Privatizing the Land provides an overview of reforms in the state socialist agrarian systems, especially during the 1970s and 1980s in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Using empirical evidence, the contributors provide a balanced assessment of how agrarian economies performed in different communist countries. The Soviet and Eastern European experience is contrasted with reforms in China, Vietnam and Cuba to provide the first comprehensive account of agricultural restructuring after the collapse of communism in Europe and Asia.

In the United States, private ownership of land is not a new idea, yet the federal government retains title to roughly a quarter of the nation's land, including national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges. Managing these properties is expensive and contentious, and few management decisions escape criticism. Some observers, however, argue that such criticism is largely misdirected. The fundamental problem, in their view, is collective ownership and its solution is privatization. A free market, they claim, directs privately owned resources to their most productive uses, and privatizing public lands would create a free market in their services. This timely study critically examines these issues, arguing that there is no sense of "productivity" for which it is true that greater productivity is both desirable and a likely consequence of privatizing public lands or "marketizing" their management. Lehmann's discussion is self-contained, with background chapters on federal lands and management agencies, economics, and ethics, and will interest philosophers as well as public policy analysts.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

How public land has been stolen from us. Much has been written about Britain's trailblazing post-1970s privatization program, but the biggest privatization of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatization of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land- for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing - has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences? The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done.

This groundbreaking collection offers the first systematic analysis of neo-liberal privatization. Rich case studies reveal both the pivotal role that privatization plays in neoliberalism and innovative opportunities for challenging neo-liberal dominance. Leading scholars in the field shed new light on how property is created, justified, questioned and contested. Investigating the disciplinary, regulatory dimensions of privatization, the authors cover topics as diverse as land reform, fishing rights, and product labels. The anthology questions the dominant view of property as ownership by demonstrating various ways that it is practiced and the surprising outcomes contained in this diversity. Contemporary privatization is remaking nature-society as property. Privatization innovates and proliferates new forms of property such as patents for genetic information, markets for water, and tradable credits for polluting. In so doing, privatization transforms the relationships we have with ourselves, each other, and the natural world.

Over centuries, African pastoralist societies have crafted institutions that enable them to survive in their harsh, semi-arid environment. Effectively managing communally held land has been one key to their success and a cornerstone of their social organization. Over the last two decades, however, a number of pastoralist communities have sought to transform their land tenure systems from communal to private ownership. In Contesting the Commons, Carolyn K. Lesorogol draws on eighteen months of fieldwork and ten previous years of work and residence among the Samburu to ask: What accounts for this challenge to an important, well-adapted, and seemingly highly functional institution? What are the effects of privatization of land on household well-being, individual behavior, and social relations? How can understanding the trajectory of institutional change in this case help us comprehend the dynamic processes of social transformation in general? "Contesting the Commons is one of the best books that I have read on the politics of land and social order in Africa. Lesorogol offers a creative and nuanced approach to questions of property rights and social norms. This is a very impressive addition to the general literature on institutional change." ---Jack Knight, Sidney W. Soeurs Professor of Government, Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis Carolyn K. Lesorogol is Assistant Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Washington University in St. Louis. She was a consultant for the National Science Foundation project, "The Roots of Human Sociality: An Ethno-Experimental Exploration of Economic Norms in 16 Small-Scale Societies," from 2001-2004, and she has also received a National Science Foundation grant and a Fulbright-Hays grant.

"In Defense of Public Lands is a wide-ranging and macro-focused attempt to refute the ideas behind the intellectual and political movements to privatize public land resources in the United States"--