Nr. 11 / 2008 | James C. Riddell | Anthropology of Property Rights in Natural Resource: New Trends in a New Century
While the focus of this paper is on Asia, much of the argument is drawn from experiences in rural resource management around the globe. One of the problems in the current discussion of “property” and “property rights” in the development literature is the assumption that we are talking about the same thing when we use the same term to describe what are often very different phenomena. The major change in behavior vis-à-vis property that has resulted from recent globalization of economic relations is the growing agreement on how people contract and transact business in regard to things (land, building, trees, etc.) while the cultural content of what these “things” really “mean” in a sense of property is something that each jurisdiction is still debating among itself. In this sense, property rights per se will probably not play the same role in Asian development that they did in North America. Rather property rights will be formed by the rules of transaction and contract. This helps us to understand how we can have rapid development in China and Vietnam without strong property rights. In this sense, property rights as instituted and practised would be an epiphenomenon of the social relationships of transactions rather than the producer of those transactions.Vollständigen Bericht jetzt abrufen (PDF)
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