Book Review: Perspectivas Urbanas: Temas Criticos en Politicas de Suelo en America Latina: Martim O. Smolka and Laura Mullahy (Eds), 2007 Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy 416 pp. US$25.00 paperback ISBN 978 1 55844 163 7 paperback (original) (raw)
Related papers
Land Reform in Latin America: Past, Present, and Future
Latin American Research Review, 2019
When the Latin American Research Review (LARR) was created in 1965 the debate on land reform was gathering force, and to its credit, the first issue carried a research review article by Richard Schaedel on land reform studies. Seventeen years passed before another review essay on land reform was published in LARR. As William Thiesenhusen wrote then, “land reform as an issue is not forgotten.” This time around, it has taken twice as many years again for this review essay to appear, prompting the question: Is land reform still alive? The five books reviewed in 1982 by Thiesenhusen deal with countries in which land reforms were ongoing. By contrast, the books now under review largely deal with the history of land reform. Is land reform history?
The political economy of Land Reform: A new perspective applied to Latin America
Economics Working Papers, 2009
We define in section 1 our notion of land reform, on section 2, the most important social and political movements of land reform in Latin America are presented. On section 3 we use a theoretical model in the context of economic growth with human capital learning-by-doing to evaluate land reforms. Section 4, discusses the results. Section 5 presents some economic efficiency estimates for the "Cédula" project of 2000 in NE Brazil-a market led land bill project, sponsored by the World Bank (WB) and the Ministry of Agricultural Development (MDA). Finally, section 6 concludes, and section 7 presents the references.
Urban land policy and new land tenure paradigms: Legitimacy vs. legality in Brazilian cities
This article provides a historical overview of land use policies and urban development in Brazil, especially during the period when the country experienced high rates of urbanization. Since most land use policy is enacted at the national level, a synopsis of Federal legislation regulating property rights and land tenure is presented, including a recent law known as the City Statute, which institutes new parameters and tools to advance the regularization of informal settlements in urban areas. A description of how urban planning tools have been used by several local governments, in isolation and in combination with land use policies, to regularize informal settlements follows an exploration of new land tenure paradigms that focus on legitimacy rather than legality. The paper concludes with an analysis of prospects for land ownership and security of tenure for the urban poor in Brazil. r
Journal of Commonwealth Law and Legal Education, 2004
Hernando de Soto's global bestseller , The Mystery of Capital, has transformed the previously obscure topic of land titling into an apparent cure for the world's ills. His achievement has been to focus attention on the relationship between sustainable capitalist economic development and the need of the Third World poor for secure land tenure. He challenges lawyers (and other professionals concerned with land management) to recognize the centrality of land to issues of social justice and development. The article links de Soto's call for integrated property systems with current cross-disciplinary academic discourses on urban law and development and postcolonialism. Specific themes (illustrated with country examples) are cadastral reform (Southern Africa), adverse possession (Israel/Palestine) and usucapio (Brazil), the relationship of customary and individual land tenure (Botswana), and land assembly and infrastructure provision for urban development (land readjustment in Japan and India). Keywords De Soto, land titling, urban development, indigenous land rights, adverse possession, usucapio, land readjustment 'government at all levels and civil society must be involved in working with the disadvantaged and the poor, removing obstacles to their obtaining land, and developing innovative mechanisms, instruments and institutions to help them obtain access to land and security of tenure via the market. Governments must also desist from actions that penalize such persons and lessen their opportunities to obtain and hold onto land.' (McAuslan 2002: 26) The Habitat II agenda focusses upon the fast-growing urban areas of the developing world. It is estimated that by the year 2025 80 per cent of the world's urban population will live in developing countries, many of them under conditions of extreme poverty and tenure insecurity, and about half of the world's population (three billion people) now live in urban areas. Various books, especially of collected papers, on the legal aspects of urban poverty have followed Habitat II (notably Fernandes and Varley 1998; Durand-Lasserve and Royston 2002; Payne 2002). The boundaries between urban and rural are being eroded, and a 'changing conceptual landscape' is emerging which recognizes the importance of the 'peri-urban' as an intermediate zone between urban and rural. Peri-urban areas are places of risk and opportunity, characterized by institutional fragmentation, mixed land uses, opportunities for multiple livelihoods, fragmented land holdings, fragmented social structure, and rapid change (Adell 1999; Brook and Davila 2000). The World Bank, USAID and other agencies were already committed to a framework of secure, transparent and enforceable property rights, perceived as a critical precondition for investment, economic growth and poverty alleviation (Deininger and Binswanger 1999; USAID 2002). The linkages between land titling and urban or peri-urban development in the Third World remained, however, a largely closed discourse within communities of development policy-makers and academics until the dramatic response to Hernando de Soto's book, The Mystery of Capital (De Soto 2000). The Peruvian economist's previous book, The Other Path (De Soto 1989), attacking the oppressive effect upon the poor of exclusionary laws and regulations devised in the colonial era, was a bestseller , but overtaken by The Mystery of Capital. De Soto himself is 'The Mystery of Legal Failure: Why Property Law Does Not Work Outside the West' This is the title of Chapter 6 of The Mystery of Capital, in which de Soto accuses lawyers of adhering to traditional processes, defending the status quo and sabotaging the expansion of capitalism: 'their knee-jerk reaction to extralegal behaviour and to large-scale change is generally hostile' (p.210). He calls for reformminded lawyers to organize themselves and influence political decision-making, and the concept of a propoor urban law is in itself a challenge to how lawyers are educated. While he has little to say about British or Commonwealth law, one section of his book (within his chapter on the United States) is entitled: 'Leaving behind Antiquated British Law'. British land and property law has been seen as difficult and complex, the preserve of specialists: in the rather bleak words of one specialist, taking 'a lifetime to master and when mastered is but lean, wasteful and barren learning'(a reformer in 1919, quoted in Simpson 1976: 24). The de Soto thesis would require property lawyers to look beyond their own construction of professional knowledge, and academic/professional networks have begun to emerge, such as the International Research Group on Law and Urban Space (IRGLUS), as part of a general widening of legal studies into theory, policy and cross-disciplinary approaches (Mansell, Meteyard et al. 1999). Much of the research on urbanization and the Third World poor has been undertaken by other disciplines, social scientists rather than lawyers, hence the title of McAuslan's latest book on the role of law in urban land reform, 'Bringing the law back in' (McAuslan 2003). The practice of land management includes not only lawyers, but other professions (such as valuers, planners, architects, land surveyors, archaeologists and ecologists) who may also have stakes in the reform of land law. Postcolonialism and globalization theory has provided new perspectives for the law and development movement, and socio-legal studies on the Third World. Legal systems have been among the most enduring
Land Governance in Brazil. A geo-historical review of land governance in Brazil
and acquisitions, both domestically and abroad. Related to this, I find of great interest Brazil's Selo Combustível Social (" Social Fuel Seal"), established to encourage contractual partnerships between companies producing biofuels and small farmers. The experience gained and lessons learned from this tax incentive are certainly worth taking into account in current debates on alternative business models that allow investments without dispossessing small farmers of their land. When discussing these topics and many others covered in this report, Fernandes and his colleagues have opted to take sides in the debate, adopting the perspective of what they call the " agrarian question paradigm". They have avoided the temptation to caricaturise the opposing view, which they refer to as the " agrarian capitalism paradigm" , but whether or not they have done justice to this perspective is up for debate. It is clear nonetheless that Fernandes et al. recognise the limitations of a binary analysis, and have candidly discussed the divergences, fragmentation, clashes, and re-composition of key social movements, civil society organisations, and debates within academic circles when confronted with some of these difficult land governance questions. This report in the Framing the Debate Series facilitates open debate on land governance policies and practices both in Brazil and globally. The paper is accessible enough to enable wider engagement in the debate. It is also published in Portuguese to reach out to the Brazilian public and the general land community. If needed, a Spanish version will also be made available. I look forward to lively debate, while preparing the third report in the Framing the Debate Series on Asia.
Projects That Title Land In Central And South America And The Caribbean: Expectations And Problems
1985
Many programs have been proposed to solve the problems of landlessness or insecure land tenure by dealing in some way with land titles, either their distribution or simply their registration or "recognition." Examples of such titling projects include cadastral surveys, title distributions, land registration, colonization, and even what is called agrarian reform. I will consider in this paper some basic concepts common to "titling" programs, the differences among them, the problems they help to resolve, and some issues which often affect the outcomes of such programs. In particular, I will discuss the conditions under which such programs can stimulate agricultural production, investments in the agricultural enterprises, land markets, tax revenue, information for zoning and investment, and sociopolitical reforms of a broader nature. I also consider some of the environmental and social costs of such projects, which may overshadow their positive achievements.
Land reform in the time of neoliberalism: A many-splendored thing
Antipode, 2007
Over the past 20 years, land reform - defined here as the redistribution of land from large to small properties - has emerged as an important political issue in the Global South. Actors with widely differing ideological perspectives have claimed land reform as central to their political, social and economic platforms. In this paper, I compare reforms championed under the neoliberal auspices of the World Bank (the so-called Market Led Agrarian Reforms) with those supported by popular grassroots actors such as the Movement of Landless Workers (the MST) in Brazil. I argue that although these two approaches to land reform are often considered antithetical to one another, they share a common theoretical foundation. Both are rooted in a labor theory of property that attributes the fruits of one's labor to the laborer. Where the two differ is in their interpretation of the "original sin" through which land and labor came to be misaligned: neoliberal actors see the state as the key source of land-related inefficiency while popular grassroots actors identify the market as the key source. I analyze case material from northeastern Brazil and suggest that the institutionalization of the labor theory of property (across civil society, state and market in the region) has generated insecurities for new land reform beneficiaries who must protect their property rights with visible evidence of their productivity.