Order with and without the law

Abstract

The idea for this research came from previous studies of farm crime which revealed that informal social norms or 'the way things are done' in rural communities had extraordinary influence for tolerating certain types of crime such as livestock theft and for proscribing the reporting of such crimes. Many victims of crime suffered in silence. Some were pressured to keep the peace, and not accuse someone in the community of theft under threat of exclusion from the community. I suspected that these same cultural practices and social judgements may impact on other social practices such as individual and community management of natural resources. In parallel to this Robyn Bartel's work on evaluating the success of land clearance regulation and the implementation strategies of agencies had opened up the need for an examination of the informal order of norms and attitudes, and the way that these interact with the formal order of the law, to uncover the full regulatory picture in this area. So this was the focus of this CERF significant project which we conducted over the past two and a half years.