The Legal Environment and Incentives for Change in Property Rights Institutions

Hamilton‐Hart, Natasha

doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.12.002

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…This position aligns with the work on legal pluralism that addresses how multiple systems of rulemaking may co-exist within the same territorial jurisdiction (Hamilton-Hart, 2017;Tamanaha, 2008). In light of this, interrogating the interactions between statutory and customary rights is central to understanding how formalisation and related natural resource governance reforms are likely to influence patterns of benefit and control.…”

Section: Assessing the Impact Of Formalisation On Access To On-farm Tmentioning

confidence: 73%

Illegality and inequity in Ghana’s cocoa-forest landscape: How formalization can undermine farmers control and benefits from trees on their farms

Hirons

McDermott

Asare³

et al. 2018

Land Use Policy

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Schemes to promote sustainable forest management have increasingly focused on addressing widespread informalities in timber production, based on the presumed links between formalisation, the maintenance of forest cover and local welfare. This trend is typified by the EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative and associated Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPA) aimed at eradicating the trade of illegal wood between partner countries and the EU. Yet there is concern that such initiatives might have detrimental impacts on the largely informal rights of local resource users. In order to inform the formalisation agenda, more detailed analysis of the operation of local rights, and how they might be affected by particular schemes is required. This paper focuses on Ghana as a country with a largely informal wood sector that has signed a VPA with the EU for the express purpose of rapid formalisation. Our analysis is guided by a framework for assessing which types of rights might be transformed by particular approaches to formalisation and the subsequent effect this might have on forests and people in particular local contexts. We then apply this framework to an in-depth local case study of on-farm timber governance within a cocoaforest landscape in Ghana's Central Region to examine how the operation of formal and informal and substantive and procedural rights shape who controls, and benefits from, on-farm timber production. We then analyse the content of the VPA in light of these local realities and assess its potential impacts. Our findings highlight how the substantive rights the state grants to companies are presumed to be balanced with the granting of procedural rights to farmers via the mechanisms of right of refusal to harvest on-farm timber, compensation for damage to cocoa crops and the negotiation of community-level Social Responsibility Agreements with private companies. Yet a comparison of these formal rights with farmers' existing informal rights reveals that farmers' control and access to benefits from trees on their farms are notably higher in the 'illegal' chainsaw dominated informal sector than in the 'legal' state-based system. Farmers choose to maintain trees on farms both to shade cocoa and in anticipation of benefits from their informal sale. The VPA, however, aims to eradicate all informal on-farm timber production and thus threatens existing local rights and benefit capture while diminishing incentives to maintain trees on farm. Rather than further criminalising local systems of timber governance, the maintenance of tree cover and local benefit-sharing would be better served by 1) phasing out timber concessions on farmland, 2) abandoning the distinction between planted and native trees on farms and, 3) understanding, recognizing and respecting the existing informal rights of farmers, traditional authorities and chainsaw loggers to negotiate among themselves patterns of access and control of on-farm trees and timber. In general, the case study challenges the assertion that fo...

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Section: Assessing the Impact Of Formalisation On Access To On-farm Tmentioning

confidence: 73%

Illegality and inequity in Ghana’s cocoa-forest landscape: How formalization can undermine farmers control and benefits from trees on their farms

Hirons

McDermott

Asare³

et al. 2018

Land Use Policy

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“…The issues of legal environment imperfection, insufficiency of legal ways to protect business, which are the reasons for informal political protection, are also discussed. Moreover, political resources are used both to protect business and to redistribute property (Hamilton-Hart, 2017), which can only generate such threats to business as unfriendly and criminal mergers and acquisitions. The articles mentioned show that it is possible to rise to these challenges only if an appropriate regulatory framework is created and the principle of mandatory implementation of its provisions is observed (Maung et al, 2019).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interdependence Logic Of Economic Security And Investment Attractiveness Of The Enterprise

Skvortsova¹

2021

European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences

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“…A detailed study of institutional decay in Southeast Asia's resource rich states, for example, shows how political powerholders reinterpreted governing rules and made incremental changes to state agencies and policies in response to increases in potential resource rents in the timber industry (Ross, 2001). Similarly, a theorized account of institutional change in the broad property rights regime governing land rights in Southeast Asia's palm oil industry shows how actors may, under particular circumstances, shift their preferences towards either legal, rulebased property rights institutions or more particularistic ones (Hamilton-Hart, 2017). In such accounts of institutional change in East Asia, the starting context, including the formal and informal rules structuring business-government relations, remains an important factor structuring incentives for change, pointing to both path dependence and agentic action.…”

Section: Institutional Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Institutions under pressure: East Asian states, global markets and national firms

Hamilton‐Hart

Yeung

2019

Review of International Political Economy

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Institutions across East Asia are in flux as a result of market pressures and political shifts. Some changes have been adaptive while others appear to erode institutional capacity. This framework article introduces the Special Issue, developing an analytic synthesis of scholarship on institutional capacity and change. We focus on the role of markets and firms in bringing about different types of institutional change, and the reconfiguration of state roles to meet new challenges. Accounts of institutional change increasingly focus on incremental institutional change and specify different endogenous processes through which it occurs. We show that changes in the way markets are structured, or market shifts, are important sources of institutional change in East Asia. Such market shifts operate in different ways and geographical scales. They can alter actor preferences with regard to institutional form, produce a shift in the relative political influence of different actors, and prompt institutional 'drift'change in the functionality of institutions due to changed circumstances. Both states and firms play a role in these changes. As the case studies in the collection show, states and firms in the region have both reacted to contextual shifts in markets and proactively led institutional change.

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The Legal Environment and Incentives for Change in Property Rights Institutions

Cited by 9 publications

References 38 publications

Illegality and inequity in Ghana’s cocoa-forest landscape: How formalization can undermine farmers control and benefits from trees on their farms

Illegality and inequity in Ghana’s cocoa-forest landscape: How formalization can undermine farmers control and benefits from trees on their farms

Interdependence Logic Of Economic Security And Investment Attractiveness Of The Enterprise

Institutions under pressure: East Asian states, global markets and national firms

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