In Afghanistan, land ownership has long shifted with political power. Successive regime changes have reshaped who is recognised as an owner, who can occupy property, and how territorial resources are redistributed. The Taliban’s return in 2021 did not produce formal land reform, but it reopened a familiar pattern in which political transition unsettles property relations and enables new forms of control. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Afghan landowners now living in exile, this article examines how ownership moves between informal occupation and formal recognition. Houses, plots, and commercial spaces often remain legally tied to former owners while authority is renegotiated on the ground. In some cases, occupation becomes institutionalised through administrative approval, new documentation, or policy measures that regularise access for politically aligned actors. Property change therefore unfolds less as a single act of confiscation than as a layered process through which possession, mediation, and emerging governance practices redefine ownership. The analysis shows how struggles over land operate as a mechanism for reassembling political order. Ownership becomes increasingly difficult to exercise across distance, producing conditions in which property may persist on paper or be reassigned through governmental decree, while recognition and effective control shift in practice. By foregrounding absent owners and unsettled claims, the article contributes to land use policy debates on restitution, return, and post-conflict land administration, with implications for other fragile political environments.
Global commitments to conserve 30% of land by 2030 place renewed emphasis on protected areas (PAs), yet governance shortcomings and distributional conflicts often undermine both conservation and socio-economic development outcomes. This paper examines PA governance in Central Karakoram National Park (CKNP), Pakistan’s largest national park in Gilgit-Baltistan (GB), a region marked by constitutional ambiguity, contested land tenure, and infrastructure-driven market integration. Using a historical institutionalist lens, we examine CKNP’s historical trajectories and critical junctures, institutional continuity and change, input and output legitimacy, and implications for co-management. We combine archival and institutional analysis of legislation and management plans with field observations, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions involving state agencies, park authorities, NGOs, and local communities in seven buffer-zone valleys. We find that administrative reforms and departmental restructuring shifted conservation authority to GB, while participatory, zoning, sustainable-use, and benefit-sharing provisions were layered onto a centralized, exclusionary 1975 legal framework. Input legitimacy remains constrained by uneven consultation, limited decision-making influence, and inadequate information for meaningful participation, whereas output legitimacy is weakened by limited implementation capacity associated with chronic understaffing, project dependence, and limited public financing. Dispersed implementation responsibilities and unresolved property and access rights concerns undermine both decision-making processes and governance performance, leaving co-management largely consultative and uneven. We conclude that co-management could be advanced through valley-level forums with clear decision-making mandates and representation, strengthened and trusted field staffing, sustained public resourcing, and transparent and equitable benefit-sharing. The study highlights how frontier conditions, historical institutional legacies, and valley-specific dynamics shape PA governance.
