Property Matters: Synergies and Silences Between Land Reform Research & Development Policy

Abstract

Land market reform is re-emerging as one of the most important instruments of development policy to address rural poverty, inequality, conflict and insecurity. Its effectiveness, however, is a subject of intense scrutiny and debate within academic and policy circles. This article examines the largely neglected work of critical scholars and researchers who challenge many of the underlying assumptions that legitimate market based land reform. The article argues that the negligible impact that critical research has had on the basic policy orientations and imperatives of major international organizations and donor agencies is primarily a reflection of powerful neo-liberal political and economic ideologies, and their associated institutional arrangements and biases. Policy makers and institutions that ignore or marginalize findings that land privatization frequently impedes rather than enhances land tenure security, food security, inequality and conflict, may be sponsoring development programs that have negative impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable among rural populations. A stylized fact, and confirmed by a large literature, is that owner operated smallholder farms are desirable from both an equity and an efficiency perspective. Secure individual property rights to land would therefore not only increase the beneficiaries’ incentives and provide collateral for further investment but, if all markets were competitive, would automatically lead to socially and economically desirable land market transactions (Deininger and Binswanger 1999, 249).