The African Frontier: the reproduction of traditional African societies

Tania Li’s Land’s End is a masterfully written exploration of how cash crops gradually brought inequality and deprivation to a small, isolated community of Indonesian highlanders. A Marxian tragedy...

Land′s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier

This paper analyses the contribution of the biophysical characteristics, accessibility conditions and land use/cover classes on poverty dynamics among rural smallholders in Altamira, State of Para. Poverty-environment literature points that the increasing institutional restrictions to deforestation, along with lack of titling, may affect the ability of smallholders in the Amazon (and elsewhere) to diversify their agricultural strategies and expand their production. Using a longitudinal representative sample of rural properties/households in the Altamira Study Area (1997 and 2005), we find some evidence that corroborate this scenario. Accessibility to the property during the rainy season and the presence of alfisoils are the two main factors impacting the time spent on poverty, regardless of initial condition of the farmer. Conversely, natural capital and land use indicators are more sensitive to the initial condition, suggesting a higher level of endogeneity between them and the condition of poverty. Results suggest that improvement in property accessibility provided by local or regional government may reduce, instead of exacerbate, the demand for land by allowing farmers to capitalize for more intensive and sustainable land use strategies.

Poverty dynamics, ecological endowments and land use among smallholders in the Brazilian Amazon

Ethnicity, Conflicts and Consensus in Ghana. In: Managing Farmer-Herder Conflicts in the Middle Volta Basin of Ghana

For many years scholars, policy makers and donors have debated whether tenure security, increased productivity and poverty reduction could best be achieved through customary land use arrangements or through state led registration programs. In the first decades after independence many African countries witnessed attempts at land tenure reform through state programs of titling and registration. Disappointment with the effects of these programs combined with the realisation that customary tenure systems are the dominant existing reality, have led to a renewed interest in customary land tenure systems. Issues of equity and security are, however, still of particular concern. This article describes the tendency to describe customary tenure systems in terms of negotiability and flexibility. This is a welcome response to notions of ‘customary tenure as a pre-colonial code of fixed rules’ (Woodhouse 2003: 1712) and corresponding ideas that customary land tenure systems are unable to adopt new institutions and mechanisms for dealing with a changing environment. This article warns, however, for an overemphasis on the negotiability of customary tenure. Generalising the powers of negotiation of local actors in contestations over land obscures the limits to the agency of some people, as arising from the stratification of local communities, and paints an overly positive picture of customary tenure. Such a picture sends a wrong signal to policymakers interested in customary tenure systems, as it allows them to neglect the inherent injustices and to overlook issues of social differentiation and inequality. The recognition of the dynamics and flexibility of customary land tenure systems largely originates within social science research, such as in the works by Berry (1993, 2001), Juul and Lund (2002: 3); Shipton and Goheen (1992: 308-11); and Toulmin, Lavigne Delville and Traoré (2002). Berry (1993; 2001), for instance, describes African land tenure systems as adaptive arrangements, of which the rules have remained ambiguous, and the rights are subject to ongoing reinterpretation. People’s access to land is therefore linked

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Chiefs and farmers : Social capital and the negotiability of rights to land in Ghana

This doctoral thesis analyses the internal migration of farmers from Northern Ghana to Brong Ahafo Region’s agricultural frontier, theorizing this mobility as part of a wider ‘complex adaptive system’ made up of interlinked social and environmental processes. It draws on original qualitative research conducted in three migrant ‘settler’ communities in Brong Ahafo in 2014 in order to investigate local-level migration trends and histories, the relationship between in-migration and changing land tenure norms, and migrant farmers’ perceptions of environmental change at their migration destinations. Each of these research themes provides an entry point for scrutinising the relationship between in-migration and the local ‘social-ecological system’. Finally, the thesis introduces a typology of livelihood trajectories among migrant tenant farmers in Brong Ahafo based on research findings at the three case study sites, which accounts for livelihood differentiation among migrants. 

This thesis thus makes an original contribution to the literature on the climate-migration nexus and to debates about rural development in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the case of the former, much of the current literature on ‘environmental migration’ focuses on the extent to which environmental factors influence out-migration from communities of origin, and whether such migration can be thought of as a form of ‘adaptation’ to environmental change. Debates about rural development, meanwhile, are increasingly preoccupied with understanding rural transformations. This thesis illustrates the need to consider how environmental conditions can affect migrant livelihoods at rural destinations, where livelihoods are often highly sensitive to environmental factors, and to account for how in-migration can serve as ‘feedback’ which contributes to changing social and environmental conditions in such areas. Additionally, the stratified migrant livelihood trajectories encountered at my field sites show the diversity of migrants’ agency, which affects their capacity to adapt to climatic and other shocks in situ as well as to provide support for kin in Northern Ghana.

Migrant livelihoods in a complex adaptive system : investigating the links between internal migration, land tenure, and environmental change in Brong Ahafo, Ghana

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Migrant livelihoods in a complex adaptive system : investigating the links between internal migration, land tenure, and environmental change in Brong Ahafo, Ghana