scholarly journals SmartSkeMa: Scalable Documentation for Community and Customary Land Tenure

Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 662
Author(s):  
Malumbo C. Chipofya ◽  
Sahib Jan ◽  
Angela Schwering
Keyword(s):  
Land Tenure ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
Land Administration ◽  
Land Relations ◽  
Fit For Purpose ◽  
Indigenous Land Rights ◽  
Customary Land ◽  
The Many ◽  
High Level ◽  
Indigenous Land

According to the online database landmarkmap, up to an estimated 50% or more of the world’s habitable land is held by indigenous peoples and communities. While legal and procedural provisions are being made for bureaucratically managing the many different types of tenure relations in this domain, there continues to be a lack of tools and expertise needed to quickly and accurately document customary and indigenous land rights. Software and hardware tools that have been designed for documenting land tenure through communities continue to assume a parcel-based model of land as well as categories of land relations (RRR) largely dimensionally similar to statutory land rights categories. The SmartSkeMa approach to land tenure documentation combines sketching by hand with aerial imagery and an ontology-based model of local rules regulating land tenure relations to produce a system specifically designed to allow accurate documentation of land tenure from a local perspective. In addition, the SmartSkeMa adaptor which is an OWL-DL based set of rules for translating local land related concepts to the LADM concepts provides a more high-level view of the data collected (i.e., what does this concept relate to within the national LADM profile?) In this paper we present the core functionalities of SmartSkeMa using examples from Kenya and Ethiopia. Based on an expert survey and focus groups held in Kenya, we also analyze how the approach fairs on the Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration tools scale. The results indicate that the approach could be beneficial in scaling up mapping of community and customary lands as well as help reduce conflict through its participatory nature.

Winning Title to Land but Not to Its Past: The Toledo Maya and Sites of pre-Hispanic Heritage

2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shoshaunna Parks
Keyword(s):  
Land Tenure ◽  
Indigenous Rights ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Indigenous Land Rights ◽  
The Government ◽  
Customary Land ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
Indigenous Land

AbstractThe struggle for indigenous rights to pre-Hispanic cultural heritage parallels the struggle for indigenous land rights in Belize. By Belizean law, material objects and sites of activity older than 100 years in age are the property of the state. Similarly, land inhabited by indigenous communities in southern Belize is held in trust by the government. In 2007 the community of Santa Cruz in southern Belize won customary land tenure over their lands for the first time from the Belizean government. This change in land ownership presents new challenges to the definition of ownership of ancient places in Maya territory. In particular, the transfer of land rights to the community has potential implications for the ownership and management of the local pre-Hispanic site of Uxbenká that may ultimately serve as a paradigm for the future relationship between Maya peoples and ancestral remains throughout the nation.

scholarly journals Law, land, development and narrative: a case-study from the South Pacific

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Farran
Keyword(s):  
Land Tenure ◽  
Land Development ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
Small Island ◽  
The South ◽  
Indigenous Land Rights ◽  
Indigenous Land

This article explores a primary source of legal studies, case-law, as a form of narrative in the context of indigenous land rights, and considers how this narrative negotiates pre-colonial land claims in a post-colonial context. Its case-study is the South Pacific island country of Vanuatu, a small-island, least-developed, nation-state, where laws introduced under Anglo–French colonial administration are still retained and sit uneasily alongside the customary forms of land tenure which govern ninety percent of all land in the islands. The article looks at the traditional and changing role of narrative presented as evidence by claimants and their witnesses against a context of rapid social and economic change, and asks whether the metamorphosis of narrative signals the future survival or imminent demise of customary indigenous land rights and what that might mean for these island people faced by the pressures of development.

Fractured Governance and Local Frictions: The Exclusionary Nature of a Clandestine Land Market in Southern Zambia

Africa ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Sitko
Keyword(s):  
Land Tenure ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
Land Market ◽  
Land Markets ◽  
Private Land ◽  
Land Administration ◽  
The Social ◽  
Customary Land ◽  
Rural Zambia

This article explores the ways in which efforts to expand private land tenure, coupled with the continued centrality of customary land administration in Zambia, produce a fractured system of land governance in which localized markets for land emerge but are forced to operate in a clandestine manner. Using ethnographic and archival data sources, I argue that despite the historical and contemporary relationship between land rights and economic ‘development’, the clandestine nature of land markets in rural Zambia tends to (re)produce many of the social ills that ‘development’ seeks to resolve. Using a case study of a clandestine market for land in a Tonga-speaking region of southern Zambia, this article shows how these markets undermine women's rights to land, while allowing for the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few.

scholarly journals African Indigenous Land Rights in a Private Ownership Paradigm

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (7) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Elmien Du Plessis
Keyword(s):  
Land Tenure ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Indigenous Law ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Indigenous Land Rights ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Indigenous Land

It is often stated that indigenous law confers no property rights in land. Okoth-Ogenda reconceptualised indigenous land rights by debunking the myth that indigenous land rights systems are necessarily "communal" in nature, that "ownership" is collective and that the community as an entity makes collective decisions about the access and use of land.[1] He offers a different understanding of indigenous land rights systems by looking at the social order of communities that create "reciprocal rights and obligations that this binds together, and vests power in the community members over land". To determine who will be granted access to or exercise control over land and the resources, one needs to look at these rights and obligations and the performances that arise from them. This will leave only two distinct questions: who may have access to the land (and what type of access)[2] and who may control and manage the land resources on behalf of those who have access to it?[3] There is a link with this reconceptualisation and the discourse of the commons. Ostrom's classification of goods leads to a definition of the commons (or common pool of resources) as "a class of resources for which exclusion is difficult and joint use involves subtractablity".[4] The questions this article wishes to answer are: would it firstly be possible to classify the indigenous land rights system as a commons, and secondly would it provide a useful analytical framework in which to solve the problem of securing land tenure in South Africa?[1]      Okoth-Ogendo "Nature of Land Rights" 100.[2]      See Ben Cousin's comments and examples in Cousins "Characterising 'Communal' Tenure" 122.[3]      Okoth-Ogendo "Nature of Land Rights" 100.[4]      Feeny et al 1990 Human Ecology 4.

Indigenous Planning: From Forced Assimilation to Self-determination

2021 ◽  
pp. 088541222110266
Author(s):  
Michael Hibbard
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Indigenous Cultures ◽  
Indigenous Planning ◽  
Indigenous Land Rights ◽  
Indigenous Land

Interest in Indigenous planning has blossomed in recent years, particularly as it relates to the Indigenous response to settler colonialism. Driven by land and resource hunger, settler states strove to extinguish Indigenous land rights and ultimately to destroy Indigenous cultures. However, Indigenous peoples have persisted. This article draws on the literature to examine the resistance of Indigenous peoples to settler colonialism, their resilience, and the resurgence of Indigenous planning as a vehicle for Indigenous peoples to determine their own fate and to enact their own conceptions of self-determination and self-governance.

Justice and Indigenous Land Rights

Inquiry ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Dodds
Keyword(s):  
Land Rights ◽  
Indigenous Land Rights ◽  
Indigenous Land

The Influence of Judicial Uncertainty on Executive Support for Negotiation in Canadian Land Claims Policy

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 417-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christa Scholtz
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Judicial Politics ◽  
Federal Budget ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
Land Claims ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
Indigenous Land Rights ◽  
Indigenous Land ◽  
Judicial Uncertainty

Abstract. Governments and Indigenous groups bargain under the shadow of the law, and this paper pushes the judicial politics research agenda by examining empirically whether flickers in law's shadow systematically affect the implementation of the Canadian government's negotiation choice in the Indigenous land rights context. Through interviews and a time series analysis of Canada's specific claims policy, I find that judicial uncertainty increases the federal government's propensity to accept specific claims for negotiation. However, there is evidence that Indigenous protest action during the Oka crisis and Elijah Harper's role in scuttling the Meech Lake constitutional accord, more than other factors, greatly impacted the federal budget allocated towards negotiation.Résumé. Les négociations entre les gouvernements et les groupes autochtones se déroulent sous les auspices de la loi, et le présent document examine le programme de recherche sur les politiques légales afin de déterminer de façon empirique si certaines imprécisions dans la loi influent sur les options retenues par le gouvernement du Canada en ce qui concerne les droits sur les terres autochtones. Une analyse statistique de la politique de revendication en vigueur au Canada ainsi qu'un certain nombre d'entrevues m'ont permis de constater l'existence d'un flou juridique qui amène le gouvernement fédéral à accepter d'examiner certaines revendications spécifiques à la table des négociations. Il semble toutefois que certains incidents particuliers, comme les gestes de protestation posés par les autochtones lors de la crise d'Oka, ou le rôle joué par Elijah Harper dans l'échec de l'Accord constitutionnel du lac Meech, aient eu une incidence marquée sur l'importance des sommes allouées par le gouvernement fédéral à ces négociations.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document