Brazilian Supreme Court in 2009, celebrated as a landmark in national jurisprudence and expected to bring stability to the conflicts, did not have this effect on lower courts' judgments. In fact, the 2009 decision triggered a proliferation of different interpretations among judges about how to analyze the land conflicts, thus changing the structure of the judges' decisions. Based on these findings, we can shed new light on the dynamics of judicial decision-making regarding property rights conflicts of indigenous lands in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The state of Pará in the Brazilian Amazon is recognized both nationally and internationally for its land conflicts throughout history. Agricultural modernization and the expansion of the agricultural frontier, especially with regard to soybean production, did not significantly alter Pará's record of conflict and violence. Instead, new actors involved in agro-strategies and the Amazonian agribusiness economy have experienced new land disputes, new forms of land concentration, and conflicts with indigenous tribes, Maroon communities and peasants' groups in the Santarém region, the most important urban and rural centre of Western Pará, in the heartland of Brazilian Amazon. This article examines relations between the arrival and expansion of soybean plantations, particularly in post-2001, as part of regional agro-strategies that have perpetuated and deepened long-standing conflicts over land in the state of Pará. It also highlights the emergence of new territorial disputes, which have created additional obstacles, increasing the demand for land and raising land prices while impacting processes by which land and territorial rights are secured in the state of Pará. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a widening legal scope for indigenous rights, the invocation of indigeneity to claim land rights rarely empowers marginalized communities. This article develops an explanation for why this formal recognition of community rights actually has little substantive impact on local struggles over land in Indonesia. Employing almost two years of fieldwork on how rural communities employ indigeneity-based land claims in South Sulawesi, it argues that claims for land rights on the basis of indigeneity are settled not simply on the basis of law, but also on that of the relative bargaining positions and the character of informal linkages between communities, their mediators and local authorities. Indigenous status therefore must be understood as a privilege most likely to be obtained by those groups with relatively strong connections to influential state actors. In contrast, communities that are in conflict with local state actors tend be excluded from obtaining the status of indigeneity and hence the state is likely to deny them their land rights claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal individual land titling is often posed as a foundational ingredient to economic and social development in Africa. Many have questioned this proposition with evidence from across the region. Our paper goes one step further in suggesting that an international community of actors created a fetish around land title that engenders chaos and conflict. We document the emergence of crowded field of land formalization efforts focused on technocratic solutions in Tanzania. The result is a pluralistic landscape with competing procedures and technologies, different justifications, and disparate outcomes. Despite the large allocations of funds support these efforts only 3% of all rural parcels have been surveyed since 2004. We use a mixed methods approach that includes analyses of government policies and project documents; interviews with government officials, project implementers and NGO staff; and rural household surveys in districts with and without titling. We argue that it is time to re-orient efforts by returning to a broader, integrated approach to rural development and abandon this myopic obsession with formalization, which has failed to fulfill its touted benefits. Our findings have relevance beyond land titling to other areas where duplicative efforts implemented in the name of progress might be counterproductive to achieving economic and social development goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times a growing number of Latin American rural groups have achieved extended ethno-territorial rights, and large territories have been protected by progressive constitutions. These were the outcomes of extended cycles of national and transnational contentious politics and of social movement struggle, including collective South–South cooperation. However, the continent has simultaneously experienced a resource extraction boom. Frequently the extractivism takes place in protected areas and/or Indigenous territories. Consequently economic interests collide with the protection and recognition of constitutional rights. Through a review of selected demonstrative cases across Latin America, this article analyses the (de jure) rights on paper versus the (de facto) rights in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: A good deal of research has highlighted the surge and development of rural land sales and tenancy contracts in West Africa. However, the commoditization of land, especially through sales, does not appear to be obvious, as land transactions appear to be a major source of tenure insecurity and land conflicts. This issue is linked with the broader issue of identification and recognition of both the land rights that are being transferred and people holding them. This article deals with tensions and conflicts in land transactions in Côte d’Ivoire and discusses how these transactions might be secured in a context where most transactions occur outside the legal framework. The 1998 Law aims to organise a rapid transition towards private property rights through a nationwide certification and titling program. Due to the socio-political situation, it was only in 2010 that the first certificates were issued and even independently of current political turmoil, there are grounds for doubting the effective implementation of the law. The objective of this article is to consider the issue of securing land transactions in the pre-certification/titling context, drawing from the author''s intensive field research on land transactions in Côte d’Ivoire. A first section describes the main types of rural land transactions in Côte d’Ivoire. The second section outlines the sources of tensions and conflicts arising from these transactions. The third section assesses the practices that have emerged spontaneously in rural areas to secure transactions. The fourth section considers the needs and conditions for a public intervention regarding the security of land transactions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Tension and conflict are endemic to any upgrading initiative (including basic infrastructure provision) requiring private land contributions, whether in the form of voluntary donations or compensated land acquisitions. In informal urban contexts, practitioners must first identify well-suited land for public infrastructure, both spatially and with careful consideration for safeguarding claimed rights and preventing conflicts. At the same time, they need to defuse existing tensions over land ownership and land use rights while negotiating for the potential use of a unit of land for infrastructure. Even in the case of employing participatory methods, land negotiations are never tension-free. Despite the extensive literature on linkages between urban poverty, inefficient land management systems, and land disputes, in both rural and urban settings, land negotiations for community-scale infrastructure retrofit projects (e.g., neighbourhood roads, water and sanitation infrastructure) are yet to be fully explored. Drawing on a case study of a live green infrastructure retrofit project in six informal settlements in Makassar, Indonesia, we establish links to exchange theory, collective action, and negotiation theory to build a reliable analytical framework for understanding and explaining the land negotiations in small-scale infrastructure retrofit practices. We aim to describe and assess the fundamental conditions for land negotiations in an informal urban context and conclude the paper by summarising several key strategies developed and used in the case study area to forge land agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We examine land conflicts between neighbours who have been absent due to displacement caused by armed conflicts. • Households that were displaced to locations far from their homes are more likely to have land conflicts. • Household number of years spent without doing farming in the home village and weakening informal land governance institutions appear to be the pathways of the above results. • Land conflicts are found to have a negative effect on agricultural productivity. • Land conflicts reduce farmers' incentive to invest in their plots due to insecure land rights. This paper examines conflicts in northern Uganda over land rights and land demarcation between neighbours who returned from absence due to displacement caused by armed conflicts. It uses detailed parcel-, household-, and community-level data collected in 2015 from villages in northern Uganda. The results are noteworthy: households that were displaced to locations far from their homes are more likely to have new land conflicts and more likely to be concerned about land conflicts. Household number of years spent without doing farming in the home village and weakening informal land governance institutions appear to be the main mechanisms of the above results. Furthermore, land conflicts are found to have a negative effect on agricultural productivity because they reduce farmers' incentive to invest in their plots due to insecure land rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers insight on the missed narrative of land and resource conflict beneath the reality of gemstones and ores in the inchoate industry of limestone, marble and gold mining by communities in Karamoja – Uganda. Land tenure is often overlooked as a cause of tension or driver of conflicts especially in the design of responses to conflict situations in mining areas. Land tenure is considered to be an intricate, historical and perplexing factor in conflict, and the response to its manifestation is often limited to the formalization of land rights. This paper describes the forms of land tenure induced conflicts in mining communities. It articulates the need to address such land-resource conflicts by applying responses based on property rights recognition to that capture the full bundle of rights especially on customary land and improve the leverage of communities in claiming benefits from mining actions. The paper is arranged in six sections; a short introduction, background, and methods, women in mining, description of conflicts due to land-resource tenure and property rights recognition as a response to conflict. It concludes that property rights are essential in supporting claims to entitlement and benefits for communities, as they improve the bargaining power of communities while avoiding the coalescing ability of land grievances in driving mining communities into conflict. Under customary-communal tenure, surface rights are well defined but rarely are sub-surface rights. Legal and formal instruments to guarantee economic value and costs, transmitted in compensation payments, royalty fees and in benefits to communities are necessary to lessen the frictions about quantifications and measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tackles the broad issue of agrarian contracts, property rights and conflicts in the context of rural Côte d'Ivoire. Since the beginning of the 2000s, a new type of contractual arrangement has been developing rapidly: the 'Plant & Share' contract. Through such a contract, a landowner provides the land to a farmer who develops a perennial tree crop plantation; when production starts, the plantation, the plantation and the land, or the product is shared. The aim of the paper is to discuss the conflictive features of the arrangement. I argue that this contract, in spite of its potential for tensions and conflicts, constitutes an alternative to the much more conflictive land sales that currently dominate extra-familial land transfers in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]