CONSEQUENCES OF LOSS OF COMMON PROPERTY RESOURCES IN THE SELECTED BLOCK, DINDIGUL DISTRICT OF TAMILNADU

Common property land resources include grazing ground, community pasture, village forests and woodlots, and village sites, on which the villagers have legal usufructuary rights; these land resources also include all another land formally held by the panchayat or a community of the villages (NSS 54th round). For a collection of data of common land resources de jure and e facto approaches were considered. Forest land resources which are under the jurisdiction of the forest department was also considered as poor dependent rural communities are directly or indirectly dependent on the forest for livelihoods. From the report of NSS 54th round, it is observed that 15% of India’s total geographical area substantially forms a part of common land resources. Consequences of loss of common property resources and depletion of common property resources resulted largely because there was no private cost for using these resources. Privatization of common property resources in the arid zone has invariably meant the conversion of common property resources land into cropland.

Shared landscapes: Ownership and governance of Ōhiwa Harbour (Aotearoa New Zealand)

<p>This thesis explores narratives of property and ownership in natural resources, particularly common property resources such as the foreshore and seabed. Using the Ōhiwa Harbour as a case study, I investigate property relations between Māori, Pākehā and official agencies in respect to the natural environment in an evolving ‘third space’ in Aotearoa New Zealand. In this space, conflicting narratives on the ‘ownership’ of common property resources hold centre stage. This research addresses a gap in the literature concerning everyday Māori-Pākehā relations in owning and governing natural common goods, taking both the community and local government levels into account. Its principal questions are: How do property relations inform people’s capacity to act collectively across cultural meanings? How might intercultural communities utilise legal pluralism to facilitate decolonisation in natural resource governance? Can nature be given the agency it is sometimes declared to have? Overarching these and other research questions is an investigation of how far commoning has progressed in the case-study area and whether this might form the basis for new developments for the concept of the commons. Informed by theories relating to both the commons and institutions which embody collective action, I employ a three-layered approach to property that distinguishes cultural ideologies, legal-institutional frameworks of rights, and actual social relationships and practices. I show that this mixed theoretical and empirical approach can be usefully tested through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork. In particular, my participation in everyday interactions of kaitiaki, care groups and the Ōhiwa Harbour Strategy partnership has revealed important nuances, synergies and differences between the different layers of property relations. I propose separate institutions for collective action are emerging at the community level that have started to borrow cultural concepts from each other, although their practices remain largely disconnected. At the local government level, too, the Ōhiwa Harbour Strategy partnership embodies common and intercultural ownership and offers an important stage for iwi and hapū representation. There are rich ‘commoning’ opportunities at both the community and the local government levels for the exercise of transformative power regarding the local normative order. The self- and multi-level governance of common properties such as the Ōhiwa Harbour could be fostered if ideas of the commons would be embraced more broadly, including at a national governmental level. The sense of shared ownership in the landscape that tāngata whenua and Pākehā express provides, moreover, opportunities to move beyond the formal Crown-Māori reconciliation processes that have largely excluded Pākehā. For these reasons alone, future research into the knowledge commons is crucial. The thesis contends that commons research in Aotearoa New Zealand needs to critically engage with concepts such as rangatiratanga, kaitiakitanga and stewardship, both per se and because their realisation appears to be a quest not only for Māori but for a growing number of Pākehā who question ongoing marketization and seek alternatives to public and private ownership. The thesis findings also point to other areas of research which could benefit from a commons approach, such as Pākehā and Māori memory of the transformation of landscapes, and issues related to farming, forestry and particularly freshwater. Based on an in-depth study of both the current imaginary of the commons, and practical progress on institutionalising collective action at Ōhiwa Harbour, this thesis contributes to and opens the way for future thinking on shared, socially and ecologically sustainable landscapes.</p>

Shared landscapes: Ownership and governance of Ōhiwa Harbour (Aotearoa New Zealand)

<p>This thesis explores narratives of property and ownership in natural resources, particularly common property resources such as the foreshore and seabed. Using the Ōhiwa Harbour as a case study, I investigate property relations between Māori, Pākehā and official agencies in respect to the natural environment in an evolving ‘third space’ in Aotearoa New Zealand. In this space, conflicting narratives on the ‘ownership’ of common property resources hold centre stage. This research addresses a gap in the literature concerning everyday Māori-Pākehā relations in owning and governing natural common goods, taking both the community and local government levels into account. Its principal questions are: How do property relations inform people’s capacity to act collectively across cultural meanings? How might intercultural communities utilise legal pluralism to facilitate decolonisation in natural resource governance? Can nature be given the agency it is sometimes declared to have? Overarching these and other research questions is an investigation of how far commoning has progressed in the case-study area and whether this might form the basis for new developments for the concept of the commons. Informed by theories relating to both the commons and institutions which embody collective action, I employ a three-layered approach to property that distinguishes cultural ideologies, legal-institutional frameworks of rights, and actual social relationships and practices. I show that this mixed theoretical and empirical approach can be usefully tested through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork. In particular, my participation in everyday interactions of kaitiaki, care groups and the Ōhiwa Harbour Strategy partnership has revealed important nuances, synergies and differences between the different layers of property relations. I propose separate institutions for collective action are emerging at the community level that have started to borrow cultural concepts from each other, although their practices remain largely disconnected. At the local government level, too, the Ōhiwa Harbour Strategy partnership embodies common and intercultural ownership and offers an important stage for iwi and hapū representation. There are rich ‘commoning’ opportunities at both the community and the local government levels for the exercise of transformative power regarding the local normative order. The self- and multi-level governance of common properties such as the Ōhiwa Harbour could be fostered if ideas of the commons would be embraced more broadly, including at a national governmental level. The sense of shared ownership in the landscape that tāngata whenua and Pākehā express provides, moreover, opportunities to move beyond the formal Crown-Māori reconciliation processes that have largely excluded Pākehā. For these reasons alone, future research into the knowledge commons is crucial. The thesis contends that commons research in Aotearoa New Zealand needs to critically engage with concepts such as rangatiratanga, kaitiakitanga and stewardship, both per se and because their realisation appears to be a quest not only for Māori but for a growing number of Pākehā who question ongoing marketization and seek alternatives to public and private ownership. The thesis findings also point to other areas of research which could benefit from a commons approach, such as Pākehā and Māori memory of the transformation of landscapes, and issues related to farming, forestry and particularly freshwater. Based on an in-depth study of both the current imaginary of the commons, and practical progress on institutionalising collective action at Ōhiwa Harbour, this thesis contributes to and opens the way for future thinking on shared, socially and ecologically sustainable landscapes.</p>

Land Alienation and Access To Common Property Resources among Tribal Agricultural Labourers of Wayanad District: A Critical Gender Analysis

The present investigation has been done on the basis of qualitative and quantitative data collected from primary sources and explored the land alienation and land ownership status of tribal agricultural labourers. It also investigates how social discrimination aggravates the extent of land alienation and influence the land ownership and access to common property resources among the tribal people. While considering the inter-community disparity in land ownership, Kurichiya community owned more land than Paniya community, whereas, Kattunaikan owned no land and remained landless. Majority of the tribal people, especially women experienced high degree of land alienation. The major methods of land alienation identified were marriage of tribal women with non-tribal men, mortgaging the land by the tribal people to the non-tribal people in return for credit. The major consequences of land alienation as perceived by the tribal agricultural labourers were widening gap between the rich and the poor tribal people, increased poverty, exploitation, confrontation between tribal and non-tribal people, migration, law and order problem in tribal areas and marginalization and exclusion. In the case of access to common property resources, Kurichiya community had better access to community well/ tap, forest produces, common land resources and water resources than Paniya and Kattunaikan communities.

Common-Pool Hierarchy: Explaining the Emergence of Cooperative Hierarchies

Hierarchy in international relations has often been understood as an arrangement with a single dominant state controlling aspects of the subordinate actor's sovereignty. While such arrangements play an important role in structuring international politics, it does not exhaust the forms that hierarchy can take. Very often hierarchies have developed where multiple states jointly claim control of the same sovereign rights of the subordinate state. This paper introduces a new conceptualization of hierarchy where the sovereign rights of the subordinate state are understood as a resource that can be controlled by multiple dominant states. As with other resources, different types of property regimes can be developed to organize access and extraction of sovereignty, such as common property resources regimes. Finally, an explanation of common-pool hierarchy regimes is developed and explored using two case studies: European imperialism in the nineteenth-century China and the scramble for Africa.