Breathing Life Into Dead Theories about Property Rights

Breathing Life Into Dead Theories about Property Rights PDF Author: Celestine Itumbi Nyamu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Land tenure
Languages : en
Pages : 34

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Book Description
Presumption of a direct causal link between formalisation of property rights and economic productivity is back on the international development agenda. Belief in such a direct causal relationship had been abandoned in the early 1990s, following four decades of land tenure reform experiments that failed to produce the anticipated efficiency results. The work of Hernando de Soto has provided the springboard for this revival. De Soto argues that formal property rights hold the key to poverty reduction by unlocking the capital potential of assets held informally by poor people. De Soto's justifications of formal title do not differ much from justifications that were advanced for ambitious land tenure reforms in various sub-Saharan African countries, starting with Kenya in the 1950s. Introduction of formal title in the African areas was seen as the key to solving problems of land degradation and improving agriculture by providing farmers with security of tenure that would create incentives for further investment in the land. This paper argues that there are five shortcomings in both the old and contemporary arguments for formalisation of land title. First, legality is constructed narrowly to mean only formal legality. Therefore legal pluralism is equated with extra-legality. Second, there is an underlying social evolutionist bias that presumes inevitability of the transition to private (conflated with individual) ownership as the destiny of all societies. Third, the presumed link between formal title and access to credit facilities has not been borne out by empirical evidence. Fourth, markets in land are understood narrowly to refer only to 'formal markets'. Fifth, the arguments in favour of formulisation of title as the means to secure tenure ignore the fact that formal title could also generate insecurity.

Breathing Life Into Dead Theories about Property Rights

Breathing Life Into Dead Theories about Property Rights PDF Author: Celestine Itumbi Nyamu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Land tenure
Languages : en
Pages : 34

Get Book Here

Book Description
Presumption of a direct causal link between formalisation of property rights and economic productivity is back on the international development agenda. Belief in such a direct causal relationship had been abandoned in the early 1990s, following four decades of land tenure reform experiments that failed to produce the anticipated efficiency results. The work of Hernando de Soto has provided the springboard for this revival. De Soto argues that formal property rights hold the key to poverty reduction by unlocking the capital potential of assets held informally by poor people. De Soto's justifications of formal title do not differ much from justifications that were advanced for ambitious land tenure reforms in various sub-Saharan African countries, starting with Kenya in the 1950s. Introduction of formal title in the African areas was seen as the key to solving problems of land degradation and improving agriculture by providing farmers with security of tenure that would create incentives for further investment in the land. This paper argues that there are five shortcomings in both the old and contemporary arguments for formalisation of land title. First, legality is constructed narrowly to mean only formal legality. Therefore legal pluralism is equated with extra-legality. Second, there is an underlying social evolutionist bias that presumes inevitability of the transition to private (conflated with individual) ownership as the destiny of all societies. Third, the presumed link between formal title and access to credit facilities has not been borne out by empirical evidence. Fourth, markets in land are understood narrowly to refer only to 'formal markets'. Fifth, the arguments in favour of formulisation of title as the means to secure tenure ignore the fact that formal title could also generate insecurity.

Women's Property Rights Under CEDAW

Women's Property Rights Under CEDAW PDF Author: José E. Alvarez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197751873
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
For over 40 years, the leading international treaty body on women's rights, the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (the CEDAW Committee), has been generating jurisprudence interpreting CEDAW's obligations that states protect the equal rights of women. This book concludes that CEDAW's re-engendering of property--although a flawed and evolving work in progress--has the potential to be transformative for the half of the planet who is more likely to be treated as property than to have any.

Law in the Pursuit of Development

Law in the Pursuit of Development PDF Author: Amanda Perry Kessaris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135179433
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Law in the Pursuit of Development critically explores the relationships between contemporary principles and practice in law and development. Including papers by internationally renowned, as well as emerging, scholars and practitioners, the book is organized around the three liberal principles which underlie current efforts to direct law towards the pursuit of development. First, that the private sector has an important role to play in promoting the public interest; second, that widespread participation and accountability are essential to any large scale enterprise; and third, that the rule of law is a fundamental building block of development. This insightful and provocative collection, in which contributors critique both the principles and efforts to implement them in practice, will be of considerable interest to students, academics and practitioners with an interest in the fields of law and development, international economic law, and law and globalization.

The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Legal Research

The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Legal Research PDF Author: Peter Cane
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191635421
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 1111

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Book Description
The empirical study of law, legal systems and legal institutions is widely viewed as one of the most exciting and important intellectual developments in the modern history of legal research. Motivated by a conviction that legal phenomena can and should be understood not only in normative terms but also as social practices of political, economic and ethical significance, empirical legal researchers have used quantitative and qualitative methods to illuminate many aspects of law's meaning, operation and impact. In the 43 chapters of The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Legal Research leading scholars provide accessible and original discussions of the history, aims and methods of empirical research about law, as well as its achievements and potential. The Handbook has three parts. The first deals with the development and institutional context of empirical legal research. The second - and largest - part consists of critical accounts of empirical research on many aspects of the legal world - on criminal law, civil law, public law, regulatory law and international law; on lawyers, judicial institutions, legal procedures and evidence; and on legal pluralism and the public understanding of law. The third part introduces readers to the methods of empirical research, and its place in the law school curriculum.

Universal Human Rights and Extraterritorial Obligations

Universal Human Rights and Extraterritorial Obligations PDF Author: Mark Gibney
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204840
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Globalization challenges fundamental principles governing international law, especially with respect to state sovereignty and international relations. This transformation has had a significant impact on the practice of trade law, financial regulation, and environmental law but relatively little effect on one area of law and regulation: human rights. Universal Human Rights and Extraterritorial Obligations examines both the international and domestic foundations of human rights law. What other contemporary human rights debates have almost totally ignored is that in an increasingly interdependent world—where public and private international actors have great influence on the lives of individuals everywhere—it is insufficient to assess only the record of domestic governments in human rights. It is equally important to assess the effect of actions taken by intergovernmental organizations, international private entities, and foreign states. From this standpoint, contributors to this book address how states' actions or omissions may affect the prospects of individuals in foreign states and asks important questions: To what extent do agricultural policies of rich countries influence the right to food in poorer countries? How do decisions to screen asylum seekers outside state borders affect refugee rights? How does cooperation among different states in the "war on terror" influence individuals' rights to be free from torture? This volume presents a brief for a more complex and updated approach to the protection of human rights worldwide.

Uganda

Uganda PDF Author: Jörg Wiegratz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786991101
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
For the last three decades, Uganda has been one of the fastest growing economies in Africa. Globally praised as an African success story and heavily backed by international financial institutions, development agencies and bilateral donors, the country has become an exemplar of economic and political reform for those who espouse a neoliberal model of development. The neoliberal policies and the resulting restructuring of the country have been accompanied by narratives of progress, prosperity, and modernisation and justified in the name of development. But this self-celebratory narrative, which is critiqued by many in Uganda, masks the disruptive social impact of these reforms and silences the complex and persistent crises resulting from neoliberal transformation. Bringing together a range of leading scholars on the country, this collection represents a timely contribution to the debate around the New Uganda, one which confronts the often sanitised and largely depoliticised accounts of the Museveni government and its proponents. Harnessing a wealth of empirical materials, the contributors offer a critical, multi-disciplinary analysis of the unprecedented political, socio-economic, cultural and ecological transformations brought about by neoliberal capitalist restructuring since the 1980s. The result is the most comprehensive collective study to date of a neoliberal market society in contemporary Africa, offering crucial insights for other countries in the Global South.

Water Resources Planning and Management

Water Resources Planning and Management PDF Author: R. Quentin Grafton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139496492
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 801

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Book Description
Water is an increasingly critical issue at the forefront of global policy change, management and planning. There are growing concerns about water as a renewable resource, its availability for a wide range of users, aquatic ecosystem health, and global issues relating to climate change, water security, water trading and water ethics. This handbook provides the most comprehensive reference ever published on water resource issues. It brings together multiple disciplines to understand and help resolve problems of water quality and scarcity from a global perspective. Its case studies and 'foundation' chapters will be greatly valued by students, researchers and professionals involved in water resources, hydrology, governance and public policy, law, economics, geography and environmental studies.

Law and Time

Law and Time PDF Author: Sian Beynon-Jones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351683748
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Research on law's relationship with time has flourished over the past decade. This edited collection aims to put law and time scholarship into wider context, advancing conversations on time and temporalities between socio-legal scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, geographers and historians. Through a diverse range of contributions, the collection explores how legal modalities of time emerge and have effects within wider clusters of social and political action. Themes include: law’s diverse roles in maintaining linear historicist models of time; law’s participation in the materialisation of times; and the unsteady effects of temporal pluralism and polytemporalities in law. De-naturalising the ‘time’ in law and time scholarship, this collection positions time as something that can be enacted and materialised as well as experienced, with distinct implications for questions of social justice. The Introduction and Chapter 6 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Unwritten Rule

Unwritten Rule PDF Author: Alice Beban
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753649
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
In 2012, Cambodia—an epicenter of violent land grabbing—announced a bold new initiative to develop land redistribution efforts inside agribusiness concessions. Alice Beban's Unwritten Rule focuses on this land reform to understand the larger nature of democracy in Cambodia. Beban contends that the national land-titling program, the so-called leopard skin land reform, was first and foremost a political campaign orchestrated by the world's longest-serving prime minister, Hun Sen. The reform aimed to secure the loyalty of rural voters, produce "modern" farmers, and wrest control over land distribution from local officials. Through ambiguous legal directives and unwritten rules guiding the allocation of land, the government fostered uncertainty and fear within local communities. Unwritten Rule gives pause both to celebratory claims that land reform will enable land tenure security, and to critical claims that land reform will enmesh rural people more tightly in state bureaucracies and create a fiscally legible landscape. Instead, Beban argues that the extension of formal property rights strengthened the very patronage-based politics that Western development agencies hope to subvert.

Transformations on the Ground

Transformations on the Ground PDF Author: Anne M. O. Griffiths
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025304359X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
A study of Botswana’s dual face of prosperity and poverty and that relates to its land use policies. Transformations on the Ground considers the ways in which power in all its forms—local, international, legal, familial—affects the collision of global with local concerns over access to land and control over its use. In Botswana’s struggle to access international economies, few resources are as fundamental and fraught as control over land. On a local level, land and control over its use provides homes, livelihoods, and the economic security to help lift populations out of impoverishment. Yet on the international level, global capital concerns compete with strategies for sustainable development and economic empowerment. Drawing on extensive archival research, legal records, fieldwork, and interviews with five generations of family members in the village of Molepolole, Anne M. O. Griffiths provides a sweeping consideration of the scale of power from global economy to household experience in Botswana. In doing so, Griffiths provides a frame through which the connections between legal power and local engagement can provide fresh insight into our understanding of the global. “Botswana is a darling of international donors and regularly praised as an upwardly mobile, prosperous and successful country. At the same time, it is characterized by poverty and exclusion, especially of women. In her insightful case study on land politics, Anne Griffiths effectively contrasts the image of a coherent state against myriad realities and confusion of competences on the ground. Based on decades of ethnographic fieldwork, this book masterfully demonstrates how in the realm of land and law, international, national, regional and local domains intersect and overlap, and come into conflict with one another.” —Andreas Eckert, Humboldt University Berlin “Anne Griffiths’ ambitious and original book reveals how the “global” is always situated in specific places and times through her insightful analysis of how land in Botswana has figured in practices, policy and politics from the standpoints of household, family, village, district, national and international levels. Griffiths’ astute use of political and legal history, legal documents, observation of statutory and customary law settings, multi-generational life histories and detailed ethnography enable her to provide a rich and informative account that goes well beyond the mantra of “the global in the local.” While insisting on foregrounding “the voices, perceptions, and experiences of people’s relationships with land,” Griffiths shows how these interact with national politics, policies, laws and legal practice and with the effects of international and global agencies and processes to produce inequality and class differences, despite some improvement in gendered patterns of land entitlement.” —Pauline Peters, Faculty Associate, Harvard Kennedy School and Center for African Studies