Browsing by Author "Sikor, Thomas"

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Central and Eastern European Commons
(2006) Sikor, Thomas
"I want to take the liberty and present a rather polemical commentary on the nature of academic and policy debates about Central and Eastern European (CEE) commons. My comments are informed by my knowledge of the scant literature on the topic. They are restricted to rural resource management, as I cannot claim any knowledge of other fields. Nevertheless, I hope that they will help readers put the presentations at the Brescia conference in perspective and appreciate their contributions to an understanding of commons in the region."
The Commons in Transition
(2002) Sikor, Thomas
"The paper analyses the institutional dynamics surrounding common-pool resources in postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe. It is conceived in close conjunction with the case studies reported in the four preceding papers in this series. The purpose of this pa-per is to frame the individual case inquiries, compare the findings from the four plus two additional case studies, and relate those to broader agrarian and environmental changes in Central and Eastern Europe. "The comparative assessment suggests that resource governance has shifted from the previously dominant legal and administrative state hierarchies towards markets. In addition, state power has moved from central governments towards local authorities. The waning and decentralisation of state power has caused the emergence of significant gaps between property legislation and rights-in-practice, which have been particularly stark in weak states. The discrepancy between legal texts and rights-in-practice leads to the exclusion of public and collective interests in favour of private interests in CPR management. It finds its environmental expression in the declining use of water control systems, widespread destruction of water infrastructure, and unfettered conversion of agricultural land for urban sprawl. Thus, the findings attest to the central role of distributive issues in postsocialist privatisation and suggest an additional dimension of distributive conflict: different rights and obligations associated with resources. They also suggest the need for postsocialist governments to be actively involved in the management of common-pool resources for the protection of public and collective interests."
Conflicting Concepts: Contested Land Relations in North-Western Vietnam
(2004) Sikor, Thomas
"In villages of north-western Vietnam land allocation provided a window in which different conceptions of land relations came to light. Villagers resisted the implementation of key elements of the new land legislation, though the new law purported to extend peoples control. Their resistance manifested a fundamental disjuncture between the exclusive and territorial concept of land rights promoted in the new land law and peoples lived land relations. They refused to give up the substance of land relations that had proven useful before collectivisation, under collective agriculture and again in the initial years of decollectivisation. Peoples reactions highlight how post-socialist land reforms provoke their own forms of resistance. Villagers negotiate the reforms in conflicts over resources and authority as well as over the very concept of landed property. This article examines the nature of these conflicts, explores their linkages with socialist and post-socialist land legislation, and relates them to the larger literature on post-socialist property relations."
Conflicting Concepts: Contested Land Relations in North-Western Vietnam
(2003) Sikor, Thomas
"This papers examines land reforms in villages of north-western Vietnam. Land allocation provided a window in which different conceptions of land tenure came to light. Villagers resisted the implementation of key elements of the new land legislation, though the new law purported to extend people's control over land. People's resistance manifested a fundamental disjuncture between the exclusive and territorial concept of land tenure promoted in the new land law and people's lived land relation. People refused to give up the substance of land relations that had proven useful before collectivisation, under collective agriculture, and again in the initial years of decollectivization. People's reactions highlight how postsocialist land reforms provoke their own forms of resistance. Villagers negotiate the reforms in conflicts over resources and authority as well as over the very concept of landed property. This paper examines the nature of these conflicts, explores their linkages with socialist and postsocialist land legislation, and relates them to the larger literature on postsocialist property relations."
Conflicts and Concepts: The Politics of Forest Devolution in Postsocialist Vietnam
(2002) Sikor, Thomas
"In this paper, I examine people's resistance to land allocation in Chieng Dong. In particular, I seek to understand why people resisted land allocation almost in its entirety. I locate people's motivations in cleavages between land relations in the villages and land legislation. My findings suggest that villagers resisted the very concept of land tenure itself contained in the new land law. Their opposition to concrete elements of the land legislation manifested a more fundamental disjuncture between the concept of land tenure promoted in the new land law and people's lived relations to the land. People were not ready to give up the substance of land relations that had proven useful before collectivization and under collective agriculture. Land allocation, its implementation and the reactions it provoked, thus provided a window in which different conceptions of land tenure came to light."
Illegal Timber Logging in Vietnam: Who Profits from Forest Privatization Connected with a Logging Ban?
(2006) Phuc, Xuan; Sikor, Thomas
"This paper examines how forest land allocation and a logging ban influence the distribution of income from illegal timber logging in northern Vietnam. The Vietnamese government implemented forest land allocation in the 1990s, granting rural households legal rights to forest land. At the same time, it issued a logging ban in the early 1990s, criminalizing virtually all timber logging. Yet because of the demand for timber in lowland markets, illegal timber logging still takes place in many upland forests. Using commodity chain analysis, this paper examines the distribution of benefits derived from small-scale illegal logging among various actors as well as the mechanisms creating and maintaining access to timber for those actors. The paper shows that the benefits derived from timber are distributed unequally among different actors along the chain. Villagers and hired woodcutters are the ones who benefit least, in contrast to a village trader, a wholesaler, a number of local state officials, and two 'lawmakers'. These results indicate that forest land allocation may have granted villagers legal rights to forest, but in the presence of the logging ban, the actual distribution of benefits largely reflects actors' control over markets and power derived from state positions."
Institutional Options for the Protection of Open Space: Evidence from Poland
(2003) Wasilewski, Adam; Sikor, Thomas
"This paper seeks to contribute to the development of institutional options for the management of public goods in Central and Eastern Europe. It assesses the potential of different governance structures, including administrative hierarchies, market approaches, and efforts at local non-market co-ordination. The paper examines the management of public goods in Central and Eastern Europe through a study of open space management and urban sprawl in a semi-urban county near Warsaw, Poland. The protection of open space poses significant challenges to semi-urban land management, as its benefits cannot be captured by individual entities and accrue as much to urban residents as to local people. The concrete institutional options investigated comprehend the use of land registers for monitoring land conversion, establishment of land trusts in part financed by a development gains tax, and technical and organisational support for local environmental organisations. The evaluation of options builds on an analysis of causes underlying rapid land conversion in the past decade. The causal analysis demonstrates that privatisation and decentralisation have evoked the radical changes in land use. The demand for housing land motivated farmers to sell semi-urban land, as the state could not enforce its legal oversight over land use. Land conversion was driven by local alliances of farmers eager to 'cash in' on their newly acquired rights of alienation, a broader rural society primarily interested in economic development, and local authorities lured by increasing tax revenues."
Land Allocations in the Vietnamese Uplands: Negotiating Property and Authority
(2008) Sikor, Thomas
"This paper examines what negotiations over property regarding land in Vietnam's uplands tell us about practices and processes constituting authority. The paper proceeds by way of two local case studies on land allocations in a Thai village in the Northern Mountains and an Ede village in the Central Highlands, complemented by a review of published research on land allocations in other upland settings. The results suggest that control over land is volatile due to competition by multiple politico-legal institutions within and outside 'the state'. As people reference their land claims to multiple institutions they connect negotiations over property in Vietnam's uplands with larger processes constituting authority at national and international scales. The processes, in turn, differentiate rural transformations in Vietnam due to variation in historical and contemporary conditions."
Local Outcomes of Forest Devolution: An Assessment Tool for Forest Departments Developed in Vietnam
(2004) Sikor, Thomas; Thanh, Tran Ngoc; Tan, Nguyen Quang
"Devolution programs have generated highly varied local outcomes in terms of changes in forest conditions, local livelihoods, property rights, and governance structures. There is an urgent need to improve understanding of local outcomes as an input into the design of appropriate policy and programs. This paper discusses a tool developed for assessing local outcomes of devolution in Vietnam. The paper describes the social and analytical processes underlying the development of the assessment tool by researchers and decision-makers. Results from its development and application in ten villages in Dak Lak province suggest that the tool provides an effective and feasible way for forest departments to generate relevant information about local outcomes of forest devolution. The tool serves to strengthen the capacity of forest departments to formulate appropriate policy and programs, as they take on new roles in the implementation of devolution and thereafter."
People, Institutions and Agroecosystems in Transition
(2002) Gatzweiler, Franz W.; Hagedorn, Konrad; Sikor, Thomas
"This paper aims at explaining the role and importance of the evolution of institutions for sustainable agrienvironments during the transition process by referring to examples of agri-environmental problems faced in Central and Eastern European countries. It is often stated that the replacement of institutional structures in post socialist countries would bring a unique opportunity to implement new policies and institutions needed to ensure that economic growth is environmentally sustainable. This idea stems from the assumption that the breakdown of the socialist system resembles that (of the Schumpeterian type) of creative destruction - a process that incessantly revolutionizes economic structures from within. However, not all kinds of institutions, especially at local level, can simply be implemented, and even more, not incessantly. Instead, they evolve as a response to ecosystem and social system characteristics, and this is a rather slow process. A central question therefore is whether the required institutional arrangements for achieving sustainability in the area of agri-environmental resource management can be built more easily in periods of transition as they fill institutional gaps, or whether processes of transition make institution building a more difficult and far more time consuming task than previously thought. Above all, we want to find out, how these two processes of institution building at different scales affect the sustainable management of resources such as water and biodiversity in agriculture? It will become clear that the agrienvironmental problem areas faced during transition are complex and dynamic and require adequate institutions both by political design and from the grassroots, to be developed by the respective actors involved. Transition from centrally planned to pluralistic systems has to be considered as a particular and in some respect non-typical process of institutional change. Popular theories of institutional change do not necessarily apply. The privatisation experience from many CEE countries will serve as an example. Finally, we will provide some examples of missing or insufficient interaction between political actors or agencies and people in CEE countries."
Post-Socialist Property in Asia and Europe: Variations on 'Fuzziness'
(2004) Sturgeon, Janet; Sikor, Thomas
"This introduction contextualises the set of articles included in this issue and discusses their contribution to understanding the observed fuzziness of property in post-socialist contexts. Katherine Verdery, among others, has highlighted ambiguity, or fuzziness, as a key feature of post-socialist property relations. Property rights in practice are often quite different from the neo-liberal notion of exclusive, private property promoted in post-socialist property reforms. This introduction highlights the reasons for fuzziness identified in individual articles and contrasts them with the overlapping and flexible property relations reported from post-colonial arenas in Africa and Asia. It concludes that post socialist fuzzy property is similiar to post-colonial ambiguous property relations in many respects. The feature setting the former apart is the lack of routinized rules and crystallized practices of exclusion and inclusion (Verdery 1999: 55). The ruptures caused by large-scale economic, political and cultural trnasformations were rapid and destabilising, throwing property, identity and sozial relations up in the air, and opening up considerable room for manipulation. Local elite found themselves operating in somewhat of a vacuum and quickly asserted control over productive resources or the processes allocating them."
Property, Predators and Patrons in Romania
(2009) Sikor, Thomas; Dorondel, Stefan
"This chapter examines the reasons for new forest owners' frustrations in Dragomiresti and Dragova. How were Rudari able to exploit forests in Dragomiresti even though villagers held titles to the forest, and although there were forest guards and policemen in place to protect private ownership? What allowed the logging firm to take advantage of new owners in Dragova even though the mayor and Forest Inspectorate had the mandate to enforce regulations on its operations? Searching for answers to these questions we come to look at the predatory practices of policemen, forest guards and mayors, as they targeted new owners as easy prey. We also examine their efforts to develop relations of patronage with owners and other villagers. Our account thereby uses insights from earlier research on patron-client relationships. The concept may have dropped out of favor in the more recent literature, but we find certain insights from the literature on patron-client relationships very useful for making sense of forest dynamics in Dragomiresti and Dragova. The insights include the observation that relationships between patrons and clients develop on the basis of unequal power relations. They tend to involve exchanges of economic and political resources, generating benefits for all involved parties even if only nominal in some cases. Moreover, patronage relations are intimately interwoven with the role of the state. Our interest in forest property thus makes us connect with another debate about the nature of the Romanian state, in particular the notion that powerful actors 'capture' the local state.
Realizing Forest Rights in Vietnam: Addressing Issues in Community Forest Management
(2011) Sikor, Thomas; Tan, Nguyen Quang
"In Vietnam, forests have been under state stewardship for a long time. Degradation of forest resources under state management together with the high costs of forest protection has led to increased involvement of local people in forest management. Since the early 1990s, the Government of Vietnam (GOV) has been promoting the allocation of forest rights to local people as the foundation for development of community forest management (CFM). The initiative, known as Forest Land Allocation (FLA), has been undertaken in various parts of the country, with mixed results. This raises an important question: how can forestland allocation be improved so that community forestry can both support local livelihoods and provide environmental protection? With funding from the British Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and RECOFTC--The Center for People and Forests, a small initiative on 'Property Reforms and Forest Rights in Vietnam' was undertaken. The initiative aims to identify key issues influencing the success or failure of community forestry in various parts of the country and to discuss implications for policies on forest management and rural development. The document at hand is a product of a group of carefully selected researchers, policy experts, and practitioners seeking to share their experiences and viewpoints based on previous or on-going work. It is by no means a comprehensive discussion of all the issues related to community forest management in Vietnam. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the issues brought up by the authors in the document will shed light on some of the important aspects of community forest management in Vietnam and can serve as the starting point for further development of community forest management in the new context in Vietnam."
REDD+ Safeguards for Vietnam: Key Issues and the Way Forward
(2012) Sikor, Thomas; Tan, Nguyen Quang
"This brief discusses achievements to date by the Government of Vietnam in REDD+ readiness, issues in the seven safeguards defined by UNFCCC, and the need for a flexible, nationally-owned and inclusive process."