Understanding tenure security dynamics in resettlement towns: Evidence from the Bui Resettlement Project in Ghana

Many researchers have investigated the impacts of resettlement schemes in Ghana. However, not many have explored the tenure dynamics in resettlement and how it either improves or worsens tenure security. This study contributes to filling this gap by assessing tenure security in the Bui Resettlement Town B in Ghana and proposes measures for undertaking resettlement projects in a tenure responsive manner. The study adopted a qualitative and descriptive statistical approach based on data collected using interviews on tenure experiences and resettlement processes concerning the Bui resettlement project (Resettlement Town B) in Ghana. Findings show that tenure insecurity is associated with the resettlement project due to the transformation of tenure from communal holding to individual holding, changes in traditional land governance structures from local chiefs to Bui Power Authority and a general lack of access to land. The study concludes with some measures for improving tenure security in resettlement towns.

The People Are King

The People Are King traces the transformation of Andean communities under Inca and Spanish rule. The sixteenth-century Spanish resettlement policy known as reducción was pivotal to this transformation. Modeled on the Spanish ideal of república (self-government within planned towns) and shared sovereignty with their monarch, Spaniards in the Viceroyalty of Peru forced Andeans into resettlement towns. Andeans turned the tables on forced resettlement by making the towns their own and the center of their social, political, and religious lives. Andeans made a coherent life for themselves in a complex process of ethnogenesis that blended preconquest ways of life (the ayllu) with the imposed institutions of town life and Christian religious practices. Within these towns, Andeans claimed the right to self-government, and increasingly regarded their native lords, the caciques, as tyrants. A series of microhistorical accounts in these repúblicas reveals that Andeans believed that commoner people, collectively called the común, could rule themselves. With both Andean and Spanish antecedents, this political philosophy of radical democracy was key to the Great Rebellion of the late eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on well-known leaders such as Tupac Amaru, this book demonstrates through commoner rebels’ holographic letters that it was commoner Andean people who made the late eighteenth-century a revolutionary moment by asserting their rights to self-government. In the final chapter the book follows the commoner-lead towns of the Andes from the era of independence into the present day of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.