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Competing Claims on Disputed Lands: The Complexity of Resource Tenure in the Nicaraguan Interior

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Anja Nygren
Anja Nygren*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri-Columbia
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Abstract

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This essay analyzes the complexity and contradiction of resource-tenure regimes on tropical forest frontiers by drawing on a case study carried out in the department of Río San Juan, southeastern Nicaragua. The main attention is given to competing claims over productive resources and to contradictory relationships between the diverse modalities of resource control. The resource struggles emerging in Río San Juan are analyzed in the context of larger political-economic and socio-legal processes to understand the wider relations of politics and power that affect local resource access. The main goal is to reveal how control over resources is defined and contested in the everyday reality of legal pluralism where multiple legal orders intersect in people's lives, and where the conflicts over whose law applies, and who gets what resources and why, have increasing significance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , 2004 , pp. 123 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

This essay draws on research financed by the Academy of Finland. I am grateful to the people of Río San Juan and to the many ministries, development institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Nicaragua that cooperated with my field research. I am also grateful to the Universidad Centroamericana and the School of Natural Resources at the University of Missouri-Columbia for providing logistic support. Sandy Rikoon and the anonymous reviewers of this journal provided helpful comments on previous versions of this essay. Of course, I remain solely responsible for any errors of facts or interpretation.

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