This book analyzes the new political economy of land reform in South Africa. It takes a holistic approach to understand South Africa’s land reform, assesses the current policy gaps, and suggests ways of filling them. Due to its cross-disciplinary approach, the book will appeal to a broad audience, and will benefit readers from the fields of policy reform, administration, law, political science, political economics, agricultural economics, global politics, resource studies and development studies.

This book examines key issues concerning land acquisition, and puts forward policy suggestions. Land acquisition is one of the most important issues besetting India’s political economy today. There have been many conflicts surrounding acquisitions; but there have been ample peaceful acquisitions, too. Growth in any economy requires more land. Hence in India too, in the future more and more land will be required for the purposes of infrastructure expansion, industrialization, urbanization etc. The book also examines a number of broader policy issues in the context of land reforms and shows how a successful resolution of the land acquisition matter is vital to attaining a high rate of growth. Using a case study method, the book examines the process of land acquisition in detail and its implications for farmers. It finds that the development of acquired land leads to higher growth and higher employment; and it also leads to improvements for the dalits (the backward class p eople). Benefits in terms of higher revenues for the government are also observed. It argues that, if the acquisition process is properly executed, those farmers who lose land will not oppose acquisition but will instead become partners in the process of growth.

Following the end of World War II in 1945, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spent the next three decades carrying out agrarian reform among nearly one-third of the world’s peasants. This book presents a new perspective on the first step of this reform, when the CCP helped redistribute over 40 million hectares of land to over three hundred million impoverished peasants in the nationwide land reform movement. This land reform, the founding myth of the People’s Republic of China (1949–present) and one of the largest redistributions of wealth and power in history, embodies the idea that an equal distribution of property will lead to social and political equality. Power Over Property argues that in practice, however, the opposite occurred: the redistribution of political power led to a more equal distribution of property. China’s land reform was accomplished not only through the state’s power to define the distribution of resources, but also through village communities prioritizing political entitlements above property rights. Through the systematic analysis of never-before studied micro-level data on practices of land reform in over five hundred villages, Power Over Property demonstrates how land reform primarily involved the removal of former power holders, the mobilization of mass political participation, and the creation of a new social-political hierarchy. Only after accomplishing all of this was it possible to redistribute land. This redistribution, moreover, was determined by political relations to a new structure of power, not just economic relations to the means of production. The experience of China’s land reform complicates our understanding of the relations between economic, social, and political equality. On the one hand, social equality in China was achieved through political, not economic means. On the other hand, the fundamental solution was a more effective hierarchy of fair entitlements, not equal rights. This book ultimately suggests that focusing on economic equality alone may obscure more important social and political dynamics in the development of the modern world.

This is a study of the way individuals organise the use of resources in order to maximise the value of their economic rights over these resources.

Although today's richest countries tend to have long histories of secure private property rights, legal-titling projects do little to improve the economic and political well-being of those in the developing world. This book employs a historical narrative based on secondary literature, fieldwork across thirty villages, and a nationally representative survey to explore how private property institutions develop, how they are maintained, and their relationship to the state and state-building within the context of Afghanistan. In this predominantly rural society, citizens cannot rely on the state to enforce their claims to ownership. Instead, they rely on community-based land registration, which has a long and stable history and is often more effective at protecting private property rights than state registration. In addition to contributing significantly to the literature on Afghanistan, this book makes a valuable contribution to the literature on property rights and state governance from the new institutional economics perspective.

In sub-Saharan Africa, property relationships around land and access to natural resources vary across localities, districts, and farming regions. These differences produce patterned variations in relationships between individuals, communities, and the state. This book captures these patterns in an analysis of structure and variation in rural land tenure regimes. In most farming areas, state authority is deeply embedded in land regimes, drawing farmers, ethnic insiders and outsiders, lineages, villages, and communities into direct and indirect relationships with political authorities at different levels of the state apparatus. The analysis shows how property institutions - institutions that define political authority and hierarchy around land - shape dynamics of great interest to scholars of politics, including the dynamics of land-related competition and conflict, territorial conflict, patron-client relations, electoral cleavage and mobilization, ethnic politics, rural rebellion, and the localization and "nationalization" of political competition.

As many Indigenous communities return to self-governance and self-determination, they are taking their own approaches to property rights and community development. Based on case studies in four Indigenous communities – the Westbank, Membertou, Nisga’a, and James Bay Cree nations – Jamie Baxter traces how local leaders have set the course for land rights and development during formative periods of legal and economic upheaval. Drawing on new research about institutional change in organizational settings, Baxter explores when and how community leaders have sustained inalienable land rights without turning to either persuasion or coercive force – the two levers of power normally associated with political leadership. Inalienable Properties challenges the view that liberalized land markets are the inevitable result of legal and economic change. It shows how inalienability can result from intentional choices and is linked to structures of decision-making that have long-lasting consequences for communities.