Author: Christopher Udry Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
We examine the impact of ambiguous and contested land rights on investment and productivity in agricultural in Akwapim, Ghana. We show that individuals who hold powerful positions in a local political hierarchy have more secure tenure rights, and that as a consequence they invest more in land fertility and have substantially higher output. The intensity of investments on different plots cultivated by a given individual correspond to that individual's security of tenure over those specific plots, and in turn to the individual's position in the political hierarchy relevant to those specific plots. We interpret these results in the context of a simple model of the political allocation of land rights in local matrilineages.
Author: Matthew Noellert Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472127101 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 359
Book Description
Following the end of World War II in 1945, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spent the next three decades carrying out agrarian reform among nearly one-third of the world’s peasants. This book presents a new perspective on the first step of this reform, when the CCP helped redistribute over 40 million hectares of land to over three hundred million impoverished peasants in the nationwide land reform movement. This land reform, the founding myth of the People’s Republic of China (1949–present) and one of the largest redistributions of wealth and power in history, embodies the idea that an equal distribution of property will lead to social and political equality. Power Over Property argues that in practice, however, the opposite occurred: the redistribution of political power led to a more equal distribution of property. China’s land reform was accomplished not only through the state’s power to define the distribution of resources, but also through village communities prioritizing political entitlements above property rights. Through the systematic analysis of never-before studied micro-level data on practices of land reform in over five hundred villages, Power Over Property demonstrates how land reform primarily involved the removal of former power holders, the mobilization of mass political participation, and the creation of a new social-political hierarchy. Only after accomplishing all of this was it possible to redistribute land. This redistribution, moreover, was determined by political relations to a new structure of power, not just economic relations to the means of production. The experience of China’s land reform complicates our understanding of the relations between economic, social, and political equality. On the one hand, social equality in China was achieved through political, not economic means. On the other hand, the fundamental solution was a more effective hierarchy of fair entitlements, not equal rights. This book ultimately suggests that focusing on economic equality alone may obscure more important social and political dynamics in the development of the modern world.
Author: Minerva Arce Ibarra Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030497674 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 462
Book Description
This book presents oral histories, collective dialogues, and analyses of rural and indigenous livelihoods facing global socio-environmental regime change in Latin America (LA). Since the late twentieth century, rural and indigenous producers in LA, including agriculturists, coffee-growers, as well as small-scale farmers/fishers, and others, have had to resist, cope with, or adapt to a range of neoliberal socio-environmental regimes that impact their territories and associated resources, including water, production systems and ultimately their cultural traditions. In response, rural producers are using local visions and innovation niches to decide what, when, and how to resist, cope with uncertainty, and still be successful in using their customary laws to retain their land rights and livelihoods. This book presents a range of ethnically diverse case studies from LA, which addresses socio-environmental, educational, and law regimes’ effects using transdisciplinary research approaches in rural, traditional and indigenous production systems. Based on both, the results and insights gained into how producers are resisting and adapting to these regimes, as well as decades of research carried out in LA rural territories by the participating authors, the book puts forward a baseline for devising new public policies that are better suited to the real challenges of livelihoods, poverty, and environmental degradation in LA. These recommendations are rooted in post-development thinking; they promote territorial public policy with social inclusion and a human’s rights approach. The book draws on over 20 years of research carried out by LA’s academics and their undergraduate and graduate students who have addressed collaborative work, participatory research, and transdisciplinary approaches with rural commons and communities in LA. It features 19 case studies, with contributions from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, and Mexico.
Author: Rosa Congost Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1315439956 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 222
Book Description
Property Rights in Land widens our understanding of property rights by looking through the lenses of social history and sociology, discussing mainstream theory of new institutional economics and the derived grand narrative of economic development. Written by a collection of expert authors, the chapters delve into social processes through which property relations became institutionalized and were used in social action for the appropriation of resources and rent. This was in order to gain a better understanding of the social processes intervening between the institutionalized ‘rules of the game’ and their economic and social outcomes.
Author: Mariana P. Candido Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1009059955 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 345
Book Description
Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana P. Candido presents a bold revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884–5. Synthesising disparate strands of scholarship, including the histories of slavery, land tenure, and gender in West Central Africa, Candido makes a significant contribution to ongoing historical debates. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights eventually came to inform the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labour. By centring the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical narratives, and shows that securing property was a gendered process. Drawing attention to how archives obscure African forms of knowledge and normalize conquest, Candido interrogates simplistic interpretations of ownership and pushes for the decolonization of African history.
Author: Yochai Benkler Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 9780300125771 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 532
Book Description
Describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing. The author shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront.
Author: Matteo Di Tullio Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351880489 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 153
Book Description
The early decades of the sixteenth century were a turbulent time for the Italian peninsula as competing centres of power struggled for political control. Nowhere was this more true than the area contested by Milan and Venice, that was constantly crossed and occupied by rival armies. Investigating the impact of successive crises upon the inhabitants of the Po Valley, this book challenges many fundamental assumptions about the relationship between war and economic development and draws conclusion that have implications for early modern Europe as a whole. In traditional historiography, periods of war and general crisis have often been regarded as promoting a shift in resources from the communal towards a small number of individuals. However, through a close micro-study of a single region, this book offers a different perspective. Rather than promoting an aggressive individualism, it is argued that in times of general crisis, social networks aimed to reproduce themselves and the original status quo by developing creative solutions and institutions favouring co-operation. Furthermore the elites could not always exploit ’local’ wealth because of the need to protect their position of leadership within the community, which required the preservation of that very community. This thesis not only challenges the received wisdom, but also fuels a new debate about the ways in which economic growth occurred in Early Modern Italy and Europe.
Author: John L. Pender Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135121966 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 243
Book Description
This book investigates the role of wealth in achieving sustainable rural economic development. The authors define wealth as all assets net of liabilities that can contribute to well-being, and they provide examples of many forms of capital – physical, financial, human, natural, social, and others. They propose a conceptual framework for rural wealth creation that considers how multiple forms of wealth provide opportunities for rural development, and how development strategies affect the dynamics of wealth. They also provide a new accounting framework for measuring wealth stocks and flows. These conceptual frameworks are employed in case study chapters on measuring rural wealth and on rural wealth creation strategies. Rural Wealth Creation makes numerous contributions to research on sustainable rural development. Important distinctions are drawn to help guide wealth measurement, such as the difference between the wealth located within a region and the wealth owned by residents of a region, and privately owned versus publicly owned wealth. Case study chapters illustrate these distinctions and demonstrate how different forms of wealth can be measured. Several key hypotheses are proposed about the process of rural wealth creation, and these are investigated by case study chapters assessing common rural development strategies, such as promoting rural energy industries and amenity-based development. Based on these case studies, a typology of rural wealth creation strategies is proposed and an approach to mapping the potential of such strategies in different contexts is demonstrated. This book will be relevant to students, researchers, and policy makers looking at rural community development, sustainable economic development, and wealth measurement.
Author: Philip Goodchild Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1786614286 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 214
Book Description
In Economic Theology, Goodchild offers a philosophical analysis of the contemporary economy in terms of the way it structures credit and faith. The Great Financial Crisis of 2007 and onwards has exposed the extent to which the economy functions as a network of credits and debts. Credit and debt may now be understood as the driving force of economic behaviour. In this analysis, economic theories of markets and money are also ways of ordering trust. Similarly, the institutions of money, finance and banking provide the framework enabling trust and cooperation. Goodchild explores how reliance on such theories and institutions produces disequilibrium dynamics, growing inequalities, increasing enclosure, resource depletion and breakdown. Nevertheless, the failures of the system only intensify efforts to extend the system itself. Building on and extending Goodchild’s Theology of Money, the author exposes the extent to which humanity has become enslaved within theories and institutions of its own making. As the second volume in his Credit and Faith trilogy, Goodchild explains how the economy itself is a way of shaping time and attention, care and evaluation, trust and cooperation, so directly assuming a theological role. This volume extends the theological critique of the dynamics of financial capitalism.
Author: Ulrika Kolben Waaranperä Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000468917 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 163
Book Description
For more than a century, property rights to land in Molo in the Kenyan highlands have been subjected to diverse reforms and desires. Colonial and independent state administrations have restructured land tenure systems to establish and maintain authority or alleviate landlessness. Meanwhile, people on the ground have developed their own ideas about property rights, place, and people. Via a detailed political ethnography, Ulrika Kolben Waaranperä uncovers the heterodox notion of property rights that has emerged as land has been redistributed, settlement schemes established, electricity lines drawn, and electoral violence mobilized. The book makes an important contribution to the study of land and politics in Kenya and beyond by drawing attention to how conceptions of property rights are shaped by and constitutive of relations of belonging and authority. This relational view challenges the universal definition of property rights undergirding most contemporary land reforms. Instead, property rights are situated within the political and rendered legible for both definitional and distributional debates. In effect, land reform is posited as a fundamentally political undertaking.
Author: Christopher Udry
Author: Matthew Noellert
Author: Minerva Arce Ibarra
Author: Rosa Congost
Author: Mariana P. Candido
Author: Yochai Benkler
Author: Matteo Di Tullio
Author: John L. Pender
Author: Philip Goodchild
Author: Ulrika Kolben Waaranperä