The Limits of State-Led Land Reform: An Introduction
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.
Section snippets
Land reform past and present
Land reform has been a primary state activity in rural areas over the past century, although its popularity has risen and ebbed over time. In addition, land reform has undergone a significant change in its concrete forms, today’s reforms including a more diverse set of policies and programs than those taking place in much of the 20th century. This section presents a brief review of land reform in the past and today.
The limits of state-led land reform
The papers included in this issue indicate the continuing emphasis on the state in today’s land reforms. Furthermore, they demonstrate that the potential of state-led land reforms to achieve desirable changes in actual land tenure and land use is limited. Top-down initiatives cause land reform programs to miss out important developments on the ground and fail to enlist support from relevant actors. Reliance on bureaucratic modalities hinders the adaptation of state action to tenure arrangements
Community-led land reform: empirical and conceptual foundations
The limits of state-led land reform suggest the need to look for alternatives. One potential alternative emerges from contemporary programs that recognize the significance of “community” in processes of land reform. Correspondingly, this emergent alternative may be referred to as community-led land reform, “community” signaling the significance of actual land tenure arrangements and authority relations as well as “bottom-up” political initiatives. This section reviews empirical and conceptual
Issues in community-led land reform
As the discussion in the previous section has shown, there are convincing empirical and conceptual reasons for exploring the potentials of community-led land reform. The challenge is now to translate practical experiences and theoretical concerns into policy principles and strategies on the one hand and research programs and projects on the other hand. The papers in this issue suggest that policy-makers and researchers should pay special attention to four issues in this process, namely
Conclusions
Many land reforms, past and present, portray a focus on the state as their primary initiator and implementer. This model of state-led land reform emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, when land reform was envisaged as one of the “big pushes” in state-led development and bureaucratic implementation was considered most efficient. Today, many land reform programs continue to assign the state the primary role, whether they promote land redistribution, registration, or post-totalitarian distribution. This
Acknowledgments
We thank Emmanuelle Bouquet, John Bruce, Derick Fay, Pauline Peters, Frank Place and Caroline Upton for insightful comments and suggestions on this essay. The Emmy Noether-Programm of Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft funded the writing of the essay and the workshop on “Land reform, land tenure, and land use: Assessing the linkages” held at Humboldt University, Berlin in May 2006.
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