I recently interacted with two foundational reads on the concept of ‘enclosure’ or partly known as enclosure within the praxis of community and indigenous communities' involvement in the present conservation efforts. The negative associated impacts of forced enclosure of lands on the communities involved, especially the unseen, unregistered persons who had from the dawn of civilization dwelt in the given areas and hence called the place their home befits the title – ‘The Tragedy of Enclosure”. The tragedy of enclosure occurs when the public-owned land or property is subdivided to private or public interest groups while ignoring some factions, and as such, pushing those who are assumed not to belong to enclosed groups to the periphery of economic resource sharing or ownership. The enclosure is founded on the principle of division of the property to make the most use of it as individual entities. The World Bank land reform opined that using land for commercial and agrarian purposes is more useful as this would lead to more utilization and increase utility by improving the general productivity by optimizing technologies.

Under this praxis, the World Bank market-assisted reforms sought to readjust the market demand and supply, by reducing the supply and, as such, aiming to reverse the demand for land (Hardin, 1968). The impact of this measure was the tragedy of enclosure; the commonly held land was subdivided into small paddocks, with each individual interest group from farmers to developers having control over a given land. The tragedy of enclosure is demonstrated by enclosing land from public access and reversing common land ownership. While this is aimed at correcting the tragedy of commons, it occurs in a non-developed society or in a society with pastoral communities used to common landowners. The consequence of enclosure was the inequitable allocation of land resource to commercial interests both in the agriculture and conservation capitalists.

Among the Q’eqchi of Guatemala, the tragedy of enclosure is noted in the continued distress that this pastoralist group experiences. This is because the highlands were enclosed for agricultural use and taken by foreign coffee farmers who appropriated the land for commercial use. On the other hand, the Q'eqchi people were further pushed to the low forests of Southern Belize and Northern Guatemala. While they aimed to find a lasting solution by migrating to these areas where they would tend to their herd uninterrupted, they would find themselves pushed further to the lowlands as the frontier cattle ranchers enclosed the land, and as such, it was illegal for the Q'eqchi pastoralists to graze their flock on the restricted areas. In addition, the rise of conservationism as an enclosure mechanism aim at reversing the detriments of the tragedy of commons – which Hardin argues is the depletion of the economic resources due to a reckless use, rendered the Q'eqchi people to be in a new conflict with the environment (Hardin 1968; Grandia, 2012). They were termed as intruders and a threat to biodiversity. On the other hand, their aspects of survival as a people who had existed in a fair balance with nature was impugned as they had little land to graze their crops. This disapproves the concept of the enclosure as a method of solving the tragedy of commons as it only acerbates inequality in a society that had erstwhile been more equal (Grandia, 2012).

Further, in the modern commercial enterprise where global commercial interest groups and market players are interested in land utility and resources, the tragedy of enclosure is becoming more pronounced (Grandia, 2012). As it occurs, even among the maize cultivating farmers among the Q'eqchi find themselves further pushed from the markets as commercial interest farming groups such as large-scale coffee farmers and cattle ranches widen their enclosure on land as they purchase land from the poor maize farmers which disapproves Hardin’s thesis of enclosure as solution to tragedy of commons. All this is in a bid to reverse the tragedy of commons, which in reality is mostly a capitalistic economic concept aimed at punishing those who use common resources (Grandia, 2012). While the World Bank measures and global market interests as anticipated by the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) and the Puebla to Panama Plan (PPP) are being attained, the enclosure of land has worse effects on the communities that were used to common land use – and were enclosed from the capitalistic competition which often leads to resource depletion which justifies Grandia’s critique.

References

Grandia, L. (2012). Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle, and commerce among the Q’eqchi’Maya lowlanders. University of Washington Press.

Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons: the population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality. science, 162(3859), 1243-1248.