Land Tenure Center Newsletter
Number 80, Fall 2000, p. 2
The Director's desk can be an amazingly interesting place to sit. I never know what is going to come in over email or who will be on the end of the phone or at my door. What is clear, though, is that committed and engaged people involved with land issues in quite varied parts of the world, often end up considering how the Land Tenure Center can be involved with them—much as we here at the Center are constantly thinking about the relationship of land issues to changing socioeconomic and environmental circumstances worldwide.
During this last six months alone, a Development Studies alumnus returned to Madison, visited the Center, and raised the possibility of a project in North Korea on the future of state-owned agricultural lands (see page 9, this issue), the U.S. State Department elicited our participation in a high-level roundtable discussion on the relationship of land reform to political transformation in Zimbabwe (page 8), Wisconsin’s U.S. Senator Russell Feingold sent an official from his office to seek ways to make good use of LTC’s Africa expertise (page 8), and, as the feature article of this newsletter shows, our relationship with colleagues in Fiji allows us to make available new information and analyses.
In this issue, LTC researcher Malcolm Childress (page 12) ponders a future for land tenure research. This is a constant challenge for the Center: to rethink and explain the relevance of our work. LTC was founded in the early 1960s; how is it still relevant for the 21st century? The simple answer is that land will never not be central to people around the world. In 1999 the very first act of the new Scottish Parliament was to deal with land problems that have been smoldering for 900 years, and a recent news article quoted Polish protestors marching on their Parliament about land restitution and redistribution as saying, "There is no freedom without ownership." While the answers to land issues differ depending on where and when they occur, these issues are ever present and ongoing.
Copyright © 2000by Land Tenure Center and Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin. All rights reserved.
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