Redistributing land rights is a tricky subject and one that easily becomes controversial as recent experience has shown. This new book calmly examines the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of land redistribution.

Through the prism of a Nepali remittance village, this book critically examines poverty and livelihood dynamics remade through transnational labour migration and remittances, and their interrelationships with land, rural labour and agriculture. The concept of The Remittance Village emphasises rural people’s transnational mobilities as a key feature of contemporary dynamics in many parts of the Global South, which are reconfiguring rural social, economic and ecological textures. Sunam challenges complacent linear narratives that assume new opportunities such as transnational migration, and remittances provide better pathways for the rural poor to come out of poverty, as well as narratives that understate the importance of land and farming for the rural poor. He demonstrates both that new opportunities are inaccessible for many poor people and that accessing these opportunities often engenders increased precarity and vulnerability. In The Remittance Village, he finds that even those accessing new opportunities are successful only when their household member(s) are simultaneously engaged in in-situ (non-)agricultural activities. This book is a valuable resource for scholars and students from a range of interdisciplinary backgrounds, including human geography, anthropology of development, and sociology. It is also recommended reading for policy makers, international development agencies and I/NGOs working on rural development in the Global South. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Securing land rights takes up themes at the centre of socio-political debates throughout the African continent. These relate to national struggles over access to land, land distribution, land rights and security of tenure. Land in much of rural Africa is communally held, a system that provides security of livelihood and a social safety net, but is not immune to appropriation by government or injustices such as the eviction of women from the land on the death of their husbands. This book contextualises Namibia within these debates, highlighting the country's stance in relation to communal land tenure reforms with a focus on the realities of people's lives in north-central Namibia. Leading questions centre on competing ways of ascribing value to land; mechanisms and monetisation of access to land; commercialisation of land use, de-agrarianization and ongoing transformation underpinned by economic and territorial restructuring. These processes have direct impacts on equity in access to land and land distribution, and engender competing visions of land rights. Communal land reform is an uneasy compromise between different processes and interests.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Delft University of Technology, 2004.