Posted by Huaitoa While I agree that such an elaborate ownership concept is useful in promoting community acceptance of development proposals, I dont think that the argument that land is owned by communities and tribes is true. In fact there is no such thing as community ownership of land in this country but even if such kind of ownership is perceived, they should be of little relavance when it comes to the process of land acquisition for development purposes. In our various island and rural communities, there are always people and individuals who own land, every single piece of land. The only land that is close to being community owned are the lands where our villages are built but this is only because years of community use of these lands have helped abrogated real ownership. In some villages, land ownership remain very clear. Even lands that are known well in communities to be owned by familiies and tribes, what I would call the central ownership of land is rested on figure-heads and certain individuals and family heads and it is not common at all to have situations where ownership is vested on entire communities in their entire right. The elaborate system of customary land which make land appear to us as owned by community is merely through land usage and free access to land. In families and tribes, ownership of land is clearly rested on individuals who will passed this own to their immediate sibblings. The rest of family members own the same land but only through usage and free access to the same land. As long as these lands remain customary, this system of ownership remain widely accepted and when it comes to any wider general use of these lands within customary use, individuals who carry the ownership of these lands will have the final say. As we all know, development requires direct ownership of land. I believe that it is not impossible to carry out development within our various ways of owning land under customary practice. The problem with development though is that while they stand to take away land usage and land access which has been the basis of land ownership for the rest of families and tribes and communities in some cases, the benfits of such development can only be determined through direct ownership in which case, they will acrue to the true land owners as identified within communities and even families. If we are going to do something about land in order to encourage development, what we need is introduce a system and laws that emphasised land ownership as understood by communities and families, a system that must also put into proper context ownership through usage of and access to land. In this way, benefits may be acrued to "owners" as determined through customary land ownership. The good thing about this is that benefits can be distributed under a fixed system and laws other than through committees and the determinations of figure-heads and so called family leaders which can easily be overshadowed by greed and internal disputes.
on 9/7/2003, 9:48 pm
One reason we continue to use to try and explain the difficulty of carrying out development in this country is that our land is customary-owned. By this we mean that lands in this country are largely owned by families, tribes and even communities.
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