Property Taskforce is commited to studying and confronting the barriers individual property rights pose to indigenous sovereignty, ecological governance, and political freedom.
Africa
Structural Adjustment Programs | Africa | Central America | South America | Asia | Global
The Destructive Agrarian Reform Policies of the World Bank
Submitted by shiri on Sat, 2006-10-28 19:12.
This report is the beginning of my education on the relationship between the WB and private propertization schemes. The most damning report I've read so far is George Caffentzis' "Tale of Two Conferences," which is also posted on this website. Caffentzis accuses the WB of responding to the worldwide revolts against Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) by pushing common property arrangements as a way of controlling indigenous resistance. However, this report on the destructive agrarian reforms of the WB focuses mostly on the sale of land, rather than on the promotion of common property as a subversive method of propertization. These methods are described here in this excerpt from the report:
Structural Adjustment Programs | What is property? | Privatization and Propertization | The Colonial State | Africa
Property as Privatization in Asante
Submitted by shiri on Fri, 2006-10-27 23:19.
Sara Berry's article on Asante, Ghana highlights the centrality of propertization to the agenda of privatization (“Tomatoes, Land and Hearsay: Property and History in Asante in the Time of Structural Adjustment.” World Development. 25:8, pp. 1225-1241, 1997).
The problem of the article is framed by what seems like a bewildering turn-around of international lending institutions – first, through SAPs, they pushed for market liberalization, and now they are pushing for firmer state controls and regulations -- in particular getting the state into land enclosures and privatization. Berry contends that both actions are undertaken in order to promote "Democracy," i.e. "agricultural productivity" and "sustainable development," but both strategies of imposed property rights regimes fail to address the real issue: “Calls for privatization continue, despite accumulated evidence that transfers of ownership do not necessarily transform patterns of resource management” (1226).
Tragedy of the Commons | Africa
What was the power of Hardin?
Submitted by kev on Thu, 2006-10-26 08:13.BOOK REVIEW
Pauline E. Peters. Dividing the Commons: Politics, Policy, and Culture in Botswana. Charlottesville; London: University Press of Virginia, 1994.
Pauline Peters' book provides a fascinating, Foucauldian historicization of communal land in Africa, brilliantly marking out the ways that the British enclosures and ‘improvement’ discourses shaped land tenure policies in the colonies.
Peters also has a particularly insightful take on Garrett Hardin, placing him in the broader context of the rise of rational choice theory and neo-classical economic models.
