Children of Another Land: Social Disarticulation, Access to Natural Resources and the Reconfiguration of Authority in Post Resettlement

Abstract

The breakdown of social order, social disarticulation, is a common impact of population resettlement. This article shows that social disarticulation results from the dissolution and reconstruction of authority through which people gain, maintain, and control access to essential resources in response to changes in the material conditions inherent in resettlement. Resource access—and the relations it implies—is required for long-term autonomy and security. When new patterns or hierarchies of resource control lead to some part of the group being disadvantaged via subordination to others or exclusion from resource enjoyment, resettled villages experience social disarticulation. We explore this access realignment and differentiation process in the case of the resettlement of two natural resource-dependent communities out of the Limpopo National Park in Mozambique.

Keywords:

• Access
• authority
• natural resources
• resettlement
• Limpopo National Park
• Mozambique

Notes

Acknowledgments

We thank the residents of Nanguene and Chinhangane for their support of this work. This article was based on research conducted for a chapter in a Ph.D. thesis written by Jessica Milgroom (Milgroom, J. 2012. Elephants of democracy: an unfolding process of resettlement in the Limpopo National Park, Wageningen University).

Notes

1 In our view, “the ability to benefit from things” also includes human-environment relationships in which “using” land, seeds, water, and other natural resources implies entering into a reciprocal relationship of responsibility, rather than one of unilateral benefit (Corntassel 2008).

2 We prefer Bourdieu’s (1977) approach to capitals. The widespread use of Coleman’s (1988) style of social and cultural capital, e.g. social bonds and bridges or rules of the game, diverts attention from having to recognize and invest in the appropriate material capital, supports far beyond the standard issue brick house or even roads.

3 They imply, but do not state clearly that this renegotiation is “cultural” and thus the changes in access result from cultural change. Clearly the process is dialectical.

Additional information

Funding

This study was made possible by funding from the United States National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the INREF-funded research program "Competing Claims on Natural Resources: Overcoming mismatches in resource use through a multi-scale perspective", Wageningen University, and the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation Group, of Wageningen University.