Abstract

This paper is dealing with land tenure and land tenure issues. The report is based on data collected during a 3-week field trip to Sabah, Borneo. The fieldwork was conducted in the village of Tikolod with additional interviews at the Crocker Range XPDC camp, the Department of Agriculture, District Office as well as PACOS a local NGO based in Sabah. As our point of departure we tried to let the local villagers themselves define issues they saw as being related to land tenure. This we combined with our own observations of what was actually going on.

Our research showed that there has been a change in the system of land tenure during the last decades. The introduction of the Land Ordinance, which is a system of private ownership to land, has resulted in changing patterns of land acquisition making inheritance more important. At the same time it has made land a scarce resource, because all the land in Tikolod has been applied for by the local farmers in their wish to secure themselves and their children. However, the introduction of the Land Ordinance has not meant a total abandoning of the traditional system of land tenure, the Adat. In stead some parts of the Adat has been incorporated into the new reality of the inhabitants in Tikolod.