NUMBER 55 / 2007

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

John McCARTHY lectures at the Crawford School of Economics and Government, Australian National University. He carries out research into issues to do with agrarian change, land tenure, environmental governance and natural resource conflict. His main research area is environmental policy and rural development, particularly with respect to Indonesia. He has extensive experience in natural resource management, environmental policy and rural development, and has carried out various assignments with non-government organisations in Australia and Indonesia including AusAID and the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). He is the author of The Fourth Circle: A Political Ecology of Sumatra's Rainforest Frontier. Palo Alto, CA : Stanford University Press, 2006, and co-editor with Carol Warren of Environment and Governance in Indonesia: Locating the Commonweal. London: Routledge Press, forthcoming.

Chris MILLEY is the Principal of Nexus Coastal Resource Management, a small independent consulting and research company that provides research and advisory support in community-based resource management. He is a graduate of Mount Allison and Dalhousie Universities, Canada, holding the degrees of Bachelor of Science, Master of Science (Oceanography), and Master of Marine Management (Community-based Management). He has 10 years’ international development experience in Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America, where he taught and worked on marine resource development and management projects and has also established a multinational fisheries management program in the Caribbean. He also worked for 11 years with a number of Mi'kmaq fishery management projects and organizations.  These included: the Eskasoni Fish and Wildlife Commission; the Mi'kmaq Fish and Wildlife Commission (where he was Executive Director); the Atlantic Policy Congress (where he was a fishery policy analyst); and the Mi’kmaq Confederacy of Prince Edward Island (PEI) (where he was Integrated Resource Management Director). Prior to his move to PEI he worked with the Acadia Band in Nova Scotia as Director of their Fisheries Program.

June PRILL-BRETT is Professor Emeritus at the College of Social Sciences, University of the Philippines Baguio, Philippines. Her anthropological fieldwork has been largely focused on the Northern Cordillera cultures of the Philippines, over the past thirty years. Her research interests in customary law, indigenous resource management and legal pluralism are reflected in some of her publications, such as: ‘Indigenous Land Rights and Legal Pluralism among Philippine Highlanders.’ Law & Society Review 28(3) (Special Issue: Law and Society in Southeast Asia): 687-697 (1994); and ‘Ancestral land rights and legal pluralism: another land reform in the Northern Philippines Highland’, Law & Anthropology 9: 43-71 (1997). She is currently professorial lecturer at the Graduate programme in Social Development Studies, University of the Philippines Baguio, and still actively involved in research on changing property rights and legal pluralism.

Siri Ulfsdatter SØRENG is a researcher at the Northern Research Institute (Norut), Alta, and a PhD candidate at the Centre of Marine Research Management at the University of Tromsø, Norway. Her work focuses on issues of resource management, including coastal zone management, regional development, and legal pluralism in marine fisheries. Her PhD research relates to indigenous rights discourses within coastal fisheries pertaining to the Sami. Recent publications are: ‘Moral discourse in fisheries co-management: A case study of the Senja fisheries, Northern Norway.’ Ocean & Coastal Management 49: 147-163 (2006); (with Arild Buanes, Svein Jentoft, Anita Maurstad, and Geir R. Karlsen) ‘Stakeholder participation in Norwegian coastal zone planning.’ Ocean & Coastal Management 48: 658-669 (2005).

Xuan Phuc TO is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Anthropology at University of Toronto, Canada. For his doctoral degree, obtained from Humboldt University, Berlin in 2007, he conducted field research in the northern upland of Vietnam. He has published Forest Property in the Vietnamese Uplands: An Ethnography of Forest Relations in Three Dao Villages. Münster-Hamburg-Berlin-Vienna-London: LIT Verlag (2007). Currently he is engaged in a project on Challenges of Agrarian Transition in Southeast Asia, and is also associated with the Market and Modernity Research Group at the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto.

Janine UBINK is a Lecturer at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Development of the Faculty of Law, Leiden University, The Netherlands. She studied international law, joined the Van Vollenhoven Institute in 2001, and has recently completed her PhD thesis on ‘Peri-urban land administration: chiefs, state and customary law in Ghana’.  Her publications include: ‘Tenure security: wishful policy thinking or reality? A case from peri-urban Ghana.’ Journal of African Law 51: 215-248 (2007); ‘Land, chiefs and custom in peri-urban Ghana: traditional governance in an environment of legal and institutional pluralism.’ In Werner Zips and Markus Weilenmann (eds.), The Governance of Legal Pluralism. Empirical Studies from Africa and Asia. Münster-Hamburg-Berlin-Vienna-London: LIT Verlag (forthcoming).

Benjamin VAN ROOIJ is a Senior Lecturer at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Development of the Faculty of Law, Leiden University, The Netherlands. He studied Dutch Law and Chinese Languages and Culture at Leiden University, and after a short period in legal practice joined the Van Vollenhoven Institute in 2000.  He gained his PhD there for a thesis on the local implementation of national resource protection legislation in Southwestern China. His current research activities include political law enforcement campaigns in China, pollution regulation in developing countries, developmental lawmaking, and recent trends in law and development studies. He has published: Regulating Land and Pollution in China, Lawmaking, Compliance, and Enforcement; Theory and Cases. Leiden: Leiden University Press (2006). He has edited (with J.M. Otto and J. Arnscheidt), Lawmaking for Development. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (forthcoming), which contains his paper ‘Bargaining about the Land Bill, Making effective legislation to protect arable land in China’.

Melanie WIBER has been a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Brunswick, Canada since 1987.  Her doctoral fieldwork in the Philippine Uplands resulted in the book Politics, Property and Law in the Philippine Uplands. Waterloo Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press (1993). More recently she has worked in agriculture and the fisheries on issues of new forms of property (quota regimes), which resulted in a number of edited volumes and journal publications, including: (edited with Joep Spiertz) The Role of Law in Natural Resource Management. sGravenhage, Waterloo Ontario: Vuga, Wilfrid Laurier University Press (1996); and (edited with Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann) Changing Properties of Property. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books (2006).  Currently she is working on a five year participatory research project on integrated fisheries management involving eight community partners in the Canadian Maritimes.

Werner ZIPS completed a doctoral degree in law at the University of Vienna in 1981, and obtained a further doctorate in anthropology and African studies at the same University in 1989.  He has been teaching and conducting research at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University since 1990.  He has carried out ethnographic research in Jamaica, Tanzania, Ghana and Botswana.  His numerous publications include: Schwarze Rebellen. Afrikanisch-karibischer Freiheitskampf in Jamaica [Black Rebels: African-Caribbean Freedom Fight in Jamaica]. Vienna: ProMedia (1993); (edited with Donald I. Ray) Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and Power in West African Societies. Perspectives from Legal Pluralism. Münster-Hamburg-Berlin-Vienna-London: LIT Verlag (1997); Anthropologie der Gerechtigkeit [Anthroplogy of Justice] in three volumes. Vienna: Universitätsverlag; and many films on topics arising from his anthropological researches.

Manuela ZIPS-MAIRITSCH holds a law degree from the University of Vienna.  She has just completed her doctoral thesis at that University, on the law of Botswana (Bechuanaland during the British colonial period), with particular reference to the San.