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CURRENT RESEARCH:
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Governance, Land Use and Resource Rights in Southern Africa: Paths toward Grassroots
Democratization Funded by UF Research and Graduate Programs Seed
Fund (2006-2007)
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Southern Africa is at the leading edge of the devolution of
wildlife resource rights to private and communal landholders. We study the linkages between resource
rights and democratization on the one hand, and with economics, land use
change and environmental sustainability on the other. We seek to identify the conditions under
which devolution of governance leads to genuine democratization. We address
this through the lens of land use and resource rights. We contend that
devolution of land use and resource rights will encourage democratization
and economic freedoms, contributing simultaneously to poverty alleviation,
improved governance and environmental sustainability?
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Infrastructure Change, Human Agency, and
Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems
Funded by National Science Foundation
(2005-2009)
.[Roadies interdisciplinary group on UF
campus]
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New roads bring complex
changes to regions, including ecological degradation, social conflict, and economic
development. We focus on human agency as it relates to livelihood decisions
and resource use. We examine how
these factors not only respond to new infrastructure, but also lead to
ecological and institutional changes that in turn generate feedback effects
that impact human well-being. Using an interdisciplinary complex systems
framework we focus on social-ecological systems as integrated wholes via
the interface of infrastructure and land tenure. We draw on the concept of
resilience, a property of complex systems, and reformulate it in terms of
system components, relationships, innovations and continuity. This gives us a means of observing system
properties relevant to the retention or loss of system identity. The research focuses on a global biodiversity
hotspot in the southwestern Amazon where Brazil,
Bolivia and Peru
meet.
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Inside the Polygon: The Efficacy of Community Tenure in the
Western Property Paradigm.
Funded by
John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (2004-2007)
..[Barnes,
Ankersen, Mueller, Ruppert]
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In this project we examine the historical
evolution of communal land tenure in western legal systems, and its
development into a formal tool to address contemporary development,
conservation and human rights interests.
At the same time, we contrast this against indigenous and/or
traditional community-based land tenure systems. In focusing on the nexus of these two
property traditions we are able to better understand the dynamics of these
complex social-ecological systems through a focus on land and resource
tenure. Through several case studies
in Latin America we analyze the extent to
which communities are embracing or adapting property law and technological
innovation to their own needs, and developing the means and capacity to
record increasingly complex information.
From this we draw conclusions concerning the adaptability and
resilience of community tenure arrangements within the dominant western property
paradigm. Ultimately, our goal is to
expand current property and tenure theory to embrace a more nuanced
understanding of community property arrangements in light of technology and
other external drivers.
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Development of Rapid, Affordable Property Surveying
Methods using GPS in Developing Countries
Funded by
USAID, World Bank, DANIDA, U Wisconsin Land Tenure Center and others
(1994-)
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Beginning in the early 1990s development banks like
the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) began to make more
funding available for large property formalization projects in LAC and
elsewhere. This funding, and the
corresponding demand for property formalization, led to a huge demand for
boundary surveying as almost every project included a component for
adjudicating and surveying large numbers of parcels in rural areas. These countries were therefore faced with
a sudden need to survey massive numbers of parcels within a relatively short
period of time, typically 4 to 5 years.
Conventional surveying approaches for rural parcels would not meet
the time and cost constraints posed by these projects. In addition, since these projects were
often aimed at poorer rural land holders, who were mostly occupying low
value land, the cost of a conventional survey could actually exceed the
value of the parcel in rural areas. There was therefore a huge demand for
an alternative methodology that was less costly and more efficient.
In this research we have used sub-meter accuracy
GPS as the basis for developing a rapid and cost-effective methodology for
cadastral surveying in developing countries. We have tested and
demonstrated this methodology in Albania,
Peru, Belize, Nicaragua,
Trinidad and Tobago and Bolivia.
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Recent
Projects:
Maintenance and Sustainability of
Property Formalization and Land Administration Systems.
Partial funding through Land Tenure
Center (St. Lucia) (2003-
)
..[Barnes, Griffith-Charles]
Modeling Feasibility
and Impacts of Water Transfer in Florida
using Linear Programming and GIS.
Funded by SNRE
(2003-2004)
..[Barnes, Hildebrand, Jones, Fraisse, Tripathi]
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Back to Barnes Webpage
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