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Seeks to explore the institutional arrangements that have enabled the establishment of a credible and socially accepted cropland tenure system in China. For this purpose, the chapter starts with a broad review of the national policy and law-making process that dictates property rights for agricultural land. In addition, the chapter analyses China’s land property rights structure. It is argued that the restraint which the central government exercised in leaving land ownership ambiguous—the creation of ‘intentional institutional ambiguity’—offers the greater part of the explanation of why the cropland tenure system functions

The transition from ideas and policies that sought to redistribute ‘land to the tiller’ to those that promote ‘land liberalization’ is a snapshot of Gujarat’s story of development from independence to the present day. The chapter shows, in high-definition, Gujarat’s thwarted post-independence developmentalism giving way to a politicized and skewed liberalization. An embedded state has provided continuity between the phases. The great Indian land grab and the re-agglomeration of land in the hands of the mega players of the new economy, which dominates public debate in India today, can be contextualized within the larger policy shift depicted in this chapter.

This essay probes the messy and contested history of land tenure in the British colony of Lagos to show how it was shaped by the encounter between the colonized and colonizers. It demonstrates that major changes in land use and land rights were driven by the practices of Africans on the ground and later in the colonial courts, rather than by the policies of the British. The essay further shows that the major transformations in local land tenure during the colonial period were not linear, from inalienable, communally-owned family property to commercialized, private property, but involved a more complex interplay between the two ways of owning land. Finally, the essay investigates changes in Britain’s land policies in West Africa once her empire began to move inland from the coast after 1893.

This is the fourth of five country case studies on income inequality, and looks at the case of South Africa. After an introduction, the second section of the chapter reviews the evolution of inequality in South Africa, and the third draws together the findings of other authors to highlight the primary sources of changes in the nature of income inequality (wage differentials and unequal access to employment). The fourth section assesses the evolution of economic policy and performance, drawing a distinction between the apartheid years and the post‐1994 period, and also considers the posttransition policy framework in more detail. The fifth section briefly discusses policies targeted at the structural causes of poverty and inequality since 1994 (policies on education and social expenditure, and on land). The sixth section focuses on the likely impact of the macroeconomic policy framework since 1994 on income distribution, arguing that changes in labour markets resulting from the breakdown of apartheid in the workplace dominated the observed shifts in the distribution of income during the 1970s and 1980s, although there is evidence that the shift towards neoliberal orthodoxy is increasingly affecting the income distribution; topics addressed include the effects of stabilization (inflation and interest rates), fiscal policy, trade and financial liberalization, and labour institutions.

This chapter examines the continued evolution of land rights as the threat of colonization diminished with the outbreak of World War I, along with the emergence of Thai nationalism as a political force and the impact of the Great Depression on rural society. Before discussing the interaction between the parallel development of nationalism and property rights in land in Thailand, the chapter considers the role of Japan in the continued evolution of Siamese land policy and law. It also discusses the land-titling law passed by Parliament in 1936 and goes on to analyze how the new political forces and historical experiences reinforced rather than challenged the status quo in regards to rural land rights in Thailand. The chapter concludes by comparing the impact of the Great Depression in Burma and Siam to illustrate the significance of the legacy of institutional underdevelopment.

The application of the resource-oriented approach used in this book confirms the prominent role of the resource Property in the resource portfolios of each of the three policy actors. Property consists of the ownership of property and use rights to material and immaterial (natural, manufactured, social and/or human) resources and the various bundles of goods and/or services they provide to the owner. One of the prominent services of such resources involves their role as policy resource (abstract use of such resources as opposed to concrete uses). The most prominent material resource is the ownership of (strategic) land, which enables both public and private actors to play a predominant role in policy formulation and, especially, implementation processes. The chapter illustrates the mobilization and use modes of the resource Property in the areas of spatial planning, institutional policies (creation of a Swiss canton) , public accounting and state infrastructural policies (land acquisition policies for communal land use policy). It stresses the role of legal appeals by target groups or beneficiary organizations and the privileged position occupied landowners in the planning and implementation of large urban projects.

This chapter provides a background to the scope of this book's study on colonial policies in Palestine. The book focuses on the contexts in which imported ideas and presumptions about land were continually being adapted to changing circumstances. Abstract theories of property informed official policies, but analysis of colonial land policies is best anchored in specific historical developments. It is the highly contextualised nature of land policy that this book hopes to capture for the case of Palestine in the inter-war years. The book aims to reveal the nature of colonial land policies in Palestine as ad hoc and makeshift, multidirectional and inconsistent, even contradictory. It attempts to untangle colonial land policies by specifically addressing the utilitarian set of expectations which colonial officials themselves held about the proper role secure and individual property rights were expected to play.

The chapter focuses on the sustainable use of land which is fixed in availability and has competing uses for meeting the requirements of any economy. As agriculture for food supply is the most critical use of land it outlines the theory of land use and rent with reference to soil or land quality and defines the carrying capacity of land in terms of providing life support to people in calorie units. It critically discusses the issue of food security with reference to the adequacy of carrying capacity of land and points to both the challenges of distribution as well as augmenting carrying capacity using biotechnology and developing genetically modified crops. It further discusses the actual pattern of land use and land degradation in India, and their causal factors, like soil erosion, chemical and physical degradation of land, poverty, overpopulation and dependency on ecologically fragile resources with their policy implications.

This chapter provides an overview of the institutional design of Russia's land reform. It discusses the historical, policy, and legislative contexts that shaped this reform; the behavioral responses of rural households to land reform policies; and the economic and social effects of land reform policies. It also presents some basic characteristics and national trends that have emerged in landownership and in Russia's land market during its contemporary reform.

This chapter looks at the federal reclamation during the 1920s. It first determines that the federal reclamation clashed with powerful trends in American agriculture, and that farms continued to be abandoned. This is followed by a description of a long memo entitled “Reconstruction”, which was prepared by William Ellsworth Smythe. This reflected the old-fashioned homemaking ideal that had ruled American land policy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The discussion then introduces the Lane-Mondell Bill, which supported a partnership between central government and the states. Tenancy, land monopoly, the reclamation fund, and the Reclamation Reform of the 1920s are all examined. The next few sections focus on the decrease in popularity of the Bureau of Reclamation, which was partly due to low crop prices. The chapter reveals that the Reclamation Bureau transferred to the South following its low popularity in the West.

This chapter looks at how Kenya has dealt with and addressed issues about land, humans, and the connections between them—testing how far the nation's principles and aspirations about such things can be set into official language. It looks at the arguments that ensued due to concerns about colonial legacy, farmer-herder friction, clan body burial, or widow inheritance. It looks at the change in regime in 2003 from the government of Daniel arap Moi to that of Mwai Kibaki as president, and how this change brought about discussions and rethinking about the nature, evolution, design, and effects of land tenure. This was reviewed merely as part of a broader process of re-imagining the constitution and government of the nation. Charles Njonjo saw the three-year commission of enquiry into the land laws of Kenya, and concluded that a new national land policy was in serious need. This chapter ends by examining the particular case of Kenya's process of procuring a new land policy.

This chapter focuses on ecology, ecosystem management, and federal public land policy. Current scientific and philosophical thought generally acknowledges that sustaining interconnected ecological components and processes is vitally important to human welfare, for utilitarian as well as non-utilitarian purposes. Both disciplines, committed to a holistic view of nature, endorse the related proposition that natural resources should be managed on an ecosystem scale. Broader societal trends, ranging from rising affluence and increased urbanization to a new environmental awareness, are helping propel these ideas into the policy arena. The chapter reveals that the public domain is serving as an early battleground over how a functional ecosystem management policy might be fashioned and implemented. It shows that strong criticisms have been leveled against the concept of ecosystem management, and that these criticisms must be addressed for ecosystem management to be fully recognized as a viable natural resource policy.

This chapter focuses on preservation and public land policy. It is now understood that undeveloped wilderness serves as the last refuge for many of the most imperiled species, making it both the real and symbolic heart of any ecosystem management strategy. The traditional enclave strategy of nature conservation does not meet contemporary biodiversity concerns and ecological needs. The chapter reveals that public land preservation decisions are inherently political decisions, and that Congress has routinely deferred to local political preferences in shaping new wilderness legislation, effectively devolving this power to local congressional delegations. It argues that large-scale wilderness preservation proposals must surmount major political obstacles, which often leaves them languishing in legislative limbo, and also presents a discussion on the Montana wilderness debate.

Land governance is currently the focus of many new global rule-making projects, marking a sharp break with past practices that sought to exclude land as an international governance issue. Wide-ranging concerns about land grabbing and its exclusionary and ecological consequences have driven this, prompting states and global civil society to devise new global land-governance instruments. This chapter offers a preliminary theoretical and empirical analysis of what is conceptualized as “emergent global land governance,” focusing primarily on its international governance dimensions. A review of relevant land-governance policy instruments in the fields of investment, land tenure, and forestry suggests that emergent global land governance is likely to consist of multiple, overlapping instruments with diverging normative frameworks and objectives that are not closely coordinated instead of a singular, discrete international regime. Published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.

This chapter focuses on the Lumads of Bendum village, situated in the Mindano Island of the Philippines. Extensive logging activity, along with the land-tenure policies of past governments, encouraged migration and pushed back tribes such as the Lumads into more remote areas. The area around Bendum is also home to the New Peoples' Army insurrectionists, as a result of which the Philippine army also favors better roads to the area. Apart from these, the proposal for two hydropower dams and an integrated development project for the area, approved by the Asian Development Bank, have resulted in increased competition for resources between the Lumads and migrants. The countercampaign launched by the Lumads for the restoration of their tribal rights over the forests finally succeeded in 1998, which also helped in developing a better social infrastructure for themselves.

This chapter examines the incorporation of the territory first acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, particularly the states west of the Mississippi with the exception of the Southwest. It first considers the tensions in early land policy between those who wanted to use the land for profit and those who wanted to settle and cultivate it. These battles originated in Congress, in disputes over preemption and homesteading that engaged the idea that settlers ought to be allowed to have subsidized or free land if they settled and cultivated it in a manner beneficial to the growth of the nation. Once eastern settlements were incorporated as states, federal land policies began to change. The chapter also explores the rising tension between homesteading and slavery before concluding with an analysis of the consequence of the Homestead Act of 1862 for western settlement and for the continued manufacturing of whiteness, especially in Oklahoma.

This chapter discusses politics and property rights and access to agricultural land in the later Soviet period. It describes the evolution of land reform policies and legislation during 1990–91 at the national level and in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR).