The term "access" is frequently used by property and natural resource analysts without adequate definition. In this paper we develop a concept of access and examine a broad set of factors that differentiate access from property. We define access as "the ability to derive benefits from things," broadening from property's clas- sical definition as "the right to benefit from things." Access, following this definition, is more akin to "a bundle of powers" than to property's notion of a "bundle of rights." This formulation includes a wider range of social relationships that constrain or enable benefits from resource use than property relations alone. Using this fram- ing, we suggest a method of access analysis for identifying the constellations of means, relations, and processes that enable various actors to derive benefits from re- sources. Our intent is to enable scholars, planners, and policy makers to empirically "map" dynamic processes and relationships of access.

A Theory of Access.

The paper proposes that reports of pervasive competition and conflict over land in sub-Saharan Africa belie a current image of negotiable and adaptive customary systems of landholding and land use but, instead, reveal processes of exclusion, deepening social divisions and class formation. Cases of ambiguous and indeterminate outcomes among claimants over land do occur, but the instances of intensifying conflict over land, deepening social rifts and expropriation of land beg for closer attention. More emphasis needs to be placed by analysts on who benefits and who loses from instances of ‘negotiability’ in access to land, an analysis that, in turn, needs to be situated in broader political economic and social changes taking place, particularly during the past thirty or so years. This requires a theoretical move away from privileging contingency, flexibility and negotiability that, willy-nilly, ends by suggesting an open field, to one that is able to identify those situations and processes (including commodification, structural adjustment, market liberalization and globalization) that limit or end negotiation and flexibility for certain social groups or categories.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2004.00080.x

Inequality and Social Conflict Over Land in Africa

We construct a simple model where political elites may block technological and institutional development, because of a ‘political replacement effect.’ Innovations often erode elites’ incumbency advantage, increasing the likelihood that they will be replaced. Fearing replacement, political elites are unwilling to initiate change, and may even block economic development. We show that elites are unlikely to block development when there is a high degree of political competition, or when they are highly entrenched. It is only when political competition is limited and also their power is threatened that elites will block development. We also show that such blocking is more likely to arise when political stakes are higher, and that external threats may reduce the incentives to block. We argue that this model provides an interpretation for why Britain, Germany and the US industrialized during the nineteenth century, while the landed aristocracy in Russia and Austria-Hungary blocked development.

Economic Backwardness in Political Perspective

This article offers a critique of framing perspectives on collective action discourse and an alternative dialogic approach. The argument set forth is that the latter sees collective action discourse as a joint product of actors' agency and discourse dynamics, including its multivocal nature. Such discourse is a joint product of challengers' rational actions and the constraints of the discursive field. Challengers seek to appropriate and subvert the dominant discourses that legitimate power, creating discursive repertoires. To illustrate this, the contentious actions of English cotton spinners in the 1820s and 1830s are analyzed. The spinners produced a discursive repertoire drawing on mill owners' dominant discourses.

The Talk and Back Talk of Collective Action: A Dialogic Analysis of Repertoires of Discourse among Nineteenth‐Century English Cotton Spinners

The questions at the centre of this article are: who profits from commercial forestry, and how? Through access mapping with commodity chain analysis, this study examines the distribution of benefits from Senegal’s charcoal trade and the multiple market mechanisms underpinning that distribution. Benefits from charcoal are derived from direct control over forest access, as well as through access to markets, labour opportunities, capital, and state agents and oAcials. Access to these arenas is based on a number of inter-related mechanisms including legal property, social identity, social relations, coercion and information control. A commodity chain is the series of relations through which an item passes, from extraction through conversion, exchange, transport, distribution and final use. Access mapping involves evaluating the distribution of benefits along the chain, and tracing out the mechanisms by which access to benefits is maintained. It sheds light on the limited role of property, the embedded nature of markets, and the role of extra-legal structures and mechanisms in shaping equity and eAciency in resource use. It does so in a socially situated, multi-local manner, spanning the geographic spread of production and exchange. It also illuminates the practical issues surrounding establishment of community participation in benefits from and control over natural resources.

/pdf/theorizing-access-forest-profits-along-senegal-s-charcoal-7w2dfo4w8a.pdf

Theorizing Access: Forest Profits along Senegal's Charcoal Commodity Chain

Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837

(1976). Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 4, No. 10, pp. 225-225.

Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act

(1976). Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 4, No. 6, pp. 135-135.

Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966

Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony

Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule: Ellis, Steven G.: New York: Addison Wesley Longman 437 pp., Publication Date: November 1998

Stuart E. Prall

Papers

Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837

Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act

Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966

Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony

Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule: Ellis, Steven G.: New York: Addison Wesley Longman 437 pp., Publication Date: November 1998