India’s disappearing common lands: fuzzy boundaries, encroachment, and evolving property rights

Opportunistic land encroachment occurs in many low-income countries, gradually yet pervasively, until discrete areas of common land disappear. This paper, motivated by field observations in Karnataka, India, demonstrates that such an evolution of property rights from common to private may be efficient when the boundaries between common and private land are poorly defined, or ‘‘fuzzy.’’ Using a multi-period optimization model, and introducing the concept of stock and flow enforcement, I show how effectiveness of enforcement effort, whether encroachment is reversible, and punitive fines, influence whether an area of common land is fully defined and protected or gradually or rapidly encroached.

Livelihoods and Vulnerability in the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands of Southern Africa: Exploring the links between ecosystem services and poverty alleviation

This book sets out the findings of research conducted into the links between ecosystem services and poverty alleviation in Southern Africa. It follows from extensive primary research conducted in the region, as well as intensive engagement with researchers, policy-makers and relevant institutions in several countries in southern Africa, as part of the Ecosystem Services and Poverty Alleviation Programme led by DFI, NERC and ESRC.

'Penetrating' foreign lands: contestations over African landscape. A case study from Eastern Zimbabwe

While it was happening, European expansion was often legitimised by evoking frontier images: pioneers setting off from the metropolis, penetrating wilderness in order to open access to resources, like minerals, living-space, and fertile lands. Central to the ideology of the frontier is the notion of 'no-man's land'. These 'pioneers', however, often had to face local inhabitants and their interpretations and uses of this land. Thus it will be argued that contestations over landscape were at the same time battles over the legitimation of European expansion, as well as over local perceptions of this process. Ideologically, contestations by Europeans and Africans become apparent in the sexualisation of landscape. This paper is based on the case study of a Valley in eastern Zimbabwe on the border with Mozambique, and more specifically of two tea estates which were established in the rainforest. Unusually late for the region, European influence in this remote area only began to become significant in the 1950s which were an important turning point regarding land and landscape in the area. These years of great change will be analysed in order to map out different strands of interest by the main parties involved. It will be demonstrated that their readings of landscape translated into contestations over land. A recent example of such a conflict will be given.