Doolittle's analysis offers a fresh perspective on the state of contemporary property regimes on native lands in Sabah, Malaysia. In an effort to raise the awareness of scholars and advocates of community-based natural resource management about realities associated with “communities” and “native customary law”, the author shows how reliance upon these concepts does not necessarily lead to empowering local people towards biodiversity conservation. She argues that today's policies dealing with native rights to natural resources are based on an outdated and static picture of community land management, codified during British colonialism. In addition to a critical review of the historical processes and motivations of land reform, a case study is provided to demonstrate how local land management strategies have been transforming in the face of new markets and political environments and to point up the intra-community conflicts that arise as a result.

Under 1950s colonial land policies, many native communities subscribed to state schemes that enabled them to obtain Native Titles and sell their communal land to outsiders. In rarer cases, as with the rural Dusan community studied here, natives negotiated federal protection of their land within Native Reserves that prohibit the sale of land to non-community members. Using archival data and oral histories, the author shows that contrary to popular belief, native people were not passive subjects of colonization, but succeeded in their strategic efforts to secure what some considered to be advantageous rights to their communal lands. Nevertheless, once legally systematized and regulated according to colonial interpretation, the fluid and adaptive nature of native land management mechanisms was stifled, thereby rendering the Native Reserve a compromised representation of traditional land management, dependent upon state sanction for its legitimacy.

Ethnographic data gathered during fieldwork shows how the inability to sell land on Native Reserves, while benefiting some community members, also restricts the participation of native people in today's national economy. The story of one village member elite is told to illustrate the variety of internal conflicts that develop due to individual drive to compete in a wider market economy. Issues concerning community access to fallow land and the internal sale of usufructuary rights to land were confronted in the Native Court. Capitalizing on legal pluralism, the elite farmer drew on a mixture of statutory law, customary law and social power to win his land dispute. The case shows how the local ethic of access to land is being overshadowed by the demands of commercial crop production and how local cultures adapt to these conditions despite outdated legal frameworks.

State-society relations and property relations on Native Reserves are evolving in response to changing regional political-economic conditions. Champions of wider application of Native Reserves in Sabah must be conscious of these local effects and realize that Native Reserve statutory laws may not be congruent with today´s economic and cultural realities.

Prepared by Megan Glore