Despite several legal initiatives to negotiate disputes with ethnic land claims over the 75 years of post-colonial history, the governments have failed to reorganize public administrations to deal with ethnic rights giving due consideration to their cultural distinctiveness. My research in Bangladesh found that local government administrators lack cultural sensitivity to comprehend ethnic ways of living and their social norms such as matriarchal land inheritance, collective land ownership, Jhum (shifting) cultivation, and dependence on forest lands for livelihood and crop selection, to mention but a few.