Who Owns the Land? Gender and Land‐Titling Programmes in Latin America

The main focus of state intervention in Latin American agriculture in the 1990s was on land-titling programs, designed to promote security of tenure and enliven land markets. A review of seven of these projects suggests that they were often designed without sufficient attention to civil codes and marital regimes that protect women's property rights. They often ignored that a household's endowment of land may consist of three forms of property: the wife's, the husband's and jointly owned property. By assuming that the family farm is owned by the male household head, these projects trampled upon women's ownership rights. Nonetheless, the share of female beneficiaries of land-titling projects has been much higher than the share of women adjudicated land under the agrarian reforms of previous decades. This is partly because the primary way that women acquire land is through inheritance, and inheritance appears to be more gender equitable than other manners of acquiring land. It is also due to the impact of the more gender-equitable agrarian legislation of the current period, itself a product of the impact of women's movements on the state.     

Gender Levees: Rethinking Women's Land Rights in Northeastern Honduras

In the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, one woman's impassioned speech linking women's exclusion from land rights with the failings of Honduras' state-led agrarian reform and counter-reform gathered gale force, simultaneously weakening particular levees of gender-bias while constructing others. Post-Hurricane Mitch organizational practices and reconstruction policies in Northeastern Honduras afforded women access to joint property titles and participation. Yet the practices and processes through which women gained new rights reproduced certain exclusionary gender structures and created new barriers to women's participation. These contradictory consequences speak to recent feminist assessments of women's land rights under neo-liberal land titling programmes and a resurgence of policies addressing agrarian reform, and reveal the broader stakes of struggles for women's land rights. In so doing, they underline the importance of attending to spatial connections and historical articulations between the present and the past, and thus the past and the future.     

Where There Is No Movement: Local Resistance and the Potential for Solidarity

In Burma, any attempt to form independent agrarian movements is violently suppressed, yet rural Karen villagers have developed and practise complex forms of resistance involving inter-community action and solidarity across wide regions. These have been successful in weakening state control over land and livelihoods largely because their lack of formal organization makes them difficult to target. Though Karen village resistance has characteristics that resemble 'movements' as broadly defined and make it comparable to some existing agrarian movements, transnational movement coalitions have yet to actively engage with it. This contribution argues that transnational agrarian movements and local struggles could both benefit from active engagement, and explores the possibility and potential for such engagement in the Karen case.     

Piety in the Sky? Gender Policy and Land Reform in South Africa

This article examines the disjuncture between high–level commitments to gender equity and practice in South Africa's land reform programme. Weaknesses in implementing the gender policy of the Department of Land Affairs stem largely from limitations within the broader programme, compounded by the inadequate conceptualization and management of the task and an absence of political accountability around women's land rights by the Department and Ministry. The low political priority accorded gender policy is itself a reflection of weak levels of organization among rural women. However, rural women show an interest in strengthening their rights in land and the small number of women whose households have secured land through the programme regard this as a positive achievement.     

Agrarian class struggle and state formation in post‐colonial Pakistan, 1959–1974: Contingencies of Mazdoor Kisan Raj

State formation in post‐colonial societies is often explained with reference to the roles of elites. In Pakistan, landed elites continue to dominate the rural political economy through informal and formal institutions, but the history of its largest peasant movement shows how agrarian class struggle can change the institutional forms and functions of power. The Hashtnagar peasant movement achieved lasting de facto land and tenancy reforms in north‐western Pakistan in the 1970s through forcible land occupations that were regularized by state intervention. I argue that although divisions among elites were important, the state intervened in favour of peasants due to the rising organizational power of tenants and landless labourers under the centralized leadership of the radical Mazdoor Kisan Party. Agrarian class struggle weakened the informal power of landed elites and gave rise to institutions of peasant power. However, other fractions of the ruling class sought to undermine their landed opponents while co‐opting the militancy of the peasant movement by strengthening state institutions to intervene in favour of upwardly mobile tenants. The latter were separated from poorer peasants and the landless, thus demobilizing the movement.     

Evo Morales and the MST in Bolivia: Continuities and Discontinuities in Agrarian Reform

There is a widespread understanding in critical scholarly literature that the government of Evo Morales is fundamentally challenging the neoliberal order in Bolivia. The empirical record of Morales' first five years in office, however, illustrates significant neoliberal continuities in the country's political economy. At the same time, the most important social movements that resisted neoliberalism prior to Morales' election have been considerably demobilized in its wake. This gives rise to the critique that the Morales government has merely implemented a more politically stable version of the model of accumulation it inherited. This paper draws on recent field research in Bolivia to make a contribution to this broader research agenda on reconstituted neoliberalism. Our focus is twofold. On the one hand, the paper examines the continuities of agrarian class relations from the INRA law at the height of neoliberalism in 1996 to the various agrarian reform initiatives introduced since Morales assumed office in 2006. On the other hand, the paper traces the mobilization of the Bolivian Landless Peasants' Movement (MST) in response to the failure of the 1996 neoliberal agrarian reform, followed by the movement's demobilization after Morales' 2006 agrarian reform initiative. The paper explores this demobilization in the context of agrarian relations that have remained largely unchanged in the same period. Finally, the paper draws on recent reflections by MST members who, to varying degrees, seem to be growing critical of Morales' failure to fundamentally alter rural class relations, and the difficulties of remobilizing their movement at the present time.     

被征地农民及其社会保障——文献评论与今后公共政策选择

研究目的：通过文献评论为被征地农民及其社会保障提供公共政策选择的方向。研究方法：文献研究法、归纳分析法。研究结果：1978年中国农村土地家庭承包制改革以来,土地的社会保障功能使政府职能有机会从农村社会保障中退出,导致后来的立法和政策设计对农民应得的社会保障等社会权利的救济均附着在土地权利之上。研究结论：当前的问题在于没有区分农民的土地权利和社会权利,农民失地的同时也失去了附着于土地上的社会保障权利,造成农民保障生存安全、享受社会成果的权利与能力的缺失。     

2018年土地科学研究重点进展评述及2019年展望 ——土地经济分报告

研究目的：梳理并比较2018年国内外土地经济领域研究进展和研究重点,展望未来研究方向。研究方法：文献法。研究结果：2018年,土地价格、土地市场化、土地产权安排、土地征收和土地改革等是国内外共同的研究焦点。国外研究关注城市土地价格的变化趋势、土地市场不完善的原因、产权稳定性与生产效率的关系、土地改革的成效等,而国内研究重点关注农地流转的意愿和价格、失地农民的福利、产权稳定性与农业投资的关系、土地制度演化变迁过程以及集体土地“三权分置”等问题。研究结论：2018年,土地经济领域研究在土地制度变迁过程、土地流转市场新体系、土地供给、土地细碎化、征地影响因素等方面有所进展。2019年将重点关注实现乡村振兴的土地政策、宅基地“三权分置”改革、农村土地制度改革试点跟踪评估、土地经营权流转和融资担保制度等。     

论农村妇女土地权益的保护

随着城乡格局的不断变化,人口的大量流动,各种制度不断改革,农村妇女土地权益流失的问题日渐凸显。中国农村妇女土地权益受到侵害的现象十分严重,这一现象阻碍了农村妇女的生存和发展,也导致了部分弱势群体陷入贫困,影响了中国社会的稳定和和谐发展。因此,本文结合农村的具体情况,从农村妇女土地权益受侵害的现状出发,分析了造成这种情况的原因和产生的危害后果,并提出了建议。     

‘Freedom from Poverty is Not for Free’: Rural Development and the Microfinance Crisis in Andhra Pradesh,India

Within neoliberal development discourse, the poor are represented as entrepreneurial subjects for whom integration into formalized financial systems can facilitate their escape from poverty. This paper examines how the 2010 microfinance crisis in Andhra Pradesh reveals significant fault lines that underlie this narrative. It argues that the crisis of microfinance in Andhra Pradesh needs to be placed within the context of severe agrarian dislocations stemming from the impact of trade liberalization, drought cycles and a transformation of rural social relations. The contradictions are most strikingly represented in increasing rural differentiation and a generalized crisis of social reproduction among land‐poor farmers and landless labourers. A massive influx of microfinance – driven by both state‐operated programmes and private‐sector institutions leveraged with cross‐border financial flows – found a ready clientele among various agrarian classes seeking to bolster consumption and roll over debt in conditions of significant uncertainty and distress. Yet in banking on this vulnerability, microfinance institutions socialized the contradictions of rural Andhra Pradesh and have ultimately been thrown into limbo through the unleashing of political and social forces unforeseen in neoliberal narratives of agrarian change.     

Debating the Politics of Land Occupations

This essay reviews a provocative but flawed volume of case studies of land occupations in Africa, Asia and Latin America and critically examines the arguments advanced by Moyo and Yeros in their introduction and co-authored chapter on Zimbabwe. The editors' core proposition is that the agrarian and national questions are linked in the periphery of capitalism because industrial transformation is incomplete, 'disarticulated' forms of accumulation predominate and dependent states are unable to exercise true sovereignty. The chief agent of struggles for agrarian reform, and the social base of rural social movements that occupy land as a key tactic, is identified as 'the semiproletariat'. The political characteristics of these movements are discussed in the introduction, three continent-wide overviews and several case studies. Most chapters tend not to support the editors' arguments, and sometimes contradict them. These arguments are in any case reductionist and over-schematic. The categories 'semi-proletariat' and 'peasantry' are often elided, and differences of conditions and trajectories are seldom acknowledged. A tendency to economism vitiates discussion of the politics of land. These problems are also in evidence in the chapter on Zimbabwe.     

体制秩序与地权结构——百年土地制度变迁的政治经济学解释

研究目的：从土地权利与社会秩序的关系视角为中国共产党成立以来的土地制度变革提供政治经济学解释。研究方法：基于文献和政策梳理的制度变迁研究。研究结果：（1）中国共产党以土地革命发动农民群体,打破以精英结盟维稳为主导逻辑的社会秩序,使中国社会进入国家与社会一体化的整体体制秩序;（2）在整体体制秩序中,国家构建自上而下渗透与统合社会的政治经济体制,控制土地权利,为国家工业化进行资本积累;（3）当整体体制的推行对整体秩序的维系产生威胁,国家以农村土地制度改革为起点,调整体制安排,进行朝向权利开放的改革来平衡国家与社会的利益;（4）讨论了中国朝向现代土地制度与现代化国家建设的可能路径。研究结论：土地制度变迁与社会秩序转型息息相关,土地问题始终是社会稳定与发展的重大问题。     

The Land Crisis in Zimbabwe Viewed from South of the Limpopo

Farm invasions in Zimbabwe have highlighted the pressing need for land reform throughout the southern African region. In South Africa, where the racial disparities in land holding are most severe, the events in Zimbabwe have raised the temperature of the land debate and led to calls for land invasions by some rural groups. The ANC-led government, facing criticism from both right and left for the slow pace of reform, has veered between strident defence of private property rights and threats to expropriate white farms. White farming interests have reacted differentially, with some progressive voices joining the calls for an accelerated reform programme. Current land reform policy in South Africa seems set to advance the interests of emerging black commercial farmers and tribal chiefs at the expense of the rural poor and landless.     

From Agrarian Reform to Ethnodevelopment in the Highlands of Ecuador

Through an examination of interventions in the agrarian structures and rural society of the Ecuadorian Andes over the past 40 years, this article explores the gradual imposition of a particular line of action that separates rural development from the unresolved question of the concentration of land ownership and wealth among the very few. This imposition has been the consequence, it is argued, of the new development paradigms implemented in Andean peasant communities since the end of land reform in the 1970s. The new paradigms emphasize identity and organizational aspects of indigenous populations at the expense of anything connected with the class‐based campesinista agenda, which was still operational in the indigenous movement in the early 1990s. The essay concludes with some thoughts on the remarkable parallels between the 1990s neoliberal and counter‐reformist models of action, and the pre‐reformist indigenist policies of the period that ended in the 1960s.     

Land Tenure and Tenure Regimes in Mexico: An Overview

This article provides an overview of the evolution of land tenure and tenure regimes in rural Mexico from colonial times to the present. It shows how, by the late nineteenth century, the dual system of indigenous communal tenure and Spanish and criollo landholdings was undermined by liberal legislation that sought to privatize community lands. This resulted in a process of disappropriation and concentration of land in a few hands, which created the setting for rural upheaval during the Mexican revolution and for the subsequent redistributive land reform and the creation of a 'social sector' consisting of ejidos and agrarian communities. By the 1960s, however, the reform sector began to enter into crisis. A reform of the Constitution and new agrarian legislation of 1992 opened the way to privatization of land in the social sector, expecting that this would dynamize production. It is shown that this has not been the case. In a context of globalization and asymmetric free-trade relations the crisis has only deepened.     

Land Reform, Rural Social Relations and the Peasantry

A new book, Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform , edited by Peter Rosset, Raj Patel and Michael Courville is considered. This book, via both general analytical treatment and a series of case studies set in Latin America, Asia and Africa, offers a powerful critique of the World Bank's market-led agrarian reform (MLAR) and provides an alternative model of agrarian reform, the 'food sovereignty movement', that has been articulated by La Via Campesina. Food sovereignty requires that priority be allocated to the domestic production of food and that a right to land be given to small farmers and their families. It is a vision of agrarian reform, with an emphasis on smallholder farming and the transformative power of rural social movements, that has truly emerged 'from below'. The critique of MLAR is compelling. It is argued in this essay, however, that two crucial questions are abstracted from. The first is that of the vastly differing sets of social relations that exist (compare, say, socialist Cuba and capitalist Brazil) and their implications. It is not clear that food sovereignty can, in effect, offer a coherent political economy of an alternative global agrarianism. The second relates to the implicit assumption, found throughout the book, that the peasantry is a homogeneous, undifferentiated social group. This is manifestly not so, and what the existence of socially differentiated peasantries implies requires careful examination.     

The Quest to Bring Land under Social and Political Control: Land Reform Struggles of the Past and Present in Ecuador

Land reform was one of the most important policies introduced in Latin America in the twentieth century and remains high on the political agenda due to sustained pressure from rural social movements. Improving our understanding of the issue therefore remains a pressing concern. This paper responds to this need by proposing a new theoretical framework to explore land reform and providing a fresh analysis of historical and contemporary land struggles in Ecuador. Drawing on the pioneering work of Karl Polanyi, the paper characterizes these struggles as the attempt to increase the social and political control of land in the face of mounting commodification. The movement started in the 1960s and remains evident in Ecuador today. Exploring land reform in Ecuador from this theoretical perspective provides new insight into land struggles in the country and contributes to debates over land reforms of the past and present elsewhere in the Global South.     

Pen to the tiller: Land reform and social mobility across the 1979 Iranian revolution

Giovanni Arrighi joined together questions of agrarian political economy with questions concerning the livelihoods of rural migrants and the fate of peasant communities as they dissipated. In this article, we apply Arrighi's concerns to the case of Iran to examine how processes of agrarian transformation link with trends in social stratification and upward mobility. First, we argue that land reform implemented during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi contributed to a heterogenous social differentiation of the Iranian peasantry. Second, we claim that the widening of access to credentials fostered by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic Republic laid the tracks by which peasants and rural households could convert landholding assets into newly accessible forms of cultural capital. The benefits of these transformational processes, however, fell disproportionately to the rural middle strata created under the Pahlavi monarchy. Through the use of a new survey dataset, we show how pre‐1979 land reform in Iran favoured segments of the peasantry, not for those who remained in rural agricultural production, but instead for those who utilized landholdings as a means to transfer status and opportunities to their children after the 1979 Iranian revolution.     

晋绥边区的土地关系与社会结构的变动 --20世纪三四十年代乡村社会变动的个案分析

20世纪三、四十年代，晋绥边区还保持着封建地主经济的原貌。中共晋绥边区民主政权对于地权关系的调整、改革，就在这一历史场境中展开。以减租减息为主的调整农村土地关系的政策，是在保障佃权和改善农民生活前提下实施的，虽未触及地主土地所有制，但它也带来了深刻的社会变革。1946年5月，晋缓边区开展土改运动。田家会村和吕梁四区土改个案表明，土改所导致的乡村社会变革既是剧烈的也是深刻的，由此形成的乡村社会阶级和权力关系的结构性变动，将持久而深远地影响着中国农村社会发展的路向。“新富农”是土改后乡村中出现的新阶层，由此产生的“不平均化”和两极分化，将是共产党政权必须面对必须做出历史回答的新问题。     

Resisting agrarian neoliberalism and authoritarianism: Struggles towards a progressive rural future in Mozambique

After nearly two and a half decades with a Land Law widely considered progressive, Mozambique is preparing to revise its legal framework for land. Land activists accuse the government of pursuing an authoritarian approach, excluding civil society participation, and falsifying public consultations. The revision would mark a major shift in Mozambique's land policy towards an even more neoliberal framework to allow the transfer of individual land titles. This turning point is a crucial moment for popular movements to mobilize against the consolidation of agrarian neoliberalism and fight for pro-poor land policy that benefits small-scale food producers and rural communities at large. While recognizing different rural and agrarian class formations and interests in Mozambique, I argue that embryonic forms of a cross-class alliance are becoming apparent. As deagrarianization proceeds, the National Union of Peasants (UNAC) plays a key role in mobilizing the rural poor — petty commodity producers, farm workers, fishermen, small agrarian capitalists, and agrarian civil society at large — using left-wing populism to oppose agrarian neoliberalism, which takes authoritarian forms.