GEOG Seminar 10/19: Robert Heilmayr, "Who benefits from individual rights over indigenous lands? Evidence from the Mapuche"

Join us for our weekly seminar on Thursday, Oct. 19  from 3:45-5 p.m. on Zoom!  Dr. Robert Heilmayr from the University of California, Santa Barbara, will discuss his paper about the long-term impacts of individual property rights on the material conditions of the Mapuche, the largest indigenous group in Chile.

Individual property rights can improve economic efficiency but may simultaneously expose marginalized groups to dispossession. His research quantifies the long-term impacts of individual property rights on the material conditions of the Mapuche, the largest indigenous group in Chile.

Dr. Heilmayr leverages a spatial discontinuity in courts' capacity to divide reservations between 1931 and 1951 as an instrument for the allocation of individual property rights. By 1951, reservations assigned to high-capacity courts were 74 pp more likely to have been divided, transitioning from a system of usufructuary rights over communally-held titles to private ownership of land.

Over the following three decades, individual property rights led to a dramatic decline in Mapuche control over land, while simultaneously improving the efficiency of labor and land use. We show that these changes led to increases in the average material conditions of Mapuche households, both within former reservation areas, and among Mapuche descendants who had migrated to other parts of Chile. However, descendants from reservations exposed to the greatest risk of dispossession experienced net declines in material conditions, indicating that dispossession has had a multi-generational impact on many Mapuche households.

Speaker: Dr. Robert Heilmayr is an assistant professor in the Environmental Studies Program and Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Zoom Info: Please reach out to sjwee@umd.edu, yuema@umd.edu or smith17@terpmail.umd.edu for Zoom meeting information or visit the Department Calendar.