Ethics Conference 2010

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Retracing Our Ecological Footsteps: Customary foundations for sustainable redevelopment
Odote, Collins
The discourse on property rights has been intractable and part of Kenya’s socio-political history since the advent of colonialism. At the heart of the debate lies the relationship between western approaches and views on property and African traditional approaches. Colonialism brought with it, British legal order. African customary practices and rules were largely replaced with these new western rules, based on the underlying philosophy that traditional modes of property and natural resource management were inimical to sustainability. This conclusion was arrived at as a result of the assessment that African customary modes of property regulation was based on open access, a regime without any protection of property rights, one that led to what Garret Hardin famously referred to as the Tragedy of the Commons.