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Decolonising Conservation Policy: How Colonial Land and Conservation Ideologies Persist and Perpetuate Indigenous Injustices at the Expense of the Environment
The livelihoods of indigenous peoples, custodians of the world’s forests since time immemorial, were eroded as colonial powers claimed de jure control over their ancestral lands. The continuation of European land regimes in Africa and Asia meant that the withdrawal of colonial powers did not bring about a return to customary land tenure. Further, the growth in environmentalism has been interpreted by some as entailing conservation ahead of people. While this may be justifiable in view of devastating anthropocentric breaching of planetary boundaries, continued support for “fortress” style conservation inflicts real harm on indigenous communities and overlooks sustainable solutions to deepening climate crises. In reflecting on this issue from the perspective of colonial land tenure systems, this article highlights how ideas—the importance of individualised land ownership, cultivation, and fortress conservation—are intellectually flawed. Prevailing conservation policies, made possible by global non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and statutory donors, continue to harm indigenous peoples and their traditional territories. Drawing from the authors’ experience representing the Batwa (DRC), the Ogiek and Endorois (Kenya) and Adivasis (India) in international litigation, this paper examines the human and environmental costs associated with modern conservation approaches through this colonial lens. This article concludes by reflecting on approaches that respect environmental and human rights.
Journal Article
Land and Legibility: When Do Citizens Expect Secure Property Rights in Weak States?
Legibility and political authority are often conflated in debates over formalization processes, including land titling. This can lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is that citizens anticipate would strengthen their property rights. This study examines the effects of legibility on citizens’ evaluations of property rights in Malawi, a country with limited but increasing land titling. We argue that legibility is a strategic resource for citizens, which has value in itself. To disentangle the effects of legibility and authority on tenure security, we employ a survey experiment. Our findings show that respondents perceived land with written property rights to be more secure and more desirable regardless of whether a state or customary authority granted these land rights. In contrast to scholarship that examines legibility as a technology of state control, this research suggests that legibility can help citizens advance their interests.
Journal Article
Toward Smart Land Management: Land Acquisition and the Associated Challenges in Ghana. A Look into a Blockchain Digital Land Registry for Prospects
Land acquisition in Ghana is fraught with challenges of multiple sales, numerous unofficial charges, unnecessary bureaucracies, intrusion of unqualified middlemen, and lack of transparency among others. Studies have suggested digitization as a way forward to improve Ghana’s land management system and to address these acquisition challenges. However, none of these studies have specifically provided a clear conceptual digital framework for land acquisition. Most contemporary land literature globally appraise blockchain technology as a potential solution to these challenges in Ghana’s land acquisition process. This article applies an integrative review, mixed with strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis, and deductive lessons from a digital land registry concept to develop a blockchain-based smart land acquisition framework solution in view of Ghana’s land acquisition challenges. However, it is identified that threats of sabotage of this framework exist among some customary land owners, land officials, and private blockchain-based land experts for various reasons. Among others, a legal basis for a public–private partnership is recommended particularly to discourage sabotage from private blockchain-based land experts. We recommend future research works to delve into establishing a framework that can be used as a guide to assess the readiness of land management and land administration systems for blockchain consideration in sub-Sahara Africa, particularly Ghana.
Journal Article
Custom, modernity, and stability of land rights in Ghana: An empirico-legal review
Land in Ghana is mostly governed by customary tenure systems. The sole purpose is ensuring the egalitarian use of land resources to secure the welfare of customary families and individuals with common interest in land. However, a confluence of issues including obstinate national policies on land, globalization, and land grabbing, and changing socio-economic context, have synergistically altered the customary regimes with varied and complex consequences for rural land access and use rights. This paper through narrative literature review unpacks the legal regime for customary land governance on the one hand, and empirical studies on the other, to understand the extent of destabilization of the bundle of rights in Ghana's property rights regime. This review shows the different bundles of rights examined have different levels of stability. Access and use rights remain the most stable, use, and withdrawal rights are under severe stress, while exclusion and alienation rights seek to strengthen chief authority over land. The trusteeship role of chiefs has been replaced by powers resembling absolute ownership, thereby tacitly supporting the alienability of land by chiefs, a development unintended by customary land governance relations.
Journal Article
Skin lands in Ghana and application of blockchain technology for acquisition and title registration
Purpose
The land sector in Ghana, particularly skin lands acquisition and title registration are fraught with several issues including unreliable record-keeping systems and land encroachments. The paper explores the potential of blockchain application in skin lands acquisition and title registration in Ghana with the aim of developing a blockchain-enabled framework for land acquisition. The purpose of this paper is to use the framework as a tool towards solving some of the loopholes in the process that leads to numerous issues bedeviling the current system.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper adopts a systematic literature review approach fused with informal discussions with key informants and leverages on the researchers’ own experiences to conceptualize blockchain application in skin lands acquisition in Ghana.
Findings
Problems bedeviling skin lands acquisition and title registration emanated from the issuance of allocation notes, payment of kola money and use of a physical ledger to document land transactions. As a result, the developed framework was designed to respond to these issues and deal with the problems. As the proposed blockchain framework would be a public register, it was argued that information on all transactions on a specific parcel of land could be available to the public in real-time. This enhances transparency and possibly resolves the issue of encroachments and indeterminate land boundaries because stakeholders can determine rightful owners of land parcels before initiating transactions.
Practical implications
Practically, blockchain technology has the potential to deal with the numerous issues affecting the smooth operation of skin lands acquisition and title registration in Ghana. Once the enumerated issues are resolved, there will be certainty of title to and ownership of land and property to drive investments because lenders could more easily ascertain owners of land parcels that could be used as collateral for securing loans. Similarly, property developers and land purchasers could easily identify rightful owners for land transactions. The government would be able to identify owners for land and property taxation.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the literature on blockchain and application to land acquisition and title registration with a focus on a specific customary land ownership system.
Journal Article
Can informality help create smart, sustainable cities? The vibrancy of self-organised informal settlements in Cape Town
The study critically evaluates the sustainability of informal settlements in terms of smart growth principles. There is an irony that informal settlements have more of the ideal attributes of smart development, including mixed-use development, high densities, compact affordable housing, modal accessibility, and dense local employment opportunities, than sprawling, low-density single-use developments in surrounding formal developments. Yet, despite their smart characteristics, these informalised settlements are not regarded as ideal spaces to live in due to their informal nature and thus are regarded as unsustainable modes of living. This study critically investigates these assumptions, analysing how informal mixed-use spaces are produced, organised, and regulated organised outside formal planning in a customary land use management system in Cape Town, South Africa, and whether this mode of urbanism is smart, i.e., sustainable. The research results indicate that customary self-regulation of informal settlements creates very liveable, polymorphic spaces in the marginalised townships despite the severe lack of resources. Its smart characteristics are not for aesthetic reasons but to make space functional and personal for the residents. However, the unregulated nature of this new mode of urbanism also limits the accumulation of wealth within the township, and it creates dangerous and unhealthy living conditions for residents in terms of litter, noise, flooding, fire risks, environmental degradation, and anti-social behaviour, especially in public areas not adequately regulated by customary regulatory bodies.
Journal Article
Judicial Marginalization of Communal Land Tenure in South Africa: A Critique of CASAC v Ingonyama Trust
The South African case, Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution and Others v Ingonyama Trust and Others (CASAC) concerned a dispute between customary law communities and the Ingonyama Trust (the Trust). The Trust, which holds the land for the benefit and welfare of its communities sought to unilaterally convert customary land tenure to common law leaseholds. The communities successfully challenged this decision before the Kwazulu-Natal High Court and, in this case note, I appraise the court’s reasoning. Although the order was progressive, there remained space within its reasoning to affirm customary law tenure on its own accord. Instead, the CASAC court restrained the development of customary law by employing other sources of South African law – including statutory law, the common law and the Constitution – to explain and give meaning to customary law land rights. Courts must exercise caution in engaging the plurality of land tenure in post-colonial contexts: although well-intentioned, the judicial reasoning in CASAC marginalized the application and development of customary land law.
Journal Article
Agents of alienation: accountants and the land grab of Papua New Guinea
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore and examine the role of accounting and accountants in customary land transactions between Indigenous peoples and foreign corporate entities. The paper uses the case of two accountants who utilised accounting technologies in lease agreements to alienate customary land from Indigenous landowners in Papua New Guinea (PNG).Design/methodology/approachEmploying a case study methodology, the paper draws on contemporary data sets of transcripts related to a Commission of Inquiry established in 2011 to investigate PNG’s Special Agricultural Business Lease system. Analysis of other publicly available data and semi-structured interviews with PNG landowners and other stakeholders supplement and triangulate data from the inquiry transcripts. A Bourdieusian lens was adopted to conceptualise how accounting was used in the struggles for customary land between foreign developers and Indigenous landowners within the wider capitalist field and the traditional Melanesian field.FindingsThis paper reveals how accountants exploited PNG’s customary land registration system, the Indigenous peoples’ lack of financial literacy and their desperation for development to alienate customary land from landowners. The accountants employed accounting technologies in the sublease agreements to reduce their royalty obligations to the landowners and to impose penalty clauses that made it financially impossible for the landowners to cancel the leases. The accountants used accounting to normalise, legitimise and rationalise these exploitative arrangements in formal lease contracts.Originality/valueThis paper responds to the call for research on accounting and Indigenous peoples that is contemporary rather than historic; examines the role of accountants in Indigenous relations, and examines the emancipatory potential of accounting.
Journal Article
The Nexus between Peri-Urban Transformation and Customary Land Rights Disputes: Effects on Peri-Urban Development in Trede, Ghana
Typically, peri-urban areas are havens and vulnerable receptors of customary land rights (CLRs) disputes due to the intrusion of urban activities or an uncoordinated mix of both. Although it is a dictum that CLRs cause setbacks to socioeconomic and spatial development, there seems to be a paucity of empirical studies on the effects of the CLRs disputes on the development of peri-urban areas, especially in developing countries, such as Ghana. This study addresses this issue by establishing a link between peri-urban transformation and emerging CLRs disputes, while assessing the effects of these disputes on the development of peri-urban areas. The study adopted a problem-centered mixed methods approach with a focus on the case of Trede, a town in Ghana transitioning from rural to urban status. Findings reveal that the changes leading to enhancing of peri-urban transformation are also the same changes inducing CLRs disputes in the area. It was found that the implementation of a local land use plan is a critical driver of CLRs disputes in Trede. A land-use plan implemented as a major step in converting rural lands into urban plots, triggered tenurial changes, land market development, high land values, loss of agricultural land, etc., which become recipes for the CLRs disputes in the study area. These CLRs disputes have hatched detrimental consequences on the economic, social, and physical developmental trajectories of Trede. As a way forward, the study proposes measures for peri-urban land management and CLRs dispute prevention.
Journal Article