Commons, Land Ownership and Governance amongst the Marams of Manipur

Tribal property relations under customary tenure are structured by customary conventions, traditional institutions and collective rights, with authority vested in traditional leadership. Land and forest in tribal communities are often considered to be imbued with collective identity, perceived as community or common resources with different patterns of commoning. This article examines the typologies of landed property, including forest; classification of resource systems; access rights; external provisioning; and governance mechanisms thereof amongst the Marams of Manipur. The article demonstrates that the notion of property among the Marams is not a binary of private versus commons, that the governance mechanism is polycentric and kin-nested, that commons function as social insurance for livelihood sustenance and security and that the existence of a collective governance mechanism over commons limits accumulation of landed property by elites.