Suchergebnisse

AbstractGovernments across Central and Eastern Europe have enacted agri‐environmental legislation over the past decade. This paper explores how the legislation has played out in practice, using property as an analytical lens to examine the social dynamics surrounding agri‐environmental problems. The analysis proceeds by way of three case studies on irrigation management in Bulgaria, biodiversity conservation in the Czech Republic, and the preservation of open space in Poland. The findings highlight the discrepancy between the legal rights accorded to land owners and their rights‐in‐practice. Land owners contest the constraints imposed by agri‐environmental legislation through strategies ranging from avoidance to open violation. They also counter the goal of environmental protection by invoking competing social values. The material and symbolic contestations form new sets of regulations blurring the boundary between public oversight and private rights delineated in agri‐environmental legislation.

The paper analyses the institutional dynamics surrounding common-pool resources in postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe. It is conceived in close conjunction with the case studies reported in the four preceding papers in this series. The purpose of this paper is to frame the individual case inquiries, compare the findings from the four plus two additional case studies, and relate those to broader agrarian and environmental changes in Central and Eastern Europe. The comparative assessment suggests that resource governance has shifted from the previously dominant legal and administrative state hierarchies towards markets. In addition, state power has moved from central governments towards local authorities. The waning and decentralisation of state power has caused the emergence of significant gaps between property legislation and rights-in-practice, which have been particularly stark in weak states. The discrepancy between legal texts and rights-in-practice leads to the exclusion of public and collective interests in favour of private interests in CPR management. It finds its environmental expression in the declining use of water control systems, widespread destruction of water infrastructure, and unfettered conversion of agricultural land for urban sprawl. Thus, the findings attest to the central role of distributive issues in postsocialist privatisation and suggest an additional dimension of distributive conflict: different rights and obligations associated with resources. They also suggest the need for postsocialist governments to be actively involved in the management of common-pool resources for the protection of public and collective interests.

The literature on post–socialist transformations displays a fairly broad consensus that changes in macro structures of state and economy generate or increase rural inequality. This article examines the distributional effects of macro changes in Vietnamese villages. Findings from local–level research highlight the multiple ways in which people react to changes in macro structures. Core fields of negotiation by local people include exchange relations, the use of surplus, and land tenure. Local negotiation may lead to local–level trajectories of agrarian change that differ significantly from national–level changes. Changes in macro structures thus may not substantially alter the underlying process of differentiation. Rural people may be rich and poor for the same reasons as under collective agriculture, though income differences may have become more accentuated.

A human rights-based agenda has received significant attention in writings on general development policy, but less so in forestry. Forests and People presents a comprehensive analysis of the rights-based agenda in forestry, connecting it with existing work on tenure reform, governance rights and cultural rights. As the editors note in their introduction, the attention to rights in forestry differs from 'rights-based approaches' in international development and other natural resource fields in three critical ways. First, redistribution is a central demand of activists in forestry but

The Politics of Possession investigates how struggles over access to resources and political power constitute property and authority recursively. Such dynamics are integral to state formation in societies characterized by normative and legal pluralism. Includes some of the latest theoretical work on the dynamics of access and property and how they are joined to questions of power and authorityExplores how access to resources is often contested and rife with conflict, particularly in post-colonial and post-socialist countriesOffers a thought-provoking approach to the study of everyday processes.

In Vietnam, villagers involved in a REDD+ (reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) pilot protect areas with rocks which have barely a tree on them. The apparent paradox indicates how actual practices differ from general ideas about REDD+ due to ongoing conflict over forest, and how contestations over the meaning of justice are a core element in negotiations over REDD+. We explore these politics of justice by examining how the actors involved in the REDD+ pilot negotiate the particular subjects, dimensions, and authority of justice considered relevant, and show how politics of justice are implicit to practical decisions in project implementation. Contestations over the meaning of justice are an important element in the practices and processes constituting REDD+ at global, national and local levels, challenging uniform definitions of forest justice and how forests ought to be managed.

This article examines the political economy of illegal logging through a case study from Vietnam. The study examines the extraction and trade of a particular timber species through commodity-chain analysis and looks at national-level debates about illegal logging, corruption, and the state. Its findings suggest that central government concerns over authority and public discussions about corruption informed the criminalization of much logging. Criminalization provided the grounds for powerful wholesalers, brokers, and government officials to engage in the timber business and control the timber trade. The logging operations, in turn, fed back into the concerns of the central government and public. The article concludes that these interactions between local political economy and national politics may be a more general dynamic of illegal logging. A singular focus on law enforcement may serve neither local livelihoods nor forest protection in areas with smallholder extraction.