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Does the existence of formal title to land and real estate matter for the distribution of wealth? This study reviews the empirical literature on the economic impact of land and real‐estate administration systems across countries. This study argues that a functioning credit market for secured credit is necessary to realize the full benefits of legal title to private real estate. This study also reviews quantitative economic theory on wealth distribution to assess the probable impact of different land‐registration systems on wealth inequality. The implication of current theory is that poor land‐administration systems may sometimes lead to lower levels of wealth inequality than better land‐registration systems.

Durand-Lasserve looks at peri-urban areas and hinterlands of West African cities and argues that any formalization of rights to land needs to take account of social practices and highly uneven bargaining power of different actors. Zoning and titling programs introduced by the World Bank and other developing agencies that ignore these practices are bound to fail, or worse, they tend to accelerate the concentration of land in favor of the elites. Durand-Lasserve presents an analytical framework for diagnosing land use and allocation practices that take account of tenure security and property rights, but also of the channels through which land is reallocated given these initial conditions. Moreover, he highlights the importance of a well-run land administration for limiting graft and capture.

Dwyer documents the failure of ambitious land titling schemes in the aftermath of Cambodia’s civil war. The post-war Cambodian government allowed farmers to apply for recognition of title, which quickly evolved into a system of quasi-titles. At the same time, the government sought to spur economic development by granting concessions to timber extraction companies. As Dwyer shows, newly emergent smallholdings on one hand and large-scale land control via concession agreements on the other set the stage for a sharply bifurcated property regime that not infrequently gave rise to conflicts. In short, Dwyer argues that governing essential resources requires more than minimum regulation in the form of zoning or titling programs, which are oblivious to domestic and global power relations.

This judicial affirmation of stewardship by regional tribunals builds on firm foundations laid down in Anglo-American jurisprudence. This chapter seeks to explore these foundations. The chapter analyses the last two decades of landmark decisions on ‘aboriginal title’ in Anglo-American jurisprudence, which have conclusively established for domestic law the rights of indigenous and tribal communities to their traditional lands. The chapter focuses on significant cases regarding customary land title that establish biocultural jurisprudence, such as Mabo v. Queensland (No.2), Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, and Alexkor Limited v. The Richtersveld Community.

This paper critically examines the validity of the prescriptions of conventional law and economics theory using evidence from two programs aimed at poverty alleviation through improving access-to-credit. The two programs illustrate alternative approaches to institutional reform—the land-titling program (for instance, as advocated by Hernando de Soto in Peru) represents the formalist perspective, while microfinance (as exemplified by Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank, a trust-based program) provides evidence on a more informal, norm-based approach. On a ‘static’ analysis, it finds that the Yunus model outperforms the De Soto model (both in terms of efficiency and equity)—thereby underscoring the benefits of a more socially-rooted norm-based system, at least in the short run. But, on a ‘dynamic’ analysis, it finds that the rapidly expanding microfinance sector in Bangladesh itself shows evidence of increasing formalization. This comparative study thus questions the widespread belief in the importance for development of formalizing legal institutions and arrangements. It demonstrates not only that formal law may not be a necessary pre-requisite for development in the short run, but that some countries might do better focusing on alternative institutional reforms. At the same time, it shows that, in the longer run, formal and informal legal systems may be complements rather than substitutes. This analysis has direct and important implications for the evolution of legal arrangements in China: It thus argues that it is crucial for China to reject the assumed superiority of formal law per se, as well as the false dichotomization between formal and informal systems.

This chapter examines formal rural land rights in Thailand in relation to important political and economic outcomes. It begins with an overview of broad economic trends in Thailand since the 1960s, with particular emphasis on three important socioeconomic outcomes: growth, poverty alleviation, and income inequality. It then discusses three conceptual frameworks that link formalization of land rights to economic outcomes. Building on existing models that link land titling to economic growth, it also introduces an original political model that incorporates a security dimension. Finally, it considers the emergence of substantial land and credit markets in Thailand and presents findings showing strong and substantively significant interrelationships among land titling, credit expansion, and economic growth.

This chapter examines how functional land registries enable impersonal markets. Starting with the regime of purely private transactions, it focuses on the main public titling solutions in use today: the recordation of deeds with or without title insurance, found in the United States and France, respectively, and the registration of rights available, for instance, in Australia, England, Germany, and Spain.

This chapter examines the formation of Cambodia's postwar property rights regime by tracing the evolving relationship between the German donor agency GIZ and the Cambodian state. It reviews donor agencies that ignored the failures of Cambodia's Land Rights Program and donor practices and turned the political issue of land control into a technical problem. It also explains the practices that justified the donors' continued presence, even as they created uncertainty over what was actually happening on the ground and shut down space for deeper questions about the relationships between land titling and tenure security. The chapter charts the affiliation of GIZ with the Cambodian Ministry of Land since 1995 to determine how donor interventions worked to strengthen the state elite's grip on power. It illustrates how faith in the efficacy of land title is produced in public discourse through oversimplified technical data and veiled threats that silence deeper questions.

This chapter examines the nature of the title that is acquired through taking possession of land. It argues that the traditional view, which is that mere possession is not a source of freehold title, is plausible only if one overlooks how the law has evolved. Today, one can acquire a fee simple estate simply through taking possession. The chapter seeks to marshal new arguments in support of this claim. Its main strategy is to analyse the incidents of the possessor’s interest with a view to showing that it has the core features of a fee simple estate. It also considers the scope of the rule and analyses a number of objections.

This chapter explores the intersection between the rabid market for land in the early United States and the territories’ property pluralism—the existence of multiple, conflicting sources of rights to ownership. The chapter focuses on the debate over three particularly significant sources of title: purchases from Native nations; state land grants under the system of indiscriminate location; and occupancy, commonly known in early American law as preemption. The collision between these different sources with unclear validity made ownership in the territories highly uncertain and spawned conflict. The federal government attempted to reform territorial property, deeming some sources of title legitimate while barring others, but both formal and informal law hampered these federal efforts to produce clarity of ownership.

This chapter follows the experiences of several hundred land title recipients one year after the leopard skin campaign. It considers the ways in which the recipients living in leopard skin landscapes within agribusiness concessions use and give meaning to land title. It also reveals how the production of subjectivities through land titling is explicitly racialized and gendered heteronormatively, which has deepened cleavages of class relations in rural areas. The chapter focuses on four key benefits that the land title was expected to provide according to the discourse on land titling from international agencies and the Cambodian Ministry of Land: tenure security, poverty reduction, women's empowerment, and plantation employment. It examines the trajectories of land claimants who had land surveyed versus those who did not have any land surveyed during the Order 01 land reform.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, there was an attempt by the British colonial government in Assam to change the land titles of Assamese peasants from annual leases to decennial leases. However, the peasants refused. Such resistance provides an important clue to understanding not only the impact of the colonial land settlement project in Assam but also the changes in the global geography of resource use. In an administrative memo issued in 1872, Colonel Henry Hopkinson argued that Assamese peasants were reluctant to accept long-term land titles due to the land abundance of Assam, which allowed them to find fresh soil with little difficulty. This chapter examines resource use regimes in colonial Assam. After discussing land use under the Ahom polity, it looks at the goals of the British land settlement policy and the allocation of vast tracts of land to tea plantations in Assam through ‘land grab’ interventions.

This chapter refers to the volunteer university student land surveyors who formed the front line of the state in the land titling reform. It discusses the prime minister's ability to sidestep local officials and gain the trust of rural land claimants, which depended on the mobilization of the student volunteers. It also draws on interviews with the volunteer students to argue that they were central to the way the land reform reproduced Hun Sen's personal power. The chapter agues that the unusual power of university volunteers to make decisions and bypass local officials lay in their position as the prime minister's youth. It explains that the student volunteers' power arose from their “in-between-ness” and their category as both youth and soldier since they have the technological sophistication and militarized garb to clarify the political power and threat they embodied.

This chapter investigates the struggles for communal land recognition and examines the detrimental effects of the land titling reform on collective mobilization. It confirms how both private and communal land titles as tools for land rights advocacy in Cambodia are limited and illustrates the power to define interventions that are in the hands of state actors whose own interests often run counter to the demands of rural communities. It also delves into how struggles for communal land in Khang Cheung and Khang Leit have evolved and how the Order 01 land reform shaped these struggles. The chapter discusses the connected points in the story of Ming Tam, Head of non-governmental organization (NGO) Green Cambodia, about the tensions inherent to social movements organized by and with NGOs and focused on a politics of state recognition. It reveals the limits of a politics of recognition, both in the state's ongoing production of uncertainty over the claims process.

This chapter reviews Hernando de Soto's work in Cairo on the legalization of illegal housing. It underlines how his lobbying of the highest authorities in the country helped develop the concept of the individualization of working-class property in favor of owners, rather than of occupiers/possessors. Far from regarding this program as having stopped short of its goals, it lists and makes connections between a series of reforms that have fundamentally changed land issues in informal neighborhoods. Land markets have thus been able to converge, benefiting the financial sector, which now has access to these legalized properties. The commodifcation of the registrated properties has meant neither empowerment nor a reduction in residents' poverty. The author thus demonstrates how economic reform programs are negotiated on a daily basis in unequal relationships. This set of reforms gave rise to strikes, which led to the proliferation of social and political movements that culminated in 2011.

This chapter shows how the land titling reform worked to wrest power away from local-level officials into the hands of the central government. It talks about local officials that managed to amass land by clearing forest in expectation of the land reform, while in other areas local people mobilized to prevent the elite's capture of the reform and produce new relationships with local officials. It also examines the relationships between local state officials and their constituencies during the Order 01 land reform. The chapter reviews the leopard skin land reform, which can be seen as the prime minister's attempt to wrest control over land distribution from local authorities in upland areas. It analyzes the rural people's narratives that suggest multiple strategies local authorities and other elites used to grab land, such as clearing forestland in advance of the land survey.

This chapter describes several events including the US government’s investigation of Daniel Clark under the Act for Adjustment of Land Titles; Claiborne’ nominees for the Legislative Council; the House of Representatives’ request for the repeal of certain provisions of the Act for the Government of Orleans Territory; the removal of the prohibition on domestic importation of slaves; and the challenge faced by Claiborne from the Legislative Council and the majority of members in the territorial House of Representatives.

This chapter details the evolution of policies for the rehabilitation of informal settlements in Jordan, showing that they are contingent on the residents' degree of citizenship and the fact that policies changed after the peace accord with Israel in 1994. While illegal settlements built by Palestinian refugees were rehabilitated by the Housing and Urban Development Corporation, those built following Transjordanian rural depopulation were rehabilitated locally by municipalities. From 1980 to 1997, Jordan was the first Arab country to implement the developmentalist ideology recently fostered by the World Bank, which involved the residents of informal areas in all the stages of renovation of their homes and enabled them to become homeowners. This titling policy was subsequently abandoned in favor of a single policy of provision of services.

Chapter 3 examines the first collective land claim by Dene people in Canada’s Northwest Territories in 1973. Threatened by a proposed oil and gas pipeline, Dene people pursued land rights in a period of rapid social and economic change. Drawing on historical treaties, they tried to push the state into negotiating with them as coeval partners with aboriginal title rights. When this strategy failed, they had to go to court where a sympathetic judge drew on the precedent established in the Gove land rights case to admit their histories into court. The case was hugely significant for Dene people and their struggle for self-determination. It also showed how risky legal strategies could be for indigenous peoples, particularly in terms of how their history as peoples of the land would be measured according to notions of authenticity they did not define.