Fragmented Property Systems

Property rights and climate migration: Adaptive governance in the South Pacific

“…Second, “custom” may provide a basis for property where all members of a group share expectations of respect to custom. However, the capacity to construct or control narratives of custom, or to exit from customary systems through resort to law, creates absorptive limits for systems that rely on customary mechanisms to manage in‐migration (Fitzpatrick 2016, p. 176). Third, while law or legal order may provide a basis for coordinating property, there are absorptive limits where a state is unable to meet threshold coordination conditions of legitimacy, accessibility, and bureaucratic capacity (Moore 1998; Fitzpatrick 2016, p. 183, Monson and Hoa'au 2014).…”

“…However, the capacity to construct or control narratives of custom, or to exit from customary systems through resort to law, creates absorptive limits for systems that rely on customary mechanisms to manage in‐migration (Fitzpatrick 2016, p. 176). Third, while law or legal order may provide a basis for coordinating property, there are absorptive limits where a state is unable to meet threshold coordination conditions of legitimacy, accessibility, and bureaucratic capacity (Moore 1998; Fitzpatrick 2016, p. 183, Monson and Hoa'au 2014). In all these cases, further increases in numbers and rates of migration create incentives for property claimants to disrupt coordination patterns by asserting new or altered bases for others to respect a property claim (Knight 1992).…”

“…Governance structures for property display distinctive characteristics of self‐organization as a result of dense relational interactions among individual participants over periods of time. For example, a close‐knit community is likely to develop social norms that reproduce perceptions of group identity and appropriate behavior through ritual and intergenerational transfers of learning (Fitzpatrick 2016). As a result, members of a close‐knit community system may respond to migratory pressures in a distinctive manner, not only in terms of linguistic or cultural understandings of property, but also as a result of core concerns for the maintenance of cooperative relations in a self‐organized system (Teubner 1992).…”

“…However, the extent of informal settlements in the Global South highlights the costs of formality requirements, particularly in contexts of mass rural–urban migration. Many settlements classified as informal have been in place for a number of generations (Fitzpatrick 2016, pp. 144–145).…”

The Role of Emotion in Land Regulation: An Empirical Study of Online Advocacy in Authoritarian Asia

“…This reframing is especially useful in understanding Vietnam's land administration system, which involves a complex web of relational interactions between regulators and regulated (Silbey ). It also challenges the assumption in authoritarian polities, such as Vietnam, that only governments can bring order to land administration (Fitzpatrick ; Gillespie ). A regulatory framework leaves open the possibility that land regulation is shaped from “the bottom up” through dialogical interactions between regulators, regulated, and third parties, such as social media bloggers (Black ; Silbey ).…”