Hybrid Writers’ Workshop Strengthens PPLA Special Issue

On the 25th and 26th of August 2022, PPLA held a hybrid writers’ workshop for contributors to the project’s Special Virtual Issue (SVI) due to be published in the Journal Land Use Policy, entitled “Managing ‘Great Expectations’: What can land administration realistically achieve?”. The aim of the event was to strengthen the SVI through an intensive two-day discussion session, where scholars and practitioners would bring very different perspectives concerning land administration to the table. Our ambitious objective was to establish, if not common ground, then at least a genuine dialogue between these perspectives, carrying out what Thomas Gieryn has conceptualised as “boundary work” in his influential paper from 1983.

This ostensibly modest ambition is likely to be extremely difficult. In DCU’s All Hallows Campus in Dublin, Drs Phillan Zamchiya, Bitopi Dutta, Jivanta Schöttli, A. Narayana, Oliver Scanlan and Mr Pranab Choudhury engaged in lively debate and discussion with other contributors joining remotely from Australia, Senegal, Thailand and Palestine concerning a vast array of different topics, all of them germane to the study of land. From a practitioner-focused concern with the complexities of establishing “living registries”, where land deeds are updated regularly by land-owners, to almost metaphysical discussions of the role of land in social relations, via instruments of soft law such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT), lively conversations brought the multi-faceted role of land to life. “Where do Gods fit in to the Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM)?” is a question that sums up this complexity and diversity reasonably well.

Encouragingly, all of the participants seemed to enjoy the back and forth and benefit from listening to these different perspectives. Equally encouraging were the common trends identified across extremely diverse contexts. From Germany to Indonesia, the difficulties of establishing genuinely “participatory” processes, the complexity of state-society relations, and the entry of new actors into the realm of land administration generally associated with the rise of digital technologies and the deepening financialisation of land, were just three such trends identified. The discussion also had time to address more urbane issues, including the best way to attribute data gleaned through experience working as land practitioners when offering this as evidence in a journal article submitted for peer-review.