The Limits of State-Led Land Reform: An Introduction

Summary

This essay introduces a collection of papers that examine the effects of contemporary land reforms in practice. This essay focuses on the roles of state and community in land reform. It argues that state-led strategies encounter significant problems on the ground due to their reliance on “top-down” initiatives and bureaucratic implementation. Empirical and conceptual insights suggest the benefits of a shift in emphasis from state to community in land reform. Emphasis on community calls for a state that is more reactive to political demands originating “from below” and more responsive to variation in local institutions and practices.

Introduction

Land reform is once again high on the development agenda. Post-socialist countries in Asia and Europe have seen a massive shift in control over land from state and collective units to smallholders. Governments across Africa, Asia, and Latin America recognize customary land rights by issuing formal titles to local people. Policy-makers in parts of Latin America and Africa implement programs that redistribute land from large landowners to landless people and tenants. All these programs seek to enhance the land rights of disadvantaged groups by way of legal and administrative acts. In this way they constitute land reforms, although their concrete objectives and forms display great variation (cf. El-Ghonemy, 2003, Lipton, 1993).

The resurgence of this in practice has caused global development debates to pay renewed attention to land reform. This attention finds reflection in the formation of international social movements, such as “La Via Campesina,” that demand the expansion of land reform as a strategy to improve rural livelihoods. Intergovernmental and civil society organizations have established the International Land Coalition to create a global platform concerning the access of the rural poor to land. The renewed attention to land reform has also caused the World Bank and the European Union, among other donors, to issue new land policy statements and guidelines (Council of the European Union, 2004, Deininger, 2003). It is this global debate to which the present issue contributes.

This issue assembles a series of cutting-edge analyses of land reforms from around the world, including redistributive reforms, land registration programs, and post-totalitarian land distributions. The papers examine what land reforms do in practice, and how their particular features condition the dynamics of land tenure and land use observed on the ground. The primary focus of the analyses, therefore, is on changes in actual practices and relationships brought about by legal and administrative acts of land reform. The emphasis is not on legal documents and political debates at the national level. Neither is it on the question of whether or not economic, social, or political concerns justify land reform. Thus, the analytical lens applied in this issue is complementary to other approaches in the study of land reform, such as those directing attention to macro politics (e.g., Akram-Lodhi, Bernstein, 2002, Borras, 2001), the political economy of agricultural production (e.g., Byres, 2004, Griffin), and microeconomic farm dynamics (e.g., Carter and Olinto, 2003, Otsuka and Place, 2001).

This introductory essay focuses on a central theme that runs through the contributions to this special issue: the roles of “state” and “community” in land reform.¹ In a nutshell, the analyses presented in the issue attest to the limits of state-led land reform, that is, land reform programs conceived by national governments in a top-down fashion and implemented by their administrative branches through bureaucratic modalities. State-led strategies encounter significant problems on the ground, as the initiatives frequently do not find support from the relevant local actors, and because bureaucratic modalities cannot accommodate the varying meanings of land, plural notions of property, and diverse political-economic contexts. The limits of the state-led approach, together with relevant empirical and conceptual insights, suggest the benefits of a shift in emphasis from state to community in land reform. Community-led strategies may connect state action better with “bottom-up” political initiatives and property relations on the ground. In this way, emphasis on community does not deny the state a role in land reform, but it calls for a state that is more reactive to political demands originating “from below” and more responsive to variation in local institutions and practices.

The essay begins with a brief review of land reform in the past and today. Next it discusses key insights into the limits of state-led land reform emanating from some of the papers in this issue. This is followed by a summary of empirical and conceptual grounds supporting a shift in emphasis in the land reform agenda toward community. The essay then revisits the papers in this issue to identify key issues for policy and research on community-led land reform. It concludes with a call to policy-makers and researchers to take a serious look at the roles of state and community in land reform.