Food, Justice, and Land - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 256

commodity booms (food, biofuels, and so on) and the prior and ongoing advocacy for
privatization of land resources that are still public or state-controlled are becoming a
powerful development-policy combination that may contribute to profound agrarian
transformations worldwide in the near future.
Against the backdrop of these promarket land policies, “governance” around land
policies has emerged to become an important issue. However, the dominant thinking
is firmly located within the issues of economically efficient (re)allocation of resources,
administrative efficiency (“corruption-free”) and fiscal prudence (“cheap”), the latter
almost always meaning a cutback in public expenditures. Many land policy campaigns
today involve support to “one-stop-shop” types of land privatization, registration, and
titling programs in developing countries, commonly labeled as “land administration
and management” projects (World Bank 2003). The general effect of this kind of treat-
ment is to embrace and promote technicist, de-politicized administrative functions of
the state around land-policy questions (see Borras and Franco 2010).
Therefore, the dominant advocacy for the market-oriented land policy prescriptions
within some international development agencies is concerned with how many “clean”
land titles are produced. It is, in essence, concerned about the physical land title, a trad-
able good, a thing . The concomitant “governance” issue is generally about administering
an efficient production of private land titles. It is engaged in and part of what James Scott
(1998) called “state simplification.”
This line of contemporary—and dominant—thinking on land policies is problem-
atic on two grounds. On the one hand, landed property rights are not “things”; they
are social relations between people (Tsing 2002). These social relations are linked to the
dynamic process of land-based wealth creation. On the other hand, governance cannot
be reduced to technical administration or “management” of land markets or land policy
reforms, and it cannot be confined to the sole issue of land taken in isolation of other
state and societal issues related to wealth and political power distribution. Governance
is about political relations between (groups of ) people and the institutions (rules and
regulations, both formal and informal) that “govern” them. It is linked to how, and how
well, decision-making power is aggregated and (re)distributed in a polity over time, and
how decisions become authoritative, or not, in society. For our purposes, land gover-
nance shapes and is (re)shaped by the ongoing interaction of various diverse groups and
classes (and competing interests) in society and the state, in endless contestation to gain
effective control of, among other things, land-based wealth. This classic contest is usu-
ally among national state actors, regional political and economic elites, and the rural
poor. It is from this dynamic political-economic, historical-institutional and multilevel
perspective that one should explore the links between “pro-poor land policies.”
It is important to clarify a few interrelated concepts and issues about property rights
and land policies. First, by “ownership and/or control over land resources” we mean
here the effective control over the nature, pace, extent, and direction of surplus produc-
tion, distribution, and disposition (Borras 2007). This framing will enable us to detect
actually existing land-based social relations regardless of what official documents
claim. This framing also provides us with a disaggregated view of the various competing