Property & Community

Before coming to Clark, I spent almost 10 years working on land tenure and property rights issues and programming. The weekly seminar topics in this course resonate with that professional experience and my current research and practice. ID 229 is an upper level undergraduate course, also cross listed at the graduate level.

Course description: Property is not a thing, but a social relation.

Social relations are the business of natural resource conservation, gender equality, resettlement and reconstruction, and urban and community development. Questions relevant to a "social relations theory of property" have captured attention of policy makers, scholars and development practitioners. Where does "ownership" originate in different societies? How did the rise of the market and the spread of colonialism redefine property relations around the world? Under what conditions and with what success do different property systems (statutory and customary tenure) coexist? How can women’s rights to land and assets be strengthened and what are the implications should they be? How do statutory and customary land use planning and law influence land use outcomes (conservation or exploitation)? What are the natural resource management and potentially gendered consequences of different land tenure and property rights interventions? What are the dimensions of ‘security of tenure’? This course introduces students to land tenure and property rights as a cross cutting theme in development and humanitarian assistance. The readings are global and comparative in scope.

Students will learn the key concepts and terms of land policy and land tenure administration. While I update the course every time I teach it, seminar topics have included:

  • Sustainable Forest Management: The Commons, Social Institutions & Collective Action

  • Women's Land Rights

  • Collective land tenure regimes

  • Land and Legal Empowerment

  • Land Tenure, Resilience and Post-disaster Reconstruction

  • Strengthening Land Tenure Security through Boundaries: Surveying, Mapping & Certifying Land Rights to reduce conflict and improve land use management

  • Post-conflict land restitution and resettlement

  • Housing Security and Urban Upgrading

  • Land Relations and the Politics of Belonging

  • Land Justice and Urban Gardening in the United States (we will read the book, Freedom Farmers)