Land Tenure Reform

Land tenure reform is broadly understood to be a reworking or reorientation of policies, laws, and approaches for managing land tenure—in other words, a restructuring of legal and social relations concerning land. This can include replacing or consolidating laws or making additions to laws to accommodate a new approach to land tenure. Land tenure reform is distinct from land reform in that land is ordinarily not confiscated from some people and redistributed to others as a part of land reform. Thus, land tenure reform is closer to land policy reform. However, land tenure reform can be used to achieve forms of land reform through community-driven land acquisition, market-assisted acquisition, resettlement, or delivery of forms of equity and justice through markets or other incentive mechanisms. The topic is relevant to geography because of the spatial nature of land rights and the ways in which space can be remade or reconstituted with land tenure reform.

Approaches to land tenure reform usually mirror the ideological, social, political, and economic perspectives of those engaged in reform, which may or may not be at odds with those of other sectors of society. Generally, two approaches to relations about land influence tenure reform. One approach understands land to be a part of the social relations between people, society, and land. More traditional or customary societies favor this approach to land. The other approach pursues the idea that land is a part of the economic relations between people, with land viewed largely as a commodity to be bought and sold—with many types of reform focused on making such transfer easier. Modern industrialized societies favor this second approach. Significant efforts in land tenure reform have sought to move societies from the former to the latter approach. However, the social relations approach cannot easily be legislated out of existence and replaced by market approaches to land. This is because customarily held land also provides important forms of livelihood security and insurance, which are not replaced when land is transformed into a commodity.

Land tenure reform is a priority in many international development agendas, due to its strong relevance in reducing rural poverty and food insecurity. Even so, there is considerable disagreement as to how, when, and for whom such reform should occur. While some advocate the granting of titles to lands, others favor providing greater rights and security of rights to customary forms of tenure. Reform of tenure rules generally assumes that the prevailing approach does not facilitate certain goals, such as poverty reduction, food security, peace, capital mobilization, credit, and so on, and that therefore an improvement is needed. This need for improvement can emerge through change in population pressure, the need for efficiency in landholdings (e.g., family farmers use land more efficiently than large commercial holdings), change in economics, growing land scarcity, land market operation, armed conflict or looming conflict, formalization of customary tenure, and perceived inequity in holdings or the rules under which land is held. While most attempts at land tenure reform are intended to facilitate improvement in peoples’ lives, this is not always the case. Some instances of land tenure reform are purposefully political or ethnic, such as the “ethnic cleansing” and the laws that supported this in the Balkans wars in the 1990s.

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