Browsing by Author "Van Acker, Frank"

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Of Clubs and Conflict: The Dissolvant Power of Social Capital in Kivu (D.R.Congo)
(2000) Van Acker, Frank
"The central interest of this paper is to look at how the dynamic interaction of the attributes of polity, community, and natural resources during a period of intense change in a society affect the institutional framework and one of its main emanations, the property rights system. The central argument is that social capital as the cement of the concept of community, contrary to what is generally considered, can be an important dissolvant factor in the process of unraveling common property structures. To clarify this, the endowments of social, natural, physical, and human capital are brought to relate to entitlements to resource flows in a dynamic framework that households navigate by exchanging different sorts of capital. In this process, the nature of rapid institutional transition is relevant, in that it determines the utility of capital held. This theoretical framework will be applied to a case history of commonly held land in Congo's conflict-ridden Kivu provinces. "In general, a situation in which community governs ecological systems held in common, is presented as a win- win situation. In other words, it allows a more Pareto-efficient allocation of use rights. The social capital embedded in this community is then implicitly assumed to be a uniform public good, non-rival and non-exclusive. This framework however fails to account for differences in power. Our argument here is that at the micro-level at which households exist, social capital acts as a club good, an imperfect public good that allows exclusion. "In Kivu, the land tenure system evolved to function as the main integrative focus of society. Its basis was a hierarchical network of social relations of patronage and dependency, that allowed to spread economic risk and realize economies of scale. Land was held in common but governed as a club good. The place in the structure determined entitlements, with limited social mobility. Failure to acknowledge dependency signified exclusion from the benefits of the structure. "Following Congo's independence, the increasing heterogeneity of markets, and participants and interests present in them, was facilitated by the introduction of a land law that recognized individual ownership rather than use rights, without according any legal status to land held in community structures. The resulting haziness in the legitimacy of reference frameworks allowed political actors to capitalize the rents present in the traditional land tenure structure, and thereby destroy the concommitant social relations and mechanisms that allowed to pool risks and realize economies of scale. To do so, these political actors manage to erode the utility of the social capital embedded in these structures by drawing on the social capital embedded in the informal networks that surrounded the president. The traditional chiefs played a key role in facilitating this process, as they occupied strategic places in both types of networks. "Without arguing that Kivu's tumultuous history bears a linear relationship to these changes, the paper argues that the potential for conflict was greatly enhanced by a hybrid system of property rights, in which legal norms contradicted cultural norms."
Taken for Granted: Conflicts over Cambodia's Freshwater Fish Resources
(2000) Degen, Peter; Van Acker, Frank; van Zalinge, Nicolaas; Thuok, Nao; Vuthy, Ly
"Cambodia ranks fourth among the world's top freshwater capture fisheries with an annual production of 300,000 400,000 t. Fish is an important part of food security in the country, especially for the rural poor. A household survey (1995/6) representative of 4.2 million people in central Cambodia found an average fish consumption rate of 67 kg/capita/year. "For about a decade, Cambodia has also been undergoing a period of rapid institutional transition from a communist to a capitalist economic regime. The backdrop to this transition is the government's professed ambition to create an equitable rural development. Nevertheless, after a period of 15 years during which access to fishing grounds was governed by collective schemes, an auction system determining exclusive use rights for two years was reintroduced to govern access to the most productive parts of the Cambodian fisheries domain, the fishing lots. Many of these lots consist of large areas of floodplain containing flood forest habitats essential for feeding and breeding of many species. Each lot has a 'burden book' which contains the specific management program indicating timing and spatial arrangements of the fishing operation. "Outside the fishing lots, the so-called open-access areas, are under increasing pressure from people in search of a livelihood. Almost 95% of the people in Cambodia survive from agriculture and fisheries, and population growth outpaces the growth of job-creation outside of the agricultural sector. The elementary needs of a growing rural population in conjunction with the absence of well-functioning regulatory institutions have resulted in falling fish catch rates per unit of effort and increased conflicts over and with fishing rights. "Rural households depending on the fishery for livelihood and subsistence have been losing out at the expense of politically and economically more powerful users (often using weapons to assert their interests). In the long term, a badly managed fishery engaging an increasing number of users that seeks short-term benefits, will negatively affect the recruitment capacity of fish stocks and enhance income and wealth disparities in Cambodia's rural areas. "The strategy being developed to provide solutions to these conflicts and stop the decline in fish catches, aims at environmental sensitization of resource users and broadening participation in the management of fishery habitats. The 'community' in its traditional sense as a spatially small, socially homogeneous, and normative unit seems to be too limited as an institutional framework for addressing fisheries co-management. The 'community of users (co- managers)' comprising strategic actors such as lot concessionaires, national and local authorities, military and militia groups, and small scale fishers, is interacting in a dynamic way frequently bypassing the limitations of formal institutions, and creating de facto new institutions to fulfil their interests. "With these considerations in mind, a process of enhancing transparency and communication oriented towards the needs of protecting critical fishing habitats is proposed to lead to a stronger and more focussed institutional framework allowing for broader participation of local users in protecting habitats and benefiting from its yields."