Land Tenure and Conflict

This paper uses household survey data of 2019 collected from rural Uganda to explore the impacts of land rights sensitizations on land tenure insecurity or conflict experiences. The study findings individuals from households with ties to local political institutions are more likely to be aware of land rights and formal land documentation. And have a higher likelihood of reporting land tenure insecurity experiences.

The question of land has increasingly become a major source of conflicts in many parts of Africa. In Nigeria, claims of rights over landholdings and justice administration of land disputes, though of great concern, have received inadequate attention in the literature. In this context, this paper examines Nozickian distributive justice vis-à-vis land-related conflicts in the Panda Development Area (PDA), Nasarawa state, Nigeria. It focuses on perennial delays-cum-unfavourable rectification of unjust landholdings as drivers of conflict in the area. The study employs the survey method of data collection using key-informant interviews. It adopts a qualitative descriptive method to analyse the data. The paper found that over 80% of the population in the study area rely on agriculture, and that there are numerous contestations over land use and ownership. Unfortunately, still, adjudication of these cases lingers unnecessarily, resulting in distrust, antagonisms and violent confrontations. The study recommends fundamental reform of Nigeria's justice system as it relates to land matters to ensure more equitable distribution of land. Such reform should include the introduction of special courts as well as the mainstreaming of traditional institutions, local and ad-hoc arbitrators into the dispute resolution mechanisms of land-related cases.

Authors:  Atty Emily Manuel, Atty Ingrid Gorre, Atty Edna Maguigad, Prof. Rowena Boquiren, and Yasmin Hatta 
Principal Advisor:
The present study “Who Owns the Carbon in the Philippine Forests?” was conducted in order to fill this regulatory gap by providing recommendations to policy makers on the enactment of a legal instrument that clarifies carbon rights and ownership. The study was undertaken in the frame of the DENR–GIZ Project “Climate-relevant Modernization of the National Forest Policy and Piloting of REDD Measures in the Philippines” with the funding support of the International Climate Initiative of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU). Aside from the “Analysis of Key Drivers of Deforestation and Forest Degradation,” the “Assessment of the Implementation of Free and Prior Informed Consent (FPIC),” and the “Review and Analysis of Forest Policy,” it is one of four policy studies undertaken under the DENR-FMB GIZ REDD Project to support the PNRPS implementation.
The present policy study has shown that the Philippines disposes of a comprehensive policy and institutional framework on which the legal instrument on carbon ownership should build. Indeed, carbon rights need to be treated as part of a bundle of rights; they should be directly linked to the forest tenure holder, and their recognition in the legal regime must be part of the broader forest tenure reform policy. Any prospective law on carbon rights needs to follow the rights-based approach, should specifically identify the rights holder and be read in conjunction with existing laws and safeguards that already govern the management of the country’s natural resources.
Further, the insights gained from the four case studies make clear that legal clarity on carbon ownership is pressing and urgently needed to recognize, protect and safeguard the rights of local communities and indigenous peoples, and to realize the full benefits of REDD+.
It is hoped that the recommendations are taken up by the relevant policy-making bodies and will be integrated in a legal instrument that, in the interest of the public and private sectors, clarifies carbon rights in relation to forests and safeguards the rights of the State, local communities and indigenous peoples.

The report consists of an intersectional analysis of 'family homes', which often fuse customary beliefs around property with private title. It traces the historical origins of family homes to the permit-based land rights systems used in township areas during the apartheid era. Notably, the study finds that family home disputes often share similar circumstances, where male relatives leverage both formal property and customary law systems in their favour, gaining access, control, and often ownership of the property. The report also details how courts have approached family home disputes; the lack of understanding of the family home concept; and how overlapping legal systems contribute to disadvantaging women from tenure security. The report suggests a variety of potential interventions that could address the key issues in family home disputes such as recognition of the family home concept, amending procedure for administration of deceased estate and transfer of ownership such as section 18 (3) of the Administration of Deceased Estate Act.

The impact of Darfur conflict on livestock and pastoralists livelihoods in Central and West Darfur States is a study conducted in the two states (Central and West Darfur during the period from 2003 to 2014. The objectives of the study are to find out the effects of the conflict on the dynamics of pastoralists' social status and livelihoods options. The methods applied for data collection in this study are descriptive methods of participatory approaches (Participatory Rural Appraisal PRA & Rapid Rural Appraisal RRA) through which two questionnaires (households and key informants) were developed of eighty four questions. The questionnaires were distributed in most villages and Damras within the fifteen localities of the two states. The results showed that 75% of the pastoralists were working for themselves or for their families, 16% of them working for others as labors and 9% of the community working for both themselves and other families; this meant that the labors are not available in the pastoral communities as before the conflict. 26% of pastoral livelihood groups in the two states were pastoralist, 52% of the groups were agro-pastoralists, 19% of them were farmers and 3% of them were IDPs.

This is an academic paper on the Land Conflict Monitoring and Mapping Tool Final Report, also available on this site, by the same two authors. 
    In the context of land disputes as a potential major conflict driver, the UN Peacebuilding Programme commissioned a local Acholi NGO – Human Rights Focus (HURIFO) – to develop a tool to monitor and map land disputes throughout Acholi. The overall purpose was to map and collect data not only on the numbers and types of land disputes, but on how such land was used and controlled, with the goal to inform policy, advocacy, and other relevant interventions on land rights, security, and access in the sub-region.
    Data collection was focused on rural Parishes.  And while there was considerable variability across Acholi, a typical Parish population was c. 5,000 people, with an average of up to ten Villages.  Five research tools were developed to obtain these Parish-level data: 
    “1. Parish-level Disputes Form (PDF) seeking overview information on numbers of recent and current disputes, numbers of disputes involving violence, numbers of disputes involving 10+ households; and organisations or individuals important in resolving land disputes;
    2. Individual Dispute Questionnaire (IDQ) aiming at capturing detailed information on as many recent or current disputes as each parish group could manage to complete;
    3. Parish Village List (PVL) form to identify all villages in each parish;
    4. Village-level Form (VLF) on land tenure, land use, and any clan(s) associated with the village and with recognised land rights there;
    5. Outline parish maps on which participants were asked to draw approximate village boundaries and, where possible, additional detail including clan distribution.
    Key findings included:  (i) Over 90% of rural land is understood by Acholi as under communal control/ownership – clans, sub-clans, or extended families – of widely varying size & cohesiveness.  (ii) While also varying considerably across Acholi, the number of identified rural land disputes during the project declined significantly, from c. 4,300 b/n October 2011 and February/March 2012 to c. 1,100 by Oct. 2012, though the minority of large and violent disputes were lasting longer and being resolved more slowly.  (iii) This overall decline was most likely due to increasing post-war recovery and the growing effectiveness of conflict-management resources within rural communities, with grassroots cultural and traditional leaders and lower-level local councilors (LCs) and LC courts reported as most effective in dispute resolution, followed by religious leaders and agencies.  (iv) While overall low population density should reduce land pressure, and land disputes, in Acholi for several decades, this could be offset by disputes between communities and government agencies or by land-grabbing by powerful corporate, political or individual interests.  The latter – and the accompanying risk of such disputes as conflict drivers, can only be reduced by high-level political will, combined with manifest integrity on the part of the Ugandan legal system.

In the context of land disputes as a potential major conflict driver, the UN Peacebuilding Programme commissioned a local Acholi NGO – Human Rights Focus (HURIFO) – to develop a tool to monitor and map land disputes throughout Acholi. The overall purpose was to map and collect data not only on the numbers and types of land disputes, but on how such land was used and controlled, with the goal to inform policy, advocacy, and other relevant interventions on land rights, security, and access in the sub-region.
    Data collection was focused on rural Parishes.  And while there was considerable variability across Acholi, a typical Parish population was c. 5,000 people, with an average of up to ten Villages.  Five research tools were developed to obtain these Parish-level data: 
    “1. Parish-level Disputes Form (PDF) seeking overview information on numbers of recent and current disputes, numbers of disputes involving violence, numbers of disputes involving 10+ households; and organisations or individuals important in resolving land disputes;
    2. Individual Dispute Questionnaire (IDQ) aiming at capturing detailed information on as many recent or current disputes as each parish group could manage to complete;
    3. Parish Village List (PVL) form to identify all villages in each parish;
    4. Village-level Form (VLF) on land tenure, land use, and any clan(s) associated with the village and with recognised land rights there;
    5. Outline parish maps on which participants were asked to draw approximate village boundaries and, where possible, additional detail including clan distribution.
    Key findings included:  (i) Over 90% of rural land is understood by Acholi as under communal control/ownership – clans, sub-clans, or extended families – of widely varying size & cohesiveness.  (ii) While also varying considerably across Acholi, the number of identified rural land disputes during the project declined significantly, from c. 4,300 b/n October 2011 and February/March 2012 to c. 1,100 by Oct. 2012, though the minority of large and violent disputes were lasting longer and being resolved more slowly.  (iii) This overall decline was most likely due to increasing post-war recovery and the growing effectiveness of conflict-management resources within rural communities, with grassroots cultural and traditional leaders and lower-level local councilors (LCs) and LC courts reported as most effective in dispute resolution, followed by religious leaders and agencies.  (iv) While overall low population density should reduce land pressure, and land disputes, in Acholi for several decades, this could be offset by disputes between communities and government agencies or by land-grabbing by powerful corporate, political or individual interests.  The latter – and the accompanying risk of such disputes as conflict drivers -- can only be reduced by high-level political will, combined with manifest integrity on the part of the Ugandan legal system. 
    The report concluded with a range of recommendations directed at local and national government, development partners, and civil society to address these issues.

In any human society, institutions whether formal or informal, establish the standards which guide or govern both individual and group behavior, and in the process define the rights or entitlements that people possess in relation to other people as well as to the material and ...

Globalisation and increasing foreign property investments are compelling nations to adopt international practices for greater transparency and better governance. However, it is important to recognise that a number of smaller countries struggle to implement international frameworks and practices. Using a case study of property valuations in Fiji, this paper highlights the institutional, informational and technical issues in implementation of the International Valuation Standards (IVS). Property Valuations are a source of information for financial reporting as well as crucial investment decisions. However, valuation is regarded as a “matter of opinion subjective to an individual’s assessment of different factors” (Isaac, 2002, p. 7). As a result, valuation standards at national and international levels play important roles in the promotion of ethics, integrity and impartiality in valuers (Hemphill, Lim, Adair, Crosby, & McGreal, 2014). Controversy surrounding the field of valuation ca...

About the authors Mohammed Abdel Mahmood holds a BSc in Agriculture (1984), from the Forestry Department, the University of Khartoum and an MSc in Environmental Forestry (1994) from the University of North Wales in Bangor, UK. He is by profession a forester and worked as an ...

In many developing countries, only 30 per cent of land rights are registered. This publication aims to support developing countries that have unregistered lands to be able to value these lands. It is intended for policy makers, valuation practitioners, other land professionals and various stakeholders involved in the valuation of unregistered lands. It highlights the need to address the challenges related to valuing unregistered lands. This publication provides key principles and policy guidance for people to progressively undertake valuations of unregistered lands. It is intended to assist in the achievement of professional level valuations of unregistered lands and enable users of this guide to discern when this has been achieved. Lessons learnt and solutions should be documented leading to detailed manuals on how to better value unregistered land in the future and thereby significantly contribute to sustainable development objectives. The guide serves to strengthen the implementa...

Traditional water management and irrigation techniques in Africa have frequently been ignored in irrigation statistics—and therefore in planning considerations too. Many countries (Such as Tanzania, Nigeria, Kenya) have significant areas under traditional irrigation methods, areas which often far outweight those under government-established irrigation systems. This is the case in Angola. There is hope at present that the country may be emerging from its long civil war. If so, then the opportunities to learn from the experience of other African countries and to develop enlightened irrigation development policies should be grasped.

A major challenge facing African today is the growth of urban informal settlements. From a government perspective, management of the proliferation of informal settlements implies planning and control of the location in which these settlements spring up, improving the social and economic conditions in the informal settlements and ensuring that the residents and neighboring communities enjoy social justice. Of primary importance is the improvement of land tenure security for residents of the informal settlements. Addressing these objectives requires current, accurate, social and spatial information. The greatest challenge however that is the informal settlements are complex, dynamic social systems which experience continuous change. Mapping and documentation of rights in the informal settlement therefore requires accurate and up-to date spatial information which incorporates the dynamic nature of the settlements. For a long time, a system for documenting and processing the database fo...

About 70% of land ownership units in developing countries are not formally registered and land registration is not achieving the desired results. At the same time, and while still recognising there are needs for such top-down initiatives, UN-HABITAT/GLTN is looking towards facilitating an evolutionary approach towards market development by the use of valuers. UN-HABITAT/GLTN considers the valuation of unregistered land may be necessary: 1. in situations of urban expansion into unregistered peri-urban sprawl 2. developments including infrastructure projects entailing compensation 3. upgrading of informal settlements 4. investments in improved farming resettlement initiativeseven disaster related resettlements, redressing historical displacements, and 5. individual ownersmostly from disadvantaged groups-needing to borrow against their land or do share-cropping or sub-leasing of their land due to socioeconomic pressures, etc. This paper is a progress report on facilitating the valuation of unregistered lands. In so doing, UN-HABITAT/GLTN is looking towards not only a bottom-up approach, but also one that also addresses all the relevant socioeconomic and institutional scales between the top and the bottom, so that both valuations and property markets in unregistered lands can be addressed in a "fit for the purpose" market-specific manner.

Reimagining Political Ecology is a state-of-the-art collection of ethnographies grounded in political ecology. When political ecology first emerged as a distinct field in the early 1970s, it was rooted in the neo-Marxism of world system theory. This collection showcases second-generation political ecology, which retains the Marxist interest in capitalism as a global structure but which is also heavily influenced by poststructuralism, feminism, practice theory, and cultural studies. As these essays illustrate, contemporary political ecology moves beyond binary thinking, focusing instead on the interchanges between nature and culture, the symbolic and the material, and the local and the global. Aletta Biersack’s introduction takes stock of where political ecology has been, assesses the field’s strengths, and sets forth a bold research agenda for the future. Two essays offer wide-ranging critiques of modernist ecology, with its artificial dichotomy between nature and culture, faith in the scientific management of nature, and related tendency to dismiss local knowledge. The remaining eight essays are case studies of particular constructions and appropriations of nature and the complex politics that come into play regionally, nationally, and internationally when nature is brought within the human sphere. Written by some of the leading thinkers in environmental anthropology, these rich ethnographies are based in locales around the world: in Belize, Papua New Guinea, the Gulf of California, Iceland, Finland, the Peruvian Amazon, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Collectively, they demonstrate that political ecology speaks to concerns shared by geographers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and anthropologists alike. And they model the kind of work that this volume identifies as the future of political ecology: place-based “ethnographies of nature” keenly attuned to the conjunctural effects of globalization.

Contributors. Eeva Berglund, Aletta Biersack, J. Peter Brosius, Michael R. Dove, James B. Greenberg, Søren Hvalkof, J. Stephen Lansing, Gísli Pálsson, Joel Robbins, Vernon L. Scarborough, John W. Schoenfelder, Richard Wilk

This book examines the syncretic Chatino religion in Santiago Yaitepec, Oaxaca which conserves pre-Hispanic rituals and cosmologies, and addresses the central debates Mesoamerican ethnology over the function of seemingly wasteful expenditures of saint’s fiestas. This book examines the role that the fiesta systems play in helping the community to maintain some degree of political and economic autonomy from those dominant in the wider society. It argues that under as the Mexican state and capitalist forces have penetrated the hinterlands, fiesta systems and community solidarity have come under increasing pressure. In recent years coffee has become a cash crop, and this book documents, this has not only changed these systems, but has given rise to growing wealth differentiation and endemic violence.

Issues relating to land are specifically referred to in five of the United Nations’ (UN) 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and UN-Habitat’s Global Land Tools Network views access to land and tenure security as key to achieving sustainable, inclusive and efficient cities. The African continent is growing in importance, with climate change and population pressure on land. This review explores an interdisciplinary approach, and identifies recent advances in geo-spatial technology relevant to land governance in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It discusses historical legacies of colonialism that affect the culture of its land administration institutions, through three levels of governance: international/regional, national and sub-national. Short narratives on land law are discussed for four Anglophone former British colonies of SSA. A wide range of sources are drawn upon: academic research across disciplines, and official publications of various actors, including land professions (particularly...

Pro-poor approaches to land administration are increasingly gaining impetus and getting promoted in global agreements, national land policies and NGO's briefs. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development covers four prominent land targets on poverty, food security, land degradation and gender. In addition, the role of land is well captured in the New Urban Agenda (NUA), with its social, ecological and economic functions well-articulated in the recently adopted document (Habitat III), which outlines a very prominent role for land tenure security and property rights in pursuit of sustainable land governance interventions for the next 20 years. Improved land governance and achievement of sustainable development underpin these global covenants. The need for efficient land management and administration systems and the recognition of the complexity of land rights cannot be overemphasized. In most developed nations, land records are generally well kept and cover most of the territories...

A functioning land administration sector is the foundation for economic growth. Unfortunately, effective land registry and cadastral systems with national coverage exist in only a fraction of the world's countries. Cadasta Foundation is working to overcome this challenge by developing simple digital tools and technology to help partners efficiently document, analyze, store, and share critical land and resource rights information. By creating an accessible digital record of land, property, and resource rights, Cadasta works to empower individuals, organizations, communities, governments, and businesses with the information they need to make data-driven decisions and put vulnerable communities and their needs on the map.

Afghanistan witnessed rapid urbanization in recent decades due to the post-war recovery process. When the war ended in 2001 by fall of Taliban regime, most Afghans refugees returned to urban areas of Afghanistan, especially in Kabul city. Moreover, the rapid urbanization, migration from rural areas, and population growth impacted on Kabul city with the manifestation of informal settlement. It is acknowledged that the residents of informal settlements suffer social, spatial, and economic exclusion from the benefit and opportunity of an urban environment. Furthermore, the residents of informal settlements experience disadvantages by geographical marginalization, shortage of basic infrastructure, improper governance framework, vulnerability into the effect of poor environment, and natural disaster. With all the above, the problems of informal settlements are considered challenges for and informal residents. Thus, it is a dire need to tackle and overcome problems of informal settlements...

A name cannot change the city and our relationship with places. However, new terms for now-nameless spaces will help to change people's perception and their capability of seeing what they have never seen before. The geographer's taxonomic effort to re-designate urban places and typologies involves a political and ideological content. Most urban spaces are unmanageable because they fit neither with current technology nor with the social organization. Urban design requires new interpretations of and ideas about the awareness and form of settlements. Elaborating on what we learnt in the past is no longer enough to kindle creativeness and innovation. In the tradition of classic geography, I call for a new classification of urban places, which is meant to find names for places we do not "see" and therefore we cannot catalogue. A new classification of human settlements is a step forward on a new path to perceive, define and eventually plan them. A new perception of metropolitan areas leads to a different relation between area and administration; hence between urban places and representation of citizens.

The Chatino communities in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico have an extraordinary proportion of homicides. Professor Greenberg, an anthropologist, has studied Chatino communities since 1973 to try to find the cause of this violence endemic to the region. Among the causes of this violence are the political and legal position of the indigenous communities in Mexico, which leave these semi-autonomous communities in a situation in which they cannot make adequate use of the state and federal legal system, or find legal redress that the introduction of coffee cultivation since the 1950s has played in breaking of traditional forms of land tenure. Professor Greenberg used ethnographic data, which he personally collected, as the basis of his observations and as a method for describing the complicated and unforgiving social relations in which these communities find themselves trapped.

When, as architects, we reflect on the relationship between architectural projects, cities and landscape, we must keep the urban degradation of the world we live in uppermost in our thoughts. Nowadays we live in a state of crisis, and this fact casts doubt on a series of values closely tied to professional and teaching activities. Understood as a tool for the building of top quality public spaces and ever better places and landscapes to live in, architecture is obscured by an increasingly common desire to impress. However, we must hold fast and seek to start afresh from the meaning of an architectural project, analysing case by case, each and every time, enquiring into the needs and potential a specific place expresses in nuce and revisiting all the specific features of the local area, culture and history. To respond adequately in the right tone, what is needed is silence, calm, care and the chance to rethink things and return to places, to assess even the smallest, often latent signs which are there, hidden in the landscape. A landscape which is not simply what we see but also a combination of our points of view on what is around us, a sign of our perspective on things and our idea of how we would like them to be. There is a fifth dimension of the space in which we live: the culture of cities, the culture of the landscape. And from this fifth dimension we must start again, regaining the culture and history of sites and cities.

A major challenge facing African today is the growth of urban informal settlements. From a government perspective, management of the proliferation of informal settlements implies planning and control of the location in which these settlements spring up, improving the social and economic conditions in the informal settlements and ensuring that the residents and neighboring communities enjoy social justice. Of primary importance is the improvement of land tenure security for residents of the informal settlements. Addressing these objectives requires current, accurate, social and spatial information. The greatest challenge however that is the informal settlements are complex, dynamic social systems which experience continuous change. Mapping and documentation of rights in the informal settlement therefore requires accurate and up-to date spatial information which incorporates the dynamic nature of the settlements. For a long time, a system for documenting and processing the database fo...

During the conflict, millions of Angolans fled the countryside for the relative safety of crowded shantytowns in coastal cities. The poor often settled in flood-prone environmentally risky sites, building homes incrementally where land was cheap. Angolan coastal settlements, house 64% of the Angola's urban population, are confronted by the dual challenge of supplying their war-displaced populations (particularly the poorest) with adequate water supply and safe housing. while at the same time confronting new problems of adapting to the climate and environmental changes that are occurring in these highly vulnerable coastal areas. The project's research team has recovered and analysed historical rainfall data; then digitalising it for sharing in the public domain. Mapping the results demonstrates the dramatically increased rainfall variability. Risk maps and physical planning information were co-produced and validated with the participation of local communities and municipal go...

A name cannot change the city and our relationship with places. However, new terms for now-nameless spaces will help to change people's perception and their capability of seeing what they have never seen before. The geographer's taxonomic effort to re-designate urban places and typologies involves a political and ideological content. Most urban spaces are unmanageable because they fit neither with current technology nor with the social organization. Urban design requires new interpretations of and ideas about the awareness and form of settlements. Elaborating on what we learnt in the past is no longer enough to kindle creativeness and innovation. In the tradition of classic geography, I call for a new classification of urban places, which is meant to find names for places we do not "see" and therefore we cannot catalogue. A new classification of human settlements is a step forward on a new path to perceive, define and eventually plan them. A new perception of metropolitan areas leads to a different relation between area and administration; hence between urban places and representation of citizens.

The majority of Angola's peri-urban population still rely on informal mechanisms for water supply. This water is expensive and of poor quality, representing a significant household expenditure for the urban poor. The article uses qualitative tools and tracking of the supply chain to analyze the scope of the informal water economy in Luanda. Marketing water at the local household level involves significant trading in social capital. A financially sustainable model of community water management that builds on this neighbourhood social capital has been adopted by the government for implementation across the country.

Grassroots women's organisations and their partner NGOs in the global South demonstrate that women can successfully unite to carry out long-term, self-help development solutions to daily challenges and less frequent crises in their communities. This article represents reflections by women leaders from such organisations on the effects of the recent financial, food and climate crises on their communities and the coping mechanisms they use. Their coping mechanisms and long-term self-help development work suggest that they have been reimagining development since long before the crises of 2009.

In Zambia, security of tenure for communities residing under customary land tenure settings has in recent years increasingly come under threat owing to the pressures of high rate of urbanization, speculation, subdivision and conversion to state land, which effectively excludes marginal populations from accessing resources for their land. While customary land is a major resource for most Zambians, the inadequacy or total lack of documentation leads to tenure insecurity, making people susceptible to forced displacements, and frequent land disputes. This paper demonstrates the experiences, lessons learned and emerging impacts of securing land rights of the rural poor, women and vulnerable groups in the context of customary land governance in Zambia.  It further reiterates that tenure security empowers poor households, particularly women, and describes the participatory approaches adopted, and the use of fit for purpose land administration approaches.

A laminate balloon comprising at least two layers of separately oriented thermoplastic polymer material, which are coextensive over the body of the balloon. The two layers may be made of different polymer materials, including an underlying layer made of a low compliant, high strength polymer, such as PET, and an overlying layer of a softer and more flexible polymer material relative to the first polymer material, such as a polyester-polyether block copolymer. The balloon structures have an additive burst pressure, meaning that they are stronger than a single-layer reference balloon corresponding to the underlying polymer layer. The balloons are characterized by a combination of flexibility and surface softness which allows catheters to track down into lesions relatively easily, puncture resistance, abrasion resistance and refoldability, in addition to low compliance and high burst strength. The balloons may be prepared with generally linear or with stepped compliance profiles. Metho...

• The paper reports on collaborative trans-disciplinary development of urban strategies • Traditional land use planning is limited in weak institutional contexts in Sub-Saharan Africa • Trans-disciplinarity can achieve more impact than traditional masterplanning in such contexts • Trans-disciplinarity can link research and practice in appropriate forms of knowledge exchange

Globalisation and increasing foreign property investments are compelling nations to adopt international practices for greater transparency and better governance. However, it is important to recognise that a number of smaller countries struggle to implement international frameworks and practices. Using a case study of property valuations in Fiji, this paper highlights the institutional, informational and technical issues in implementation of the International Valuation Standards (IVS). Property Valuations are a source of information for financial reporting as well as crucial investment decisions. However, valuation is regarded as a “matter of opinion subjective to an individual’s assessment of different factors” (Isaac, 2002, p. 7). As a result, valuation standards at national and international levels play important roles in the promotion of ethics, integrity and impartiality in valuers (Hemphill, Lim, Adair, Crosby, & McGreal, 2014). Controversy surrounding the field of valuation ca...

In Zambia, security of tenure for communities residing under customary land tenure settings has in recent years increasingly come under threat owing to the pressures of high rate of urbanization, speculation, subdivision and conversion to state land, which effectively excludes marginal populations from accessing resources for their land. While customary land is a major resource for most Zambians, the inadequacy or total lack of documentation leads to tenure insecurity, making people susceptible to forced displacements, and frequent land disputes. This paper demonstrates the experiences, lessons learned and emerging impacts of securing land rights of the rural poor, women and vulnerable groups in the context of customary land governance in Zambia.  It further reiterates that tenure security empowers poor households, particularly women, and describes the participatory approaches adopted, and the use of fit for purpose land administration approaches.

The institution of property, as it is found in the West, is not a static thing, but has matured and evolved markedly over time. Private property evolved through both the Greek and Roman periods. It has also changed completely in Europe over the last millennia. Along with those changes has been a constant discussion on the theory of property, with every age having its apologists and its critics. It is an appropriate time to define a Pacific property theory, with an opportunity to continue that evolution and debate. At a time when globalisation of the property profession is perceived a positive paradigm by the ‘Western’ first world order, this paper ponders how appropriate such universalism really is. It is too easy to fall victim to a form of teleological imperialism in which some implicit end state becomes the norm against which region-specific problems are diagnosed the diagnosis becomes the policy prescription (Bromley, 2001). Especially, in this global age, new answers have to be...

This paper examines the four competing theories offered as explanations for the massive expenditures  in closed corporate peasant communiities by mayordomos that sponsor fiestasor various saints. Wolf's leveling  hypotheses that such expenditures impede the use of capital within the communiity in the way it is used in the wider capitalist world. Cancian argued that such expenditures are ineffective as leveling mechanisms, but operate to enhance the prestige of these men, and justify the differences of wealth. Harris has argued that the fiesta system is essentially a colonial instrument designed to pump wealth out of these communities and into the market. Dow by contrast has argued that the fiestas are part redistributive system. I demonstrate here how the balance among various theories may better understood by examining the ratio between the number of mayordomos and eligible men to fill them, and the ratio of food from their own production redistributed verses the items that must be purchased. Also considered are how the mix of cash crops, wage labor, and subsistence farming affects the level expenditure and participation of households.

Recently in June 2019 to February 2020, the NPAA Geographic Information system and Outreach and Communication Departments conducted a Rapid Strategic Assessment on the WAPNP. The result of this assessment exposed the fact that encroachments on the WAPNP core and its underlying wetlands are ecologically and socio-economically deleterious and alarming. These results were more qualitative than calculable. For instance, the one (1) mile buffer of WAPNP (as indicated in the National Protected Area and Conservation Trust Fund Act, 2012) is no more realistic and have been artificially transformed into settlements etc. over the years. Some of the encroached areas of the core were identified as quarries, farms, cleared lands and built up areas, as stated in the rapid strategic assessment report.

(English) Recent protests at World Trade Organisation meetings around the world show that economic globalisation is being questioned on who is the real beneficiary. Is globalisation in the best interest of the developed countries or is globalisation just another form of imperialistic colonisation of lesser-developed countries? Unlike developed countries, real estate markets in developing countries are usually poorly informed, lack transparency, and may often be corrupt. Often land tenure is insecure, whilst educated and skilled real estate professionals are virtually non-existent. Many Pacific Island countries have just few valuers, with most working for their government. Statutory registration and licensure of real estate professions are very limited, if at all, with valuation standards being virtually non-existent and unenforceable. Within the valuation industry, the first global standardisation is the International Valuation Standards. The International Valuation Standards Committee's first standards were published in 1985, with subsequent updates in 1994, 1997, 2000 and most recently 2001. These American and European centric standards have extensively evolved over this period, with the most recent (2001) standards being over 450 pages. This paper will look at the role of International Valuation Standards within developing countries, with specific emphasis on small Pacific Island countries. The questions to be answered are: can the IVS work, what are the barriers to implement such, and who is the real beneficiary of implementing these 'international' standards.

Soon after their mid-17th century discovery by Europeans, the islands of the South Pacific were identified with fierce man-eating savages. A century later, European missionaries came to tame the 'barbarous savages', writing of the abhorrent practices of cannibalism, polygamy, public nudity, body inking, and the offering of females to white visitors as tokens of friendship. Margaret Mead's early 20 th century book Coming of Age in Samoa further perpetuated the free-love utopia perception of the islands. Even today, the islands of the South Pacific are often seen as idyllic easy-going gardens of Eden. However, most real estate markets in Pacific Island countries are poorly informed, lack transparency, and sometimes corrupt. Most lands are held in customary (indigenous) ownership, creating unique barriers for westernised economic efficiency. Educated, skilled, and experienced real estate professionals are virtually non-existent, with several countries having few, if any, valuers. Statutory registration and licensure of real estate professions are very limited, if at all, with valuation standards being virtually non-existent and unenforceable. This paper investigates property market problems and current valuation practices within small Pacific Island countries and suggests solutions for improving valuation practices.

Chilliwack Progress declared that the hostile relationship between the Stó:lō and Chilliwack Landing's first sheriff had "compelled Mr. Greer to move to Kitsilano before the arrival of the railway. " Greer lived in the Chilliwack, BC area for less than twenty years, but his land exploits as a squatter and claim jumper are etched into the geography of modern-day Chilliwack, visible in the rectangle of territory that he ripped from the block of Stó:lō reserve lands. 2 Sam Greer was born in Ireland in about 1844. He arrived in North America and enlisted in the United States Navy to support the Union side in the American Civil War. 3 In 1864, Greer married Sara Friar in Montreal and afterwards was "attracted by the gold discovery in the Cariboo district. " Greer traveled to BC, then split his time between Chilliwack Landing and Barkerville, where he operated a bar at Jack of Clubs Creek. 4 Throughout the 1860s, residents from the cluster of Stó:lō reserves near modern day Chilliwack (Skwah, Skwali, Kwaw-kwaw-a-pilt, Squiala and Skway) generally tolerated newcomer settlers living outside of their core settlement areas. Professor Keith Thor Carlson notes how "the Stó:lō refer to non-natives as Xwelítem ('the starving ones'), " meaning "hungry to the point of starving. " Some arrived cash-poor and afterwards lived on land they did not own. Dr. Carlson describes the circumstances of some colonial-era settlers:

This article puts forward a theory of smart pressure, which emphasises that thirdparty pressure only works if the conflict parties under pressure can agree with the endpoint of this pressure. Hence, a potential mutually acceptable agreement needs to be formulated before a mediator starts to apply pressure. To this argument, this article employs two case studies: the mediation efforts leading up to the Sudan Comprehensive Peace Agreement concluded in 2005 and the Darfur Peace Agreement concluded in 2006. These cases support the smart pressure theory and suggest that mediators need to be modest about what they can accomplish using pressure.

This article puts forward a theory of smart pressure, which emphasises that thirdparty pressure only works if the conflict parties under pressure can agree with the endpoint of this pressure. Hence, a potential mutually acceptable agreement needs to be formulated before a mediator starts to apply pressure. To this argument, this article employs two case studies: the mediation efforts leading up to the Sudan Comprehensive Peace Agreement concluded in 2005 and the Darfur Peace Agreement concluded in 2006. These cases support the smart pressure theory and suggest that mediators need to be modest about what they can accomplish using pressure.

Angola’s last four decades of near-continuous war were years of tremendous human suffering, large-scale displacements of the population, heavy damage to property and infrastructure, serious economic losses and accumulation of a massive war debt. At its peak an estimated four million or more than a quarter of the total population was internally displaced. The war has urbanised Angola’s population, and even today, two years after the war ended, more than 50% of the population live in cities. The urban poor in Angola suffer increasing social exclusion that inhibits their full participation in a post war recovery. They have been denied access to the means to pull themselves out of poverty. Three quarters of the population of Luanda live in informal peri-urban “musseque” settlements and over 80% of these residents have no clear legal title to the land that they occupy. For the urban poor, with no access to banking or savings institutions, the acquisition of a housing plot and subsequent construction of a residence is the only means of accumulation of any form of wealth. They are at risk of expropriation by commercial developers or the state with out legal recourse or appropriate financial compensation. Residual occupancy rights1 may be revoked by new land legislation, which is currently under consideration. The urban poor are therefore left in a position of extreme vulnerability with weak tenure rights over the land that they occupy and risk being turned into illegal occupiers unless planned legislation is revised. The alienation of the urban poor from lands that they have lived and worked on for many years is likely to produce serious civic conflict in the years to come, unless the Government develops policies which recognise and regularizes tenure rights. Post-war programmes need to promote socio-economic inclusion and guarantee civic and tenure rights of the urban poor and provide opportunities for civic leadership to emerge.

This paper examines land tenure and conflict in Sudan and deals with state infringement on customary land rights and the erosion of traditional local governance institutions overseeing customary rules governing those rights in rural Sudan and the implications of this for peace and security. Using secondary sources (books, articles and reports) and data from primary sources (electronic newspapers and some archives), analyses are based on a practitioner background regarding conflict resolution process approach in Darfur. This paper argues that that state land policies have resulted in ambiguity and dualism in land tenure in Sudan. This dualism, which incorporates both modern statutory land ownership and customary tenure features, places communal lands held by most rural Sudanese communities under customary tenure under constant threat of expropriation by the state for private business interests both local and foreign. The paper further suggests that although state encroachment on customary land use rights has been manifested differently in different regions, the common denominator is an increasing state denial of communal rights and the weakening of local governance structures regulating them. The paper is presented in six sections. The first section studies multiple causes of rising conflict in some parts of rural Sudan. The second section deals with local conflict resolution mechanisms. The third section, studies legal mechanisms nexus land tenure tights, and highlights the problematic of the resulting dualism in land tenure that simultaneously combines both state legal ownership over communal lands in theory and the local communities " pursuit of customary tenure in practice. The fourth section, examines mechanisms to initiate land reform processes in Sudan. The fifth section highlights lessons learned from experience. The paper ends up by concluding that uuncertainties regarding the rights of different groups and land tenure conflicts are aggravated by the plurality of state laws and policies of regulation for control over land, particularly those affecting traditional land tenure systems on which groups formerly depended.