urs geiser

Secure rights to property are vital for people to escape poverty. Such rights enable them, for example, to access and transfer land, borrow money using their house as collateral, graze their animals on common land, use water for irrigation, and collect fuelwood in forests. These rights are often formalised and guaranteed through state law. But attempts to strengthen private- and common-property regimes have not always produced the expected results. Instead, local disputes often arise. This is because these rights are subject not only to government regulation, but also to customary norms and local power relations. Further, rights that are recognised by the government do not by themselves guarantee that people may use a piece of land in a productive way. Pro-poor property reforms must therefore be accompanied by efforts to strengthen legal security and local acceptance by considering customary practices as well. Support for land and labour productivity is also required, as the poor of...

Pakistan has only a meagre amount of forest cover, and that is depleting rapidly, with ineffective governance seen as a major reason. The government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the country’s most forested province, has carried out a series of interventions with financial and technical support from various international donors. These aim to change how forests are governed, making planning and management procedures more inclusive and participatory. But these initiatives have faced many challenges: mistrust and conflicts between state officials and local forest users, unclear forest rights, dominance of customary regulations in many areas, and a lack of economic and developmental incentives.

By the early 2000s, the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach/Framework (SLA or SLF) had emerged as a promising and challenging re-orientation of development research and practice. It also inspired our own research, launched around 2002, in the context of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) North-South, a research partnership network linking research organisations in the South and Switzerland. The present article reflects on roughly eight years of insights gained into this livelihoods focus. It shows that the framework was initially a crucial facilitator of research cooperation across various disciplines, and that it provided, for example, students at the PhD and Master’s levels with a guided approach to analysing the ‘real-life’ problems and opportunities of rural people. Accordingly, the SLF was partly perceived as a new ‘theory’ of rural change and development. Gradually, however, we realised that its strength was limited to a kind of checklist for people-centre...

This article summarises and discusses eight case studies from Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Pakistan, India and Nepal that focus on the everyday realities of decentralisation. It recalls the mainstream arguments favouring decentralisation as a basic human right (i.e. to be able to participate in decision-making) and in a more utilitarian sense (i.e. decentralisation for development). The eight case studies support aspects of the mainstream; however, they also present new insights. To position these insights, the article deconstructs mainstream decentralisation discourses as based on a functionalist ontology, often leading to rather managerial and mechanistic approaches. To contrast such a functionalist position, three critical social science perspectives are introduced: the neo-Marxist view of the hegemonic state (including the notion of subalterns), Scott’s simplifying state techniques, and Midgal’s state-in-society approach. A reading of the case studies in this context highlights t...

The present contribution is an attempt to understand the conditions that impede some households and social groups in securing a decent livelihood by drawing on ‘purported’ facilitating institutions. It is generally agreed that access to livelihood assets is negotiated through institutions. However, the way in which these institutions operate in everyday practice and in specific contexts is less well understood. The four case studies presented here therefore analyse how customary norms and state regulations work. The article argues that a deeper understanding of the working of institutions, which in turn influence who is excluded from and who is entitled to access a particular livelihood asset, also provides a bridge to evidence-based development support.

Emerging from a decade long violent conflict, Nepal, today, is at a crossroads where it is faced with some major tasks to accomplish in the near future– drafting new constitution, addressing democratic deficit and institutionalizing democracy, concluding the peace process and paving the path for socio-economic development of the country. There are fundamental challenges and contradictions about development, and yet the political culture we see has apparently little interest or commitment to development issues. We know where we came from. But we do not sufficiently know where we are going. We live in a contested time. This book “Contested Development in Nepal: Experiences and Reflections” focuses on the contested issues and debates in the changing dynamics of Nepal’s development and politics. It highlights the contestations in development from the viewpoints of actors and institutions, strategies and approaches, and the roles they played in manifesting conflict and post-conflict chal...

Der vorliegende Artikel lokalisiert sich in der Debatte um das Verhaltnis von Menschen zu ihrer (bio-physischen) Umwelt.1 Auf analytischer Ebene interessiert die Frage, wie es zu Handlungsfolgen kommt, welche der Umwelt Schaden zufugen, im normativen Sinne, wie dies vermieden werden konnte. Als Beispiel einer Begegnung von Mensch und Umwelt wird die Nutzung von Land fur Land- und Forstwirtschaft oder Viehhaltung diskutiert.2

... Naseem Javed, Ayaz Khattak, Alamgir Gandapur, Abdullah Khattak, Iqbal Syal and Ghazi Marjan, guided by Khalid Sultan (Secretary Environment, NWFP) and Muhammad Abbas Khan (Minister Environment NWFP), Forest Vision—2025 (Peshawar: Government of NWFP, 2002 ...

In recent years, the Forest Department of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan–with the technical and financial support from various bilateral and multilateral donor agencies–has been active in reforming its structures and procedures towards inclusive forest governance. This move is reflected, amongst others, in sustainability and participation-oriented legislature (forest policy, forest law), in the re-organisation of the department, and in the introduction of Joint Forest Management (JFM) procedures. This ...