A Critical Review of Environmental Governance, Land Restitution, and Tourism in Protected Areas

Natural areas, when protected, conserve the natural environment and function as social spaces in which tourism brings increased income, employment, and financial support for conservation. The inclusion of local community members in the planning and management of protected areas has been on the rise since the early 1900s. Tourism has been advocated as a strategy that can help in achieving economic development, especially in rural areas. However, governance issues and potential negative impacts of tourism development have been under inspection. Conservation efforts in Southern Africa especially in the late 1800s and early 1900s had negative impacts on the local communities since this led to many communities being displaced or having limited access to these protected areas. This has seen the need for ways and efforts to get local community members' despondency and attitudes towards protected areas change such that in the 20th century, there were efforts to use conservation models that included community members in the decision-making and benefit-sharing process to garner their support for protected areas. This paper reviews literature on environmental governance, land restitution in protected areas, tourism in protected areas, co-management, and the importance of community participation. These concepts are reviewed using Manyeleti Game Reserve as a case study.

Land Reform for a Landless Chief in South Africa: History and Land Restitution in KwaZulu-Natal

Land claims and contests have been central to the construction of political authority across the African continent. South Africa’s post-apartheid land reform program aims to address historical dispossessions, but the program has experienced numerous obstacles and limits—in terms of pace, communal land access, productivity, and rural class divides. Drawing on archival and newspaper sources, Kelly traces how the descendant of a colonially-appointed, landless chief manipulated a claim into a landed chieftaincy and how both the chief and the competing claimants have deployed histories of landlessness and firstcomer accounts in a manner distinct to the KwaZulu-Natal region as part of the land restitution process.

The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean colonialism

This article approaches the rebellions of the Mapuche people from a longue-durée perspective, from the Occupation of the Araucanía in 1861 to the recent events of 2020. Among other things, the article explores the Popular Unity (UP) period, and the ‘Cautinazo’ in particular, considered here as an uprising that synthesised the discourses and aspirations of the Mapuche people dating back to the Occupation, while also repoliticising them by foregrounding demands for land restitution. This experience created the conditions for a new cycle of mobilisation that began in the twenty-first century. In other words, the Agrarian Reform of the UP era set the stage for more recent rebellions that are once again challenging colonial problems related to private property rights, the usurpation of land and agricultural aggression. In seeking responses to these problems, the Mapuche movement of the early twenty-first century is being revitalised.

Contested Land Restitution Processes in Cambodia

Cambodia has experienced rapid economic growth due partly to excessive natural resource extraction. Land conflicts have been pervasive between local communities and companies that invest in land and other natural resources. Despite substantial research into land conflict resolution, knowledge about how land is returned to wronged parties and what happens to the returned land is fragmented. This review aims to provide a holistic understanding of land restitution in Cambodia by examining different types of land conflict, actors involved, and restitution processes. It provides both a macro perspective on land restitution and conflict-specific perspectives regarding how actors engage in different processes that produce various outcomes for disputants. We find both complications and ambivalence of the actors involved, particularly concerning their roles and influences in resolution processes. Specifically, we find contentious and ambivalent roles that non-governmental organisations (NGOs), donor agencies, and government authorities played in mixed results of resolution mechanisms in the cases that have yielded outcomes in terms of land restitution. Our review also suggests that the neoliberal policy that favours commoditisation of resources and the authoritarian patronage state disguised in a hybrid democracy allowed some grassroots resistance, civil society space, and responses from other concerned economic and political actors in the resolution processes. However, the state controlled and manipulated their engagement to benefit and maintain its economic and political bases, and it never allowed any transformative approach that could tackle the root causes of the problems. This understanding of complexities in land restitution is crucial to achieving land tenure security, particularly for local communities.

Filtered violence: Human rights law, forced displacement and land politics in Colombia

How does human rights law arbitrate the spatial dimensions of violence? This paper broaches this question from a “critical geographies of human rights” standpoint to grapple with how human rights law defines the spatial dimensions of the very violence it sets out to confront. Through a focus on Colombia’s 2011 “Victims’ and Land Restitution Law” (the Victims’ Law), I demonstrate how human rights law does not just attempt to ameliorate legacies of violence, but that it circumscribes the spatial valences of violence in particular ways. Colombia has one of the world’s largest displaced populations and since 2011 has managed an extensive restitution program designed to restore land title to conflict victims who lost or sold property due to armed conflict. In this case, human rights law is productive of a “juridical gaze” that illuminates the spatial dynamics of forced displacement in a manner that obscures or only indirectly addresses the relationship between forced displacement and inequality in land ownership. Drawing on contemporary debates concerning the relationship between human rights and neoliberal inequality, I argue that that human rights law produces spatial renderings of violence that reflect the underlying degree to which human rights projects recognize or eschew material inequality and its relationship to violence.

Land Resettlement and Restitution in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Program has attracted a lot of scholarly attention. While some scholars have argued that the process through which landless peasants reclaimed land was chaotic and violent, others have praised it for having been one of the most radical redistributive land reform programs in Africa. While these debates have dominated scholarship on land reform program in Zimbabwe since 2000, what has been lacking has been a historical analysis of the entanglement between land resettlement and struggles over restitution. Land restitution has been at the center of the land redistribution in Zimbabwe. In spite of the successes that the government has made in redistributing land, land restitution is the last frontier in the struggle over land. Ruins, ancestral graves, and sacred sites are important landscape features whose emotive presence and materiality enable communities to make land claims and counterclaims. Land restitution processes have been initiated in a variety of regional and country contexts. In former settler societies such as Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Canada, and Australia, indigenous populations have laid claims over land dispossessed under colonial rule. In post-conflict societies internally displaced people have also attempted to lay claims over land that they had to leave behind fleeing from violence. Further, where large-scale land deals have been unsuccessful or revoked through resistance land reclamation has also been instigated. Land restitution is concerned with restoring landed property to former owners. As compared to land redistribution, restitution is not concerned with ironing out of inequitable distribution of land to create a just future but with reestablishment of former rights based on principles of justice rather than equality. Restitution is therefore based on returning land to former owners who can prove claims. Land restitution is an elastic concept covering a range of processes designed to appease what are perceived as historical injustices around loss of land rights.

Post-Conflict Land Restitution: The German Experience in Relation to Colombian Law 1448 of 2011

This article compares the legal regimes of land restitution that were enacted in Germany, after World War II and again after the Cold War, with those enacted in Colombia after a decades-long armed conflict, in which many people lost their land. Many parallels can be drawn between these experiences: both countries decided to restitute land in an effective manner but also excluded groups of victims - which was accepted by both countries’ constitutional courts. Important differences emerge regarding the function of restitution for the resolution of the conflict and in its implementation in practice. These differences are owed to the different origins and causes of the conflicts, and to different circumstances prevailing at the time of restitution. It can be clearly shown that post-conflict restitution of land is very context-sensitive. Neither in Germany nor in Colombia were the objectives of the restitution regimes, individual justice and further policy aims, fully achieved. Nevertheless, the considerable extent to which justice was indeed attained by restitution should not be talked down or diminished.