Special Virtual Issue
PPLA has reached a major milestone by securing a special issue in the highly regarded journal “Land Use Policy”, entitled “Managing ‘Great Expectations’: what can land administration realistically achieve?”. Professor Walter de Vries of the Technical University of Munich is managing editor, with Dr Serene Ho from RMIT University joining PPLA team members Dr Dik Roth, Dr Jivanta Schöttli, Dr Jeroen Warner and Dr Oliver Scanlan as co-editors.
Special issue information:
This Special Issue responds to a recent shift in the land administration literature that places greater emphasis on equitable and pro-poor outcomes as criteria for the success of interventions. While no-one would criticise this aspiration, its practicality is uncertain due to the complexity of human relationships to land, and the way in which land mediates the relationships of human beings to each other, as demonstrated by the diversity of perspectives that discussions of land invite. This diversity encompasses varied vernacular understandings of land that are held by the “beneficiaries” of interventions, the “strange bedfellows” championing formalisation processes, the differing and often conflicting perspectives of policy makers, practitioners and scholars, and then the wide range of analytical viewpoints to be found within academia, where research interests touching on land span many disciplines.
There is scant dialogue between land administration science and the vast, heterogenous bodies of work comprising agrarian studies, political ecology and critical urban studies. Such work provides substantial evidence that in almost all contexts there is extreme variation of access to and control over land along lines of, inter alia, gender, race and class and that such variation is the result of dominant socio-economic and political preferences, often emerging from complex historical processes and operating at and between different scales. Critical work that specifically examines land administration interventions demonstrates that they have a tendency to recreate, reinforce and legally entrench such variation.
The objective
This collection is therefore concerned both with the current state of land administration as a domain of science and practice, and also how the politics of scientific enquiry are playing out within this domain. This entails several crucial and underexamined questions. Where the institutional shaping and outcome of land administration historically has been determined by dominant socio-economic and political preferences that are socially unjust, does it not follow that land interventions pursuing pro-poor outcomes must require some degree of explicit challenge to such preferences? If this is accepted, how well suited is current land administration theory and praxis to engaging with such a substantial task? How can the timeframes of land reform efforts be better calibrated to address historical injustices arising from previous titling programmes and surveys? How appropriate are current tools, most prominently the cadastre, to achieve these ambitious goals? To the extent that such tools are insufficient, what other approaches, strategies and tools are necessary to do so? What additional constituencies might usefully be engaged, in order to secure genuinely equitable outcomes for land interventions?
Instead of the creation of yet another disciplinary silo, this Special issue calls for new and challenging dialogue between disciplines, and contributions that might find a broad descriptor in what we call “critical land administration studies”. What perspectives already exist that would shed fresh light on existing and largely unchallenged assumptions within land administration concerning, for example, the nature of the state and state-society relations; diverse and complex notions of land as a form of property and definitions of land rights; the difficulties of “top-down” approaches as well as the deep complexities surrounding “participation” or the fraught and contested nature of the science-policy relationship? What constructive role might feminist and decolonial theories play in this process beyond rejectionism of land administration interventions in toto? Such a position is unrealistic and does not accord with many views from the grassroots (Hall et al., 2011), as clearly demonstrated in recent work on complex reactions “from below” to agrarian change. Instead of rejectionism, the collection draws inspiration from Science and Technology Studies, and invites contributions that address what, to adapt Jasanoff’s famous phrase, a land administration science of humility might look like, as one component of an expanded repertoire of theory, practice and policy that would be much better placed to achieve socially just settlements of rights to land.