With the rise of joint management of protected areas, community representatives are increasingly involved in formal negotiations with state officials, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other actors. Policy recommendations have commonly idealized “win-win” scenarios. Theoretical work on negotiation from psychology and management studies, however, points to identifiable circumstances under which the goal of a mutually beneficial “win-win” situation may limit the strategies, and ultimately the benefits, available to communities. Instead, an antagonistic, “distributive” approach to negotiations may be more compatible with the pressures on and strategies available to community representatives. The tensions between a “mutual gains” and “distributive” approach to negotiations are evident in two land claims on protected areas in South Africa: the Dwesa-Cwebe Nature Reserves, and the Pafuri Triangle, a portion of Kruger National Park. In each, NGOs that operated with a “mutual gains” strategy, espousing a “win-win” scenario, came to be perceived as collaborating with conservation agencies. Meanwhile, as negotiation theory would suggest, community representatives inclined towards a “distributive” strategy and allied with a second set of explicitly advocatory NGOs. Expecting that communities should embrace a “win-win” scenario from the outset is unrealistic and likely to reduce communities’ power in negotiations.

A focus on institutional norms and rules gives an incomplete picture of rural land tenure; building an account of local practice from specific cases reveals nuances and variations that are otherwise elusive. Following the latter approach, the paper describes so-called 'communal' tenure in southern Hobeni, a community in Xhora District, in the Transkei region of the Eastern Cape Province. A practice-based approach reveals significant variations in tenure practices, related to the kinship composition of local neighbourhoods. In areas where a few families are numerically predominant, agnatic kinship is the primary means for access to land. In areas that are diverse in their kin composition, other ties (for example, friendship, church membership, common employment, etc.) are used as a basis for access to land. The demographic variation underlying these practices appears to be widespread in communities in the Eastern Cape and beyond, suggesting considerable diversity within the workings of 'communal' tenure. These variations reinforce the need for tenure reform to be responsive to local conditions, and for any new land tenure institutions to be downwardly accountable to those who inhabit, use, and make decisions regarding access to land.

This paper examines population changes around the Dwesa-Cwebe Nature Reserve in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, in light of Wittemyer et al. (2008a)’s argument that migration is leading to disproportionate population growth around protected areas. Migration to, and within, rural areas of South Africa reflects both migrants’ diverse motives and the limits on movement created by socially-embedded land tenure systems, not simply an aggregation of populations around areas with potential livelihood attractions. At the 10 km resolution used by Wittemyer et al., contradictory trends are evident, related to long-standing livelihood differences and changes in rural-urban migration that accompanied the end of apartheid, and expansion of other rural population centres. At a finer resolution (2–4 km), the paper describes some small scale population movement toward the Nature Reserve, primarily attributable to the reversal of apartheid-era evictions, driven more by uncomfortable situations in the resettlement area than any attractions of the Nature Reserve. In conclusion, the paper raises broader questions about the causal claims in Wittemyer et al.’s analysis, given its lack of attention to local and regional political economic factors and the demography of migrant streams.

Post-1994 land reform policies have had limited effects on land use in the communities surrounding Dwesa–Cwebe Nature Reserves in South Africa’s Transkei region. Likewise, prior state interventions have largely been resisted and ignored. Instead, community-driven processes, influenced by the regional political economy, have shaped diverse patterns of changes in land use. These relate to the diverse livelihood styles in the area: different patterns of education, labor migration, and consumption have affected local use of land and forest products. Activities planned under land reform, however, may threaten local control of land tenure and use.

Drawing on fieldwork that incorporates ethnography and archival land research, this dissertation investigates the transformation of land into property in Hawai’i and its continued impact on the development of Hawaiian landscapes and communities contemporarily. On the windward side of the North Shore of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, residents have been fighting against the threat of commercial and urban development for decades. Through interviews with key community leaders, I describe the origins of the current grassroots anti-development movement that started in the 1970s, when protestors first organized around the protection of Native Hawaiian and non-Indigenous farmers being threatened with eviction to make way for urban development. The colonial and foreign influence on the privatization of property in the 1850s had set into motion legal practices of land dispossession that continue to impact the contemporary land struggles over development on the North Shore today. I demonstrate that the adoption of Western legal attitudes towards the productive capacity of land and property ownership is what has allowed for affluent prospectors to amass large estates over time, resulting in the immense loss of Native Hawaiian-held kuleana properties to powerful developers through processes of anticommoning. With this dissertation, I conduct a novel analysis of the ways in which this legal doctrine is inherently unsuited to address both real and intangible non-Western patterns of property distribution, thereby creating both land and resource insecurities characteristic of a tragedy of the anticommons. In conclusion, I argue that these practices ultimately undermine residents’ decision-making power over the direction of their community and their ability to resist unwanted development interventions in the future.