Towards a Theory of Claim Making: Bridging Access and Property Theory

Abstract

This article proposes a framework for studying and understanding how people make claims to land and other natural resources. We argue that a focus on claim-making practices of actors (individuals, groups, institutions, companies, the state), and the processes of appropriation, accessing and contestation that come along with it, best responds to Sikor and Lund’s call to examine “the grey zone” between access and property. We identify and discuss three practices of claim making: “grounding claims” is the practice of inscribing or altering the landscape with visible markers connoting ownership; “talking claims” is when speech is used strategically to make, justify and contest claims; and “representing claims” is when claims are represented on material objects (maps, title deeds) that are detached from the resource. We contribute to debates on enclosure, large-scale land acquisitions and resource grabbing by providing a lens of claim making through which these processes can be conceptualized.

Keywords:

• Claim making
• access
• property
• theory
• land
• natural resources

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Patrick Meyfroidt, Amy Poteete and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments during the preparation of this article. We are grateful to Rodd Myers and Jesse Ribot for inviting us to contribute to the Access Revisited special issue.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Busse and Strang build on Rose’s (1994) ideas of “acts of possession”, which will be discussed below.

2 Legal pluralism refers to the coexistence and interaction of multiple normative or legal orders with different institutions and authorities and different sources of legitimacy within a single social setting (Griffiths 1986).

3 Their use of the term “access” is different from “access” in access theory. Ostrom and Schlager use it to denote “simple access”, i.e. “the right to enter a defined physical area and enjoy nonsubtractive benefits” (1996, 131), as in having the right to hike in a forest reserve but without having the right to harvest forest products (Schlager and Ostrom 1992).

4 For example, the time to construct a fence, the money to pay for the barbed wire and the social relationships to organize a working party.

5 The term “commons” creates a lot of confusion. Commons’ enclosure is generally taken to mean the conversion of common property into individual property, suggesting a transformation of one property regime into another rather than a change from access to property. While this might be the case in some instances, it is not generally applicable. For one, not all commons (forests, grazing lands, fisheries, etc.) are controlled and managed as common property (Bromley 1992), and for some commons such as the atmosphere it is difficult to control access and we rather talk about open-access regimes (Ostrom and Ostrom 1977). Therefore, when it comes to commons and enclosure we find it more useful to focus on how actors claim resources as their own (property) that they previously used and shared with others (access to the commons), and highlighting how this happens through the exclusion, dispossession and loss of access of former users, processes Blomley (2007) rightly emphasizes in his study on the English enclosures.

6 Based on cases from the text, this table illustrates how the three claim-making practices may be configured for different actors (individuals, groups, institutions) and natural resources. It also shows for each example how the claim manifests and which grey-zone process or dynamic it reveals.

Additional information

Funding

This article builds on Angela Kronenburg García’s PhD research, which was funded by MaGW Social Sciences, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research [grant number 400-05-146] and through a grant from the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds. Angela received support for writing this article from WOTRO Science for Global Development [grant numbers: W07.45.102.00 and W01.65.332.00] and from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program [grant agreement: 677140 MIDLAND].