Taxation systems for publicly-owned forests should be founded on a government's constitutional right of radical tenure, simultaneously recognising the rights of forest-dependent stakeholders to share benefits and responsibilities. Complex taxes may be historically explicable but are open to...

The consequences of State claims to, and controls over, the territories of Guyana’s Indigenous Peoples (Amerindians) are traced through successive Dutch and British colonial to post-Independence governments. From the mid-eighteenth century, a numerically small sugar plantocracy wielded...

Bai Shan Lin (BSL), a partially state-owned Chinese logging company began operating in 2007 in Guyana, a small but resource-rich South American country nestled between Venezuela and Suriname on the Caribbean coast to the north of Brazil. The victory of the ‘A Partnership for National Unity'...

Successive coastland-dominated governments in independent Guyana have retained both rentier control of resource extractive activities located on State-claimed public lands and the colonial tradition of absentee holders of State-issued concession licences to logging and mining. The colonial...

There is a common assumption that when sustainable forest management (SFM) is not practised the reasons are usually a lack of knowledge or lack of training in applying those techniques. We trace the intermittent development of techniques for SFM in the tropical rain forest of Guyana (South...

This briefing paper is organised with the following sections:1. FDI arrangements for investment, milling, training, proportion of foreign staff2. Unregistered and unapproved changes in ownership structure of the Asian companies/trading of logging concessions3. Illegal renting and managerial...

Corruption is the major factor linking long-term forest harvesting concessions and the government agencies in Guyana, South America, and it is based on the very low forest taxes and high profits on under-declared log exports. Three "rings of power" or social compacts mutually foster the...

In Guyana's racialized geography, Amerindians live in scattered villages in the vast hinterland which makes up 90 per cent of the landmass. Amerindian iconography is appropriated in State-making even while Amerindians themselves are consigned to a patron-client relationship with the dominant...

Colonial governments asserted sovereignty and property rights gradually over the territory of Guyana, disregarding pre-existing Indigenous Rights. Although a Forest Department modelled on the Indian Forest Service was established, there was no equivalent settlement process to determine the...