By the end of 2007, the world’s urban population had outnumbered the amount of people living in rural areas. Urbanization is expected to increase strongly in the developing world over the coming years, most of it through informal ways of accessing land and housing. In the initiatives of governments and donor organizations to deal with these developments, the concept of tenure security features increasingly prominently. It is inter alia expected to encourage investment in housing improvement, facilitate access to public services such as gas, water and electricity and also to make formal credit available. There is, however, no consensus as to what tenure security exactly means or how it is to be established. In the present paper, development policy based on establishing tenure security through land titling is critically examined and with the emphasis on urban informality in Latin America, an alternative concept of tenure security is proposed. |
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Tenure security in de informele stad in Latijns AmerikaWanneer recht en realiteit uit elkaar lopen |
Tijdschrift | Recht der Werkelijkheid, Aflevering 01 2009 |
Auteurs | Jean-Louis van Gelder |
SamenvattingAuteursinformatie |
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De fictie van de constitutieOver de maatschappelijke functie van ontwerp-denken |
Tijdschrift | Recht der Werkelijkheid, Aflevering 01 2009 |
Auteurs | Olaf Tans |
SamenvattingAuteursinformatie |
This contribution seeks to explain our commitment to the ambition to establish constitutional government, given the fact that this ambition appears to be unsuccessful. As for the latter, it is argued that the constitutional ambition is unsuccessful in that it is based on the idea of legal closure, whereas the practice of constitutional decision-making shows a continuous failure to establish such closure. To explain why political communities are nevertheless drawn to the constitutional ambition, this contribution defends that the idea of the constution as a governing normative framework functions as a useful fiction. This fiction, so the argument goes, facilitates a certain kind of public debate that enables political communities to express their collective identity. |
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RookverbodenSurfen op golven van een veranderende maatschappelijke norm |
Tijdschrift | Recht der Werkelijkheid, Aflevering 01 2009 |
Auteurs | Heleen Weyers |
SamenvattingAuteursinformatie |
Like surfers, legislators … who wish to change everyday social norms must wait for signs of a rising cultural support, catching it at just the right time... (Kagan and Skolnick 1993: 85) The empirical study of the relation between the way a law comes into being and its effectiveness in practice is an underdeveloped subject in the sociology of law. In this article this relation is studied with respect to smoking bans in the Netherlands. The focus is on private companies in general, with special attention for Dutch cafés, bars, hotels and restaurants (where such a ban was recently introduced). Dutch smoking bans in private establishments were only enacted after the government was convinced of public support and after a period of selfregulation. This proved to be a good preparation. The general picture of the relation between the emergence and the effectiveness of smoking bans in Dutch hotels, restaurants etc. is much the same. However, there is one sector - bars, pubs and the like – in which the smoking ban has encountered problems. In this sector a fourth of the establishments refuse to comply. A question addressed in this article is whether the legislator acted too precipitously with respect to this sector. This is obviously the case: there is less public support for smoking bans in such establishments and there had not been a preparatory period of selfregulation. |
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Constitutioneel bewustzijn in Nederland:Van burgerzin, burgerschap en de onzichtbare Grondwet |
Tijdschrift | Recht der Werkelijkheid, Aflevering 02 2009 |
Auteurs | Barbara Oomen |
SamenvattingAuteursinformatie |
Faced with increased individualization, debates on immigration and interna-tionalization, the Dutch government has recently appointed a Constitutional Review Commission to strengthen the Dutch constitution and enhance its social relevance. It is against this background that this article examines the place that the Dutch constitution currently holds in empirical and discursive understand-ings of citizenship in the Netherlands. From the vantage point of citizenship discourse, the interpretation of citizenship (burgerschap) in the Netherlands amongst policy-makers and the public at large hinges on civicness rather than on democratic citizenship, and departs from a strongly assimilationist perspec-tive: ‘burgerschap’ is essentially about participating in and adapting to the dominant culture. From the vantage point of the constitution, the current consti-tution’s main function is legal: constituting government powers and limiting their exercise. Legal scholars emphasize that the Dutch constitution hardly has a more symbolic or social role. These facts are contrasted with data from a representative survey under the Dutch adult population, which demonstrates how the Dutch hardly know anything about the contents of the constitution, but do have great confidence in the document, and consider it to be very important. Interestingly, respondents also emphasize the symbolic and societal function, in addition to the legal function of the constitution. This seems to point towards the possibility of an understanding of Dutch citizenship more firmly based upon the values embodied in the constitution. |
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In blijde verwachting?Een analyse van de oordelen van de Commissie Gelijke Behandeling over zwangerschapsdiscriminatie |
Tijdschrift | Recht der Werkelijkheid, Aflevering 02 2009 |
Auteurs | Kirsten Bolier en Nienke Doornbos |
SamenvattingAuteursinformatie |
In this article we report on our research which aimed to investigate which fac-tors influence the outcome of pregnancy discrimination cases of the Dutch Equal Treatment Commission (CGB) and the compliance of respondents with this outcome. We studied equal treatment legislation and all 188 cases between the period of September 1994 and March 2008. The results show that equal treatment legislation hardly leaves any room for objections raised by the re-spondents. The arguments made by the employers are often based on financial or other business-related burdens, even though these arguments are legally irrelevant. We assume that the strictness of the legislation might cause the lack of willingness to comply with the outcome. This presumption is confirmed by the fact that the legal representatives of employers put forward these irrelevant arguments as well. Furthermore, the results show that the nature of the relation of the applicant with the respondent has an influence on the compliance of the respondent with the outcome. Respondents are more likely to comply in cases where the applicant is already working for the employer instead of applying for a job. The results also show that non-profit organizations are more likely to comply with the outcome than profit organizations. |
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Over de instabiele betekenis van staatsburgerschap, staatloosheid en juridisch vreemdelingenschapNederlandse politieke vertogen over de burger- schapsstatus van 'postkoloniale' burgers |
Tijdschrift | Recht der Werkelijkheid, Aflevering 02 2009 |
Auteurs | Guno Jones |
SamenvattingAuteursinformatie |
This article demonstrates how Dutch politicians have in- and excluded people from the former overseas Dutch colonies in/from the Dutch legal and imagined community, against the backdrop of decolonization and increased migration to the Netherlands. Political discourses by members of the Dutch Government and Parliament in the wake of World War II demonstrate the contingent meaning of Dutch citizenship of people in and from the (former) Dutch colonies of Indone-sia, Suriname and the Dutch Antilles. These discourses not only illustrate that formal Dutch nationality as such can proof to be an uncertain status that can be lost. They also illuminate how politicians have redefined the meaning of Dutch citizenship of people from the colonies (who remained Dutch citizens) in con-nection with discourses on their identities. As a consequence, their rights of free migration and settlement in the Netherlands were problematized, both symbolically and via policies. However, Dutch political discourses and related policies are also characterized by instances of partial inclusion of legal aliens and stateless people from the former colonies who lost Dutch citizenship, often to compensate for political injustices in the past. Agency by postcolonial citi-zens played an important role in bringing about these changes. In sum, formal citizenship, statelessness and legal alienage turned out not to be stable predictors of positions in Dutch society: their meaning was and is constantly mediated by power relations. |
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Social Dominance and Cultural Consensus: The Case of the Bakiga-Banyoro Conflict in Uganda |
Tijdschrift | Recht der Werkelijkheid, Aflevering 03 2009 |
Auteurs | Rafael Wittek en Jonelle Armstrong |
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Death and Resurrection of Anthropology of Law. Introduction to the Special Issue |
Tijdschrift | Recht der Werkelijkheid, Aflevering 03 2009 |
Auteurs | Wibo van Rossum en Anita Böcker |
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Potent Relatives. Ethnic Relations and Exclusive Rights in Kalimantan |
Tijdschrift | Recht der Werkelijkheid, Aflevering 03 2009 |
Auteurs | Laurens Bakker |
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Chiefs and Farmers: Social Capital and the Negotiability of Rights to Land in Ghana |
Tijdschrift | Recht der Werkelijkheid, Aflevering 03 2009 |
Auteurs | Janine Ubink |
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Reconsidering Conflicts over Land in the Sahel as Conflicts over Power |
Tijdschrift | Recht der Werkelijkheid, Aflevering 03 2009 |
Auteurs | Karin Nijenhuis |
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Law and Ideology in Indigenous Governance. Access to Land in Lomerío, Bolivia |
Tijdschrift | Recht der Werkelijkheid, Aflevering 03 2009 |
Auteurs | Michiel Köhne |
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Communal Land Tenure and Development, is there a Future for Official Legal Pluralism? |
Tijdschrift | Recht der Werkelijkheid, Aflevering 03 2009 |
Auteurs | André J. Hoekema |
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The Process of Interlegality in a Situation of Formal LegalPluralism: A Case Study from La Cocha, Ecuador |
Tijdschrift | Recht der Werkelijkheid, Aflevering 03 2009 |
Auteurs | Marc Simon Thomas |
Auteursinformatie |