Social institutions and access to resources

Abstract

Opening ParagraphFor over a decade African economies have been plagued by recurrent food shortages, economic decline and growing disparities between the living standards of rich and poor. To a large extent food shortages and rural impoverishment may be attributed to external shocks—world recession, oil price shocks, deteriorating terms of trade and mounting debt service obligations—compounded in the 1970s and early 1980s by drought and war. In addition government policies have exacerbated the effects of adverse environmental and world market trends, aggravating rather than alleviating food shortages and depressing rural output and incomes.

Decentralization and local institutional arrangements for wetland management in Ethiopia and Sierra Leone

“…A burgeoning body of work by social scientists has focused on the notion of 'institutions' as a social practice in relation to natural resource management (Berry, 1989;Leach, Mearns, & Scoones, 1999;Mazzucato & Niemeijer, 2002;Mehta et al, 1999;Uphoff, 1992). Although the term 'institutions' can refer to the organizations involved in natural resource management, in this context the concept is employed in a wider sociological sense to refer to 'regularised patterns of behaviour between individuals and groups in society' (Leach, Mearns, & Scoones, 1997: 5), and also links to other groups and individuals at higher and lower levels.…”

Policy Discourses on Women's Land Rights in Sub–Saharan Africa: The Implications of the Re–turn to the Customary

“…A significant contestation in current policy discourses is between those who describe multiple claims in land as a bundle of rights that are hierarchically ordered, in which some are primary and some secondary (especially the distinction between claims to cultivate, or otherwise use, as against claims to alienate, or otherwise control), and those who, while arguing that there are multiple claims, reject the core distinction between primary and secondary claims and their hierarchical ordering. These latter authors stress instead the negotiated dynamic and fluid nature of the tenure relations and tenure claims and treat their socially embedded nature in radically different ways (Falk-Moore 1975;Berry 1989;Okoth-Ogendo 1989;Moore and Vaughan 1994;Lavigne-Delville 1999). …”

Renegotiating Boundaries

“…As actors struggle to benefit from the productive use of natural resources, they make use of a range of social, economic, and legal mechanisms. Legal frameworks, institutional power, group membership, social or ethnic identity, social status, the dynamics within a resource-controlling group, access to the state, to capital, to material resources, to customary authority, to markets, to knowledge and the ability to use institutional mechanisms are all factors that affect the process of gaining access to resources (Berry 1989;Ribot 1998;Ribot and Peluso 2002).…”