pastoralist risk management at Egerton University (Njoro, Kenya) and the International

Abstract This paper analyzes the functioning of land rental markets in the Dominican Republic using a new data set collected specifically to characterize the entire market. We analyze the choice of the landlords and the tenants in the search for the optimal partner. We show how insecure property rights leads to segmentation in the tenancy markets along socio-economic group and hence severely limits access to land for the rural poor.

For over 300 years, dugout canoes have been traded within and between ethnic groups in the Mosquitia region of Honduras and Nicaragua. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I describe the development and contemporary dynamics of the canoe trade in order to operationalize, in one particular landscape, recent calls by geographers and anthropologists for greater ethnographic engagement with rural livelihoods. For example, his-torical analysis of the Mosquitia’s canoe trade reveals several unexpected insights into the relationship between remote rural peoples and international capital, including the interaction and co-constitution of local and in-ternational trade circuits through time, how rural producers could manipulate canoe production to take ad-vantage of boom-time trade circuits, and how canoe trading took on added importance during recessionary periods. Analysis of contemporary canoe production among Honduras’s Tawahka Sumu points, in turn, to the economic viability of canoe trading, especially in contrast to cash crop production. Individual producers, how-ever, face a variety of constraints on their ability to benefit from the canoe commodity chain, with young, undercapitalized households facing the largest barriers to canoe production and sale. Reliance on canoe sales can speak to a household’s undercapitalization or to its ability to invest in new opportunities, especially in the form of education for their children. Ultimately, the canoe case study demonstrates how attention to the trade in eve-ryday materialities in remote rural regions can help to envision and operationalize a new form of rural devel-opment, in which endogenous projects and capabilities are foregrounded. Key Words: exchange networks, rural

This paper analyzes the impact of formal property rights on plot use and credit access in 20 communities in Guatemala, and shows how these impacts differ depending on the community conflict context. The paper proposes a new instrument based on detailed information about the geographic location of the plots and historical titling processes to address the endogeneity concerns that are common in the property rights literature. The paper sheds light on whether the effect of land titles on plot use and credit access varies with the prevalence of conflicts and different types of conflict resolution mechanisms. The findings suggest that these factors might be crucial to understand the potential impacts on plot use of possible titling programs.

1 This paper is not a formal publication of the World Bank. Rather, it presents preliminary results of analysis. Citation and the use of such a paper should take account of its provisional character. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors and should not be attributed in any manner to the World Bank, to its affiliated organizations or to members of its Board of Directors or the countries that they represent.

We wish to thank our field team- Carlos Rengifo, Doris Diaz and Jaime Salazar- for their advice, enthusiasm and Herculean effort that made this project possible. Special thanks are owed also to the ribereños of the region who so willingly participated in the long interviews on repeat visits to their homes. This paper benefited significantly from the suggestions of Michael Carter, Jean-Paul Chavas, and Bill Provencher, as well as of seminar participants at the University of California and Wisconsin. It was also made possible by the tireless data cleaning work of Xiaogan Li and

Tropical forests as safety nets? The relative importance of forest product sale as smallholder insurance, Eastern Honduras

I declare that the dissertation is my own, unaided work except where acknowledged. It is

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This paper analyzes the effects of insecure property rights over land on the functioning of the land rental market in the Dominican Republic. It shows that insecurity of property rights not only reduces the level of activity on the land rental market, but also causes market segmentation. A principal-agent framework is used to model the utility maximization of both the tenant and the landlord, where the landlord takes into account the risk of losing the land when it is not traded within a narrow local circle of confidence. Using data collected with a methodology that enables the entire market to be characterized, I show that insecure property rights lead to matching in the tenancy market along socio-economic groups and hence severely limit access to land for the rural poor. The results also show the importance of a minimum endowment of assets to gain access to land in the rental market.