Modelling collective Yawuru values along the foreshore of Roebuck Bay,Western Australia using fuzzy logic

The cadastral model has played a key role in Indigenous dispossession in settler states. Yet, the recognition of Indigenous land rights, which has increased globally since the 1960s, frequently requires Indigenous communities to directly engage with this spatial model. In Australia, native title claimants must use entity-based models of space to delineate their traditional territories during the claim process. They must also engage with planning and development documents which use the cadastral model of space to assert and defend their rights following native title recognition. This is often problematic as Indigenous spatial ontologies emphasise complexity and continuity which is inimical to the ‘crisp’ representations of cadastral space.This study explores the potential of a fuzzy index modelling approach to represent cultural values using a case study from Broome, Western Australia. Sketch mapping, fuzzy index modelling and combinatory techniques were used to produce a model of several cultural values held by the Yawuru community for the in-town foreshore of Roebuck Bay. This model was overlaid on local planning documents to provide the Yawuru community with strategic intelligence for post native title governance. The experience of co-producing this model suggests that such techniques may assist Indigenous communities to engage with settler structures. This implies that policies which fail to extend analytical capacity to interested native title groups as part of programmes of spatial enablement continue to perpetuate historical processes of colonial domination.     

IN THE WAY OF DEVELOPMENT: INDIGENOUS LAND‐RIGHTS ISSUES IN MALAYSIA*

The Malaysian government regards the country's indigenous peoples as “backward” and in need of “modernization.” It aims to assimilate them into the so‐called mainstream society and to incorporate their lands and resources into national and global markets. These policy objectives leave little scope for indigenous groups to pursue their own life projects. Indigenous communities want to share in the benefits of economic development, but they are not prepared to give up their lands, cultures, and identities to obtain them. They have attempted to ward off the negative consequences of development projects by forming advocacy nongovernmental organizations, engaging in various forms of resistance, and seeking redress of their grievances in the courts. Most of all, they want recognition of their rights to land and place. The efficacy of their agency is severely hampered by a battery of repressive laws and by their own political weakness.     

Emerging Geographies of Conservation and Indigenous Land in Australia

International examples of interactions between Indigenous peoples and the new conservation paradigm come mainly from developing countries and suggest divisions over priorities. As a Western settler society, Australia is at a critical time in conservation and Indigenous peoples' rights. Innovative approaches to conservation are promoted. The role and influence of non-governmental organisations is increasing. Indigenous peoples' rights to land are recognised and Indigenous involvement in conservation is growing. Yet, despite Australia being considered a leader in these arenas, particularly the latter, there has been little analysis of the relationship between innovative approaches to conservation and Indigenous Australians under the new paradigm. This paper describes how the spatial manifestations of approaches under the new conservation paradigm and Indigenous land in Australia are creating new geographies. We identify geographies of overlap, dichotomy and absence. The paper identifies research needs into these geographies, including: examining the influence of ‘recognition’ in engagements between conservation and Indigenous Australians; investigating the impacts of approaches under the new paradigm such as scaling-up, territorialism and differing governance structures on Indigenous Australians; and questioning the social responsibilities of the non-governmental organisations towards Indigenous Australians.     

The Retention,Revival, and Subjugation of Indigenous Fire Knowledge through Agency Fire Fighting in Eastern Australia and California

This article explores the potential impact of training and employment with wildfire management agencies on the retention of Indigenous fire knowledge. It focuses on the comparative knowledge and experiences of Indigenous Elders, cultural practitioners, and land stewards in connection with “modern” political constructs of fire in New South Wales and Queensland, Australia, and California in the United States of America. This article emphasises the close link between cross-cultural acceptance, integration of Indigenous and agency fire cultures, and the ways in which knowledge types are shared or withheld. While agency fire fighting provides an opportunity for Indigenous people to connect and care for country, it simultaneously allows for the breaking of traditional rules surrounding what knowledge is shared with whom in the context of Indigenous cultural burning. By highlighting how privilege intersects with ethnicity, class, gender and age, this article demonstrates how greater cross-cultural acceptance could aid ongoing debates on how to coexist with wildfire today.     

Identifying and Preventing Biopiracy in Australia: patent landscapes and legal geographies for plants with Indigenous Australian uses

There are legal and moral imperatives to protect biological resources and the ‘traditional knowledge’ associated with them. These imperatives derive from complex legal geographies: international law (such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol), State and federal laws, Indigenous customary law, codes of ethics and research protocols. This paper reports on a ‘patent landscape’ analysis of patents that refer to Australian plant species for which there is Indigenous Australian knowledge. We have identified several patents of potential new biopiracy concern. The paper highlights the way in which actors can gain private property monopolies over biological resources and associated traditional knowledge, even though there are overlapping sovereign rights and Indigenous rights claims. Regulatory gaps need to be closed nationally to fully govern the diverse human–plant bio-geographies in Australia. Further, Indigenous laws and governance have largely been ignored by these actors. We suggest that the introduction of ‘disclosure of origin’ requirements in patent applications, sui generis Indigenous knowledge protections, the development of biocultural protocols, and a more nationally consistent system for ‘access and benefit-sharing’ are required to ensure more ‘fair and equitable’ use of plants and Indigenous knowledge in/from Australia, and to ensure the recognition of Indigenous rights to knowledge.     

From Dispossession to Compensation: a political ecology of the Ord Final Agreement as a partial success story for Indigenous traditional owners

The recent digging of a new channel for water delivery to expand irrigation in the Ord provides a good opportunity for unearthing the native title agreement that allows for intensification of agriculture there. Initial irrigation development in this north-eastern Australian catchment did not include recognition of, consultation with, or distribution of benefits to Indigenous people impacted by dam creation and land flooding. Forming agreement between those affected by previous dispossessions, and associated accumulation of wealth via mining and irrigation, with those initiating such activities was an important and challenging process. The Ord Final Agreement (OFA), formalised in 2006, came from negotiations between Miriuwung and Gajerrong traditional owners and government and private interests. Through qualitative research, I dissect the context and content of the OFA to identify the strengths and weaknesses therein. While the agreement does allow for co-management of significant land- and waterscapes, it does not provide for Indigenous water rights, showing one instance of loose ends and missing links within the Ord.     

‘The law is not for the poor’: Land,law and eviction in Luanda

This article investigates how an existing two‐tiered land tenure system creates a hybrid space that blurs, and essentially questions and problematizes the boundaries of the formal/informal divide as presented within Angolan political and legal discourses. It showcases how urban formality and informality exist alongside each other in Luanda and how people take recourse to both formal and informal channels in attempts to secure housing, land tenure and livelihoods in the city. Through case studies, the article describes how small‐scale farmers in Luanda's northern municipality of Cacuaco lost their lands to urban development in 2009–10 and the ensuing circumstances in which formal rights and informal land tenure became intermeshed and ambiguous. As the case studies illustrate, a gap exists between the legal code and practice on the ground. This gap is represented in how Angola's postconflict land strategy, with its forced evictions and demolitions of houses and neighbourhoods, often with little or no compensation, is at odds with the Angolan Land Law, which states that land may only be expropriated by the state or local authorities for specific public use and must be justly compensated.     

Sustainability,development and rural aboriginal communities

Aborigines, because of their population numbers and increasing control over land and resources, are crucial to the sustainable development of rural Australia. However, appropriate Aboriginal development requires the replacement of the ‘top‐down’ approaches generally adopted by government agencies by ‘bottom‐up’ approaches reflecting the needs and aspirations of rural Aboriginal people. Past experience demonstrates that Aborigines have faced many frustrations in reconciling these concepts. But some approaches now being adopted in the use and management of Australia's rangelands provide interesting alternatives which may be more generally applicable in enhancing rangeland sustainability. Examples include land‐use practices conducted by Aborigines living in remote homeland centres on their own freehold land, and the diversity of land uses introduced on pastoral stations now under Aboriginal ownership. Broader recognition of the value of these approaches will depend on widespread acknowledgment of the overall worth of Aboriginal land management knowledge in rural restructuring     

MANAGING PLACE AND IDENTITY: THE MARIN COAST MIWOK EXPERIENCE

ABSTRACT. Group identity serves as a mechanism for claiming rights of control and access to land in the United States. Public land managers face myriad identity‐based claims to land in their care. Identity shapes claims that must appear valid within the strictures of a legal system created by a dominant culture to serve its interests. The very form of those systems—of which public lands are a large part—makes possible the expression of particular forms of identity. The story of the Coast Miwok community and the Point Reyes National Seashore suggests that geographical links among identity, landscape, and history are actively constructed through political work and rarely are as obvious as they first appear. Both the formal legal process of federal tribal recognition and restoration and the far less formal Coast Miwok claims to land at Point Reyes National Seashore teach important lessons about neotraditional identity‐based claims to public land.     

A Mâori Sense of Place? ‐ Taranaki Waiata Tangi and Feelings for Place

Mâori attachment to ancestral lands may be viewed in terms of the western concept of sense of place. However, there are certain features of this attachment that require an extension of that idea to include features which are peculiar to Mâori interpretations of land and space. These features include whakapapa, whanaungatanga and ‘uri’‐tanga (generational and familial linkages), wairuatanga and atuatanga (the spiritual dimension relating to godlike ancestors and the unlocking of environmental and human potential), and tûrangawaewae and kaitiakitanga (inherited rights and obligations associated with belonging to a place that claims those with Mâori ancestry by virtue of all the above). This paper draws on data from research into Taranaki waiata tangi and feelings for place in order to discuss features relative to Mâori attitudes to land.     

Pushing the boundaries: the exclusion of disability rights groups from political influence in Victoria

An Australian federal government report ‘Acting against disability discrimination’ (1994) claims that disabled people ‘throughout Australia have organised themselves into a movement which is growing in strength, militancy, numbers and political sophistication, particularly over the last two decades’. The purpose is to determine whether the disabled people's movement has any strength or influence on government in Victoria. Participant observation, focused interviews, and document analysis showed that confrontational disability rights groups remain marginal to the decision making and policy making of governments in Victoria. This is because of their strategies of direct action, staging visible actions to attract media attention and subverting the ‘normal’ use of space, their non-hierarchical structure, lack of direct government funding and their small membership base that includes non-disabled people. Marginalisation may require disability groups to rethink their organisation and means of resistance if they are to gain greater influence in the formal political arena.     

The Relationship between Wellbeing and Indigenous Land,Language and Culture in Australia

A consistent finding in the literature on Indigenous peoples is the importance of the sustainability of land, language and culture. All three are related, with the maintenance of one helping to protect the others. This paper uses a nationally representative, cross-sectional survey of the Indigenous Australian population to look at the factors associated with individual measures of sustainability. Geography matters for those in remote areas who are much more likely to have participated in hunting, fishing and gathering than those in non-remote areas and somewhat more likely to be learning an Indigenous language. However, those in remote areas are somewhat less likely to have participated in Indigenous cultural production. Participation in the mainstream economy is not necessarily a barrier to these aspects of wellbeing as those with high levels of formal education were more likely to speak, understand or be learning an Indigenous language. While important in their own right, such aspects of sustainability also have the potential to directly contribute to narrower measures of social and emotional wellbeing. A positive relationship was found between the sustainability of Indigenous land, language and culture and an Indigenous person's subjective emotional wellbeing.     

Green growth machines? Competing discourses of urban development in Playa Vista,California

Playa Vista is a massive mixed-use development built on coastal wetlands in west Los Angeles. Its land use story illustrates how strategically constructed discourses shape contested urban spaces. Through an analysis of newspaper reporting and government documents, this paper traces how pro-Playa Vista interests changed their growth discourses rationalizing the development between 1979 and 2015. Findings suggest that pro-growth coalitions are resilient when they modify their discourses to negotiate new regulatory and political contexts, specifically pursuing sustainability fixes. They are not dogmatic in their adherence to orthodoxies of private property rights and “highest and best use” of land but rather continually reconstruct growth discourses incorporating enough of the values of their opponents (i.e. “green” values such as growth management and smart growth) that some environmental and homeowner citizens’ groups join the growth coalition, forming a “green growth machine” that not only profitably builds on the land but finances ecological restoration.     

Contesting the Future of Cape York Peninsula

Entrenched contests about the future of Cape York Peninsula's lands, waters and people have for long received national prominence. In the federal arena, this has climaxed with the campaign to overturn the State's declarations on wild rivers. Initially pursued as a means of influencing decisions on the determination of the government in a finely balanced federal parliament, it has been retained as an early test of the survivability of the minority Labor government. The peninsula's prominence is founded on its iconic conservation status and the continuity of Aboriginal occupance of their country, reinforced by the formidable capabilities of Indigenous and conservationist leaders. Contests are characterised by their complexity, durability and intractability. Contests are bedevilled by shifting alliances and schisms within Indigenous and conservationist constituencies. Increasingly potent is the schism between modernist/reformist/regionalist visions of Indigenous futures, forcefully presented by Noel Pearson against more traditionalist/localist visions held by many community leaderships. Other participants, notably conservationists, State politicians and bureaucracies have needed to align their policies around these contested visions. Over the last two decades, policies of State Labor governments have maintained some continuity, being pro-active on conservation goals, selectively supportive of Aboriginal advancement, necessarily passive in the determination of land claims, reactive in the resolution of land tenures and property rights, and inconsistent and ineffectual in conflict resolution and in providing leadership in shaping sustainable, multifunctional futures, attuned to the peninsula's unique challenges and potentials.     

Property and Difference in Nature Conservation

Social science research on nature conservation ascribes enclosures and the consequent evictions and dispossession of local people to unequal power relations. It reveals that the monopoly of power by the state configures new relations between local people and their natural resources, and legitimizes land grabbing. In this paper we build on this literature by engaging two questions. The first question relates to how land tenure regimes enable green grabbing and also configure the participation of local people in nature conservation enterprises. Knowing how land tenure regimes structure the involvement of local people in nature conservation is a necessary step toward an inquiry into the relationship between local people and protected areas. In the second question we ask how historical land tenure allocations enable current configurations of power relations in conservation areas. We use the case study of Mapungubwe on the Botswana‐South Africa‐Zimbabwe borderlands to demonstrate that historical land tenure allocations facilitate land alienation and the marginalization of local people in TFCAs.     

Neoliberalism,Mineral Development and Indigenous People: a framework for analysis

There have been suggestions in recent literature that neoliberalism and globalisation present positive opportunities for Indigenous communities engaging in resource development projects on their traditional lands. This paper will present evidence from preliminary research on the neoliberal restructuring that has endured for those Indigenous communities of Queensland who have engaged with mineral development opportunities. Initial findings indicate that the State has devolved some of its responsibilities to the mining company in relation to Indigenous development and service provision. This paper develops a theoretical and analytical framework to enable an examination of the implications of this voluntary devolution of responsibility for Indigenous development and service provision and questions whether this represents a positive opportunity for Indigenous people in the region.     

EXPLORING MARKET‐BASED DEVELOPMENT: MARKET INTERMEDIARIES AND FARMERS IN CALAKMUL,MEXICO*

ABSTRACT. Market intermediaries play important roles in the development of tropical‐forest frontiers but are often overlooked in the assessment of land‐change dynamics. Consistent with research beyond land‐change studies, intermediaries are found to be a pivotal element in land‐use and land‐cover change in southeastern Mexico. They have stimulated commercial chili cultivation in this development frontier, providing transportation and other services to smallholders who could otherwise not enter the chili market. This role comes at the cost of a near monopoly on chili marketing. The various roles played by these intermediaries, or coyotes, the means by which they operate, and the consequences for smallholders and land use are detailed for the Calakmul Municipality, Campeche, Mexico.     

Residential perspectives: the value of Floodplain‐ buyout open space

This mixed‐methods case study identifies how floodplain property acquisition—a buyout—impacts an urban environment at the neighborhood scale while considering the role of individual residents in formal and informal land‐use decision making. In floodplain buyouts, the reopening of urban space is enabled by federal structural drivers, primarily Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), but it is repurposed as a cultural landscape constructed and produced by individuals. This research explores how residents perceive and ascribe values to the buyout landscape in Lexington, Kentucky. Enabled by federal funds, but left largely to their own devices, residents in Lexington adopted uses, ascribed values, and produced their own land‐use norms in each buyout neighborhood.     

MOZAMBIQUE,NEOLIBERAL LAND REFORM,AND THE LIMPOPO NATIONAL PARK*

ABSTRACT. Central to its transformation from a state‐centered to a neoliberal, free‐market economy, in 1997 the Mozambican state passed a radical new land law that guarantees the rights of individuals and communities to occupy land and transfer land‐use titles, a move seen as necessary for attracting private investment. By comparing how the land law has been applied to the Limpopo National Park and several adjacent villages, I show how it has led to geographically uneven land reform. More specifically, outside the park, the law has enabled the semiprivatization of community lands, in theory protecting community land rights. However, the application of the law within the park has resulted in the further nationalization of this space, which is leading to land dispossession for communities within the park's borders. I thus show how neoliberal land reform is giving rise to a seemingly contradictory type of “neoliberal state space.”