The concept of ‘entitlement’ is constructed by Amartya Sen in terms of legal property rights that map commodities or resources onto individual owners.
This paper addresses some conceptual difficulties of applying the entitlement approach to contexts such as common property regimes, where overlapping institutions or groups of individuals all exert valid claims over a single resource endowment, and where claims on resources are socially sanctioned rather than legally enforceable.
Property rights are deconstructed into de jure ownership and de facto control, access and influence. These rights are asymmetrically distributed within social institutions such as communities and households, following complex eligibility and prioritisation rules.
Sen’s ‘cooperative conflict’ model is adapted from the ‘new household economics’ to explain the increasing stratification within rural African communities associated with commodification of land rights. These theoretical arguments are underpinned empirically by case studies drawn from conflicts over land in Namibia. The key policy conclusion is not to clarify ‘fuzzy’ property rights by privatising natural resources, but to support the positive features of common property regimes, while minimising the discrimination and tenure insecurity that women and marginalised groups within rural communities invariably face.
Authors
