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This paper analyzes changes in property rights, land uses, and culturally based notions of ownership that have emerged following privatization of communal land in a Samburu pastoralist community in Northern Kenya. The research challenges the strict dichotomy between private and collective rights often found in property rights literature, which does not match empirical findings of overlapping and contested rights.

Part of a long-term ethnographic project investigating the process of land privatization and its outcomes, this paper draws on in-depth interviews and participant observation conducted by the author in Samburu County in 2008, 2009, and 2010. Interviews focused on how land is being used post-privatization as well as emerging social norms regulating its use.

Privatization privileges male household heads with powers including rental, sale, and bequeathal of land. However, informal rights to land extend to women and other household members. Exercise of legal rights is frequently limited due to knowledge and resource gaps. New rules regulating land use have emerged, some represent sharp divergences from past practice while others support shared access to land. These changes challenge Samburu cultural notions of individuality, reciprocity, and shared responsibility.

This research illuminates complex changes following legal shifts in property rights and demonstrates the interactions between formal laws and informal social norms and cultural beliefs about land. The result is that privatization does not have easily predictable outcomes as some theories of property would suggest.

Empirical investigation of the effects of legal changes enables fuller understanding of the implications of policy changes that many governments are pursuing privatization with limited understanding of the likely effects.

For over 40 years in Nicaragua, the Mayangna indigenous group has fought for legal rights to traditional lands with the expressed purpose of protecting their rainforest. On December 21, 2009, the last of nine Mayangna territories were granted rights by Nicaragua to a majority of their historical claims, in addition to rights to have illegal colonists removed by Nicaraguan police and military. Indigenous leaders pursued land rights as a measure for cultural survival and the protection of their broadleaf rainforest, also the site of a UNESCO International Biosphere Reserve, the BOSAWAS. While Indigenous lands are encroached upon by the frontline of imperialistic consumerism, people like the Mayangna ask for international and national respect for their autonomy, self-determination, land ownership, and even sovereignty.

The Mayangna lead the way to understand necessary steps for protecting the rainforest. Their actions demonstrate the possibility for social justice given respect for true ecologically sustainability. To begin, they fought to obtain ownership of their homelands, thereafter, they battled legally and even with their lives to defend their boundaries and everything within them. The Mayangna insist indigenous land ownership, the protection of their rights, and a respect for their traditional forms of management lead to the continued protection of the rainforest and other areas critical to the survival of the global ecosystem.

Since 1969, the Moroccan government has worked to convert irrigated collective land in the Gharb region into individual freehold tenure through cadastral, registration, and titling processes. The first titles were issued in 2017, the same year that a new compact between the Government of Morocco and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US foreign aid agency, entered into force to develop a streamlined privatization process for collective lands. In this chapter, I adopt the analytic of assemblage to investigate the historical construction of administrative frameworks, material landscapes, and systems of practice governing access to collective land. I assert that the shifting arrangements of sociomaterial relations related to collective land access in the Gharb have continuously assembled new practices of land access legible to state and market actors at a wider scale. This legibility was produced by administrative reforms and the deployment of new forms of knowledge production in the form of cadastral maps and titles deeds, which have worked to formalize and individualize access to collective land in the Gharb. The logic of legibility smooths the contradictions between the diverse objectives of state actors, including rural development to improve economic livelihoods, pursuit of a neoliberal development strategy focused on commodification and marketization of land, and the evolution of a patronage system that exchanges economic gain for political support.

New and converging technologies in administration and mapping have enabled property rights to become disconnected from the facts of occupation and possession of land. By the time native title was recognised in the Mabo decision (1992) the primary representation of land tenure was in digital cadastres¹ created and controlled by Federal and State bureaucracies. Native title was immediately cast as a spatial question. The location of native title rights was determined within the confines of a map of existing legal interests in the land. In this paper, I consider how the spatial orientation of property has affected the nature and expression of native title rights in Australia.

This paper considers whether the term patrimonialism can be applied to one racially bifurcated aspect of Australian history: the relations between ‘squatters’ and those with competing civil and property claims. From the perspective of white settlers, the power of pastoralists who acquired use rights over vast stretches of land in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries represented a challenge to rural settlement, economic development, the right to vote, workers’ rights and parliamentary democracy.

From the perspective of Aboriginal peoples who held traditional ownership of pastoral lands, squattocracy began with armed conflict and ended with practices aimed at detailed government of their everyday life. More generally, as white settlers consolidated property rights to land, they expropriated Indigenous peoples’ capacity to govern themselves.

The paper concludes that there have been two distinct histories of patrimonialism in Australia. The Australian colonies were among the pioneers of ‘universal’ male and later female franchise in the nineteenth century; Aborigines gained (de jure) full citizenship only in the late 1960s. While the squatter’s patrimonial rule over white settlers was short-lived, that over some groups of Aboriginal people persisted for more than a century.

This chapter argues that sustainable development must be anchored on a human rights regime and that an integrated framing of human rights and sustainability in development policy and practice is crucial in the achievement of the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Using data gathered from the author's field research during her US Fulbright Fellowship in the Philippines in 2017, the chapter examines the impacts of corporate mining on the Philippine Indigenous people using the United Nations Declaration on the Human Rights of Indigenous People as a framework for analysis. The experience of the indigenous people shows that large scale corporate mining – largely dominated by transnational corporations – threatens their right to life, right to ancestral land, right to a healthy environment, right to education and cultural rights, right to self-determination, and the right to sustainable development. The violation of these rights threatens the Indigenous people's survival and makes their situation even more precarious during COVID-19 pandemic. State and corporate recognition of these rights is crucial to building resiliency to the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic and the survival of the indigenous people.

Our Dublin correspondent telegraphed last night:

The position of these Irish agitators is illogical and untenable; the remedy they propose is no remedy at all – nevertheless they are talking about the tenure of land and the right to land; and thus a question of worldwide importance is coming to the front.³

Women from many cultures have historically been closely tied to the land and the environment through their role as subsistence farmers. But as the more developed nations have shifted to commercial agriculture and improved technology, farming has become a male-dominated industry. China’s shift from traditional family-operated farms to government-controlled collectives required a system of incentives to encourage agricultural labor to remain and prevent mass exodus to the cities. Hukou was created in the 1950s as a system of governmental registration for restricting the internal migration of labor within China, identifying citizens’ residency by place of birth. Residents of rural or urban locations are classified agricultural or nonagricultural labor, respectively. But as China’s industrialization has grown and technology has reduced the need for human agricultural labor, the need and desire for urban employment has intensified. For women, relocating has changed marriage practices, influenced child rearing, and altered their right to land tenure in their home region. This paper examines the role of gender in the changing use of hukou in the development of China, focusing on the impact of women’s patterns of migration on land tenure. Although hukou policies are still changing and there is a lack of data on the most recent changes, initial studies show that there are few who wish to give up their rural hukou in order to obtain urban hukou. Changes over the past decade indicate that rural woman are not only taking on more of the agricultural workload as men are drawn to urban employment, but also that they are less likely to care about environmental degradation in China.