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The ‘land sovereignty’ alternative: a proposition for discussion

Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Jennifer C. Franco and Sofia Monsalve1 

12 February 2014 draft

Abstract

 In this essay we raise questions about the strengths and limitations of some current

analytical and political frameworks employed by key social movement activists in their

struggles for land control in order to understand better, and mobilize effectively around,

land issues in the current global context. We offer more questions than answers, framed

loosely as propositions for open-ended discussion. We that it will contribute towards

moving forward – in research and political actions -- with some proposed alternatives on

the global land front. We introduce and offer an initial discussion about ‘land

sovereignty’: why we need to transition the people’s demand for land from a largelydefensive struggle to one that is both defensive and pro-active struggle, from a demand

 for ‘land tenure security’ to land sovereignty, a broad framework and advocacy

campaign that we hope can capture both the defensive struggle of the rural poor

“people’s counter-enclosure campaign”, and their pro-active struggle—“people’s

enclosure campaign”. The notion of land sovereignty, cast here generally in normative

terms, goes beyond the conventional notion of ‘land struggle as mainly farmland

struggle’ – to encompass a much broader conception of land and framing of land

struggles: rural agricultural, rural non-agricultural, urban, and peri-urban, bringing in

a much wider cast of actors from various social classes and groups. In this sense, its

breadth is akin to that of the food sovereignty political project. In fact, we suggest that

land sovereignty is the land pillar of food sovereignty.

Introduction

The convergence of the food, financial and energy crises in recent years has put the land

question back onto the center stage of development discourse. This is especially so at a

1 Saturnino M. Borras Jr. is an associate professor at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and a

fellow of the Transnational Institute (TNI),  junborras5@gmail.com. Jennifer C. Franco is the coordinator of

the Agrarian Justice Program of the Transnational Institute (TNI),  jennycfranco@tni.org. Sofia Monsalve is

the coordinator of the Land Program of Foodfirst Information and Action Network (FIAN) – International

Section, monsalve@fian.org. This paper is a slightly revised version of a 2010 paper by Borras and Franco published by TNI as a Discussion Paper which in turn bulds on the authors’ body of work on the issue of

land grabs. This current version is the latest attempt of the authors to develop some parts of the paper a

little further. In the context of this work-in-progress undertaking, a third author came on board, Sofia

Monsalve. The current incomplete draft is a paper prepared for the international workshop at MIT in

Boston on 27 Feb to 2 March 2014. This current incomplete draft is not appropriately referenced, in the

main text and in the bibliography. This version is not for broader circulation and is not for citation without

authors’ permission. As we submit this 12 February 2014 version of the paper to the MIT workshop

organizers, we continue to work on this work-in-progress paper. For queries, please get in touch with the

authors.

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mailto:junborras5@gmail.commailto:junborras5@gmail.commailto:junborras5@gmail.commailto:jennycfranco@tni.orgmailto:jennycfranco@tni.orgmailto:jennycfranco@tni.orgmailto:monsalve@fian.orgmailto:monsalve@fian.orgmailto:monsalve@fian.orgmailto:monsalve@fian.orgmailto:jennycfranco@tni.orgmailto:junborras5@gmail.com

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struggles for land control in order to understand better, and mobilize effectively around,

land issues in the current global context. We offer more questions than answers, framed

loosely as propositions for open-ended discussion. We that it will contribute towardsmoving forward – in research and political actions -- with some proposed alternatives on

the global land front. We introduce and offer an initial discussion about ‘land

sovereignty’: why we need to transition the people’s demand for land a largely defensivestruggle to one that is both defensive and pro-active struggle, from a demand for ‘land

tenure security’ to land sovereignty, a broad framework and advocacy campaign that we

hope can capture both the defensive struggle of the rural poor “people’s counter-enclosure

campaign”, and their  pro-active  struggle—“people’s enclosure campaign”. Landsovereignty is the land pillar of food sovereignty. As such, it is ultimately framed in the

context of people’s (human) rights, broadly cast.

Context and basis for reframing land issues

A convergence of the global financial, environmental, energy, and food in recent years

has contributed to a dramatic revaluation of and rush to control land. Transnational andnational economic actors from various business sectors such as oil and auto, mining and

forestry, food and chemical, and bioenergy are eagerly acquiring; or declaring their

intention to acquire, large swathes of land on which to build, maintain, or extend large-scale extractive and agro-industrial enterprises.

As a result, we are seeing a rise in the volume of cross-border large-scale land deals.Various estimates placed the total lands being transacted in this context from a few

million to several hundred million hectares, although just how much land actually

changed control in this context remains unknown—warranting empirical investigation.There question of measurement of the extent of land grabs has itself become the subject

of recent debates (see, e.g. Scoones et al. 2013, Oya 2013, Edelman 2013, Anseeuw et al

2013, and Rulli and D’Odorico 2013). But while domestic capital and nationalgovernments are heavily involved in land deals (Wolford et al. 2013), transnational

corporations (TNC) are a key actor. On many occasions, we see a close partnership (or

collusion) between transnational and domestic capital with national governments. In

many cases, national governments are actively shopping around for possible landinvestors.

At the same time that the global land grab is well underway, sparking controversy as itunfolds, the main storyline is being transformed. There is a perceptible attempt in

mainstream development circles to shift the discourse from alarm over global land

grabbing, to acceptance of it. This new acceptance is founded on the idea that there is animportant ‘opportunity’ in the ongoing land deals for rural development; this opportunity

must be grabbed, as it were. Moreover, the emphasis in this changing narrative is on

gathering ‘multiple stakeholders’ to unite around a set of basic principles as a step toward

instituting an international ‘Code of Conduct’ (CoC) that can craft so-called ‘win-win’development outcomes. This re-framing is best illustrated by a statement made by IFPRI

(2009) when it proposed its version of a CoC, calling for “making virtue out of

necessity”.

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In the midst of emerging debate explained above, we reiterate some messages that may

have implications for research, policy advocacy and political actions. First, amidst

 popular outcry against the current global land grab, it is important, even critical, todifferentiate the competing views, strategies, and alternatives put forward by various

individuals and groups. While at a glance they may all be raising criticisms of the

(trans)national commercial land deals, they do not necessarily share the sameinterpretations as to the nature and implications of the phenomenon, tasks to be done, and

strategic alternatives (Borras and Franco 2010a; Borras, Franco and Wang 2013). The

underlying reasons for these differences can be class-based, as in the case between the

now defunct International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP) and ViaCampesina, or ideological-political, as in the case between La Via Campesina and the

World Bank or IFPRI. In terms of research, the two opposing camps will logically pursue

different research questions and methodologies, propose competing policy proposals, andtake competing political actions: one is likely to reinforce, not undermine, existing

development framework while the other may attempt to subvert the dominant

development model and construct a fundamentally different alternative. The future

 political dynamics on research, policymaking, and political actions around (trans)nationalcommercial land transactions will be largely (re)shaped by the dynamics between these

competing camps. It is equally important however to go beyond these polarized positions,

and critically examine heterogeneity of positions within these camps and between them.The same class-based and ideological fault-lines that separate key broad camps from each

other are found—though in much lesser extent and intensity—within each camp (see

Borras, Franco and Wang 2013). It is crucial to emphasize the diversity of positionswithin and between various camps among social movements and civil society especially

 because the emerging literature, policy and political discourse seem to erroneously

simplify the politics of social movements and civil society in relation to the global landgrab, as explained in Borras and Franco (2013).

Second, the nature, direction, pace, and extent of changes in land use in the context of(trans)national commercial land deals are diverse and complex—and cannot be captured

 by the popularly protested conversion of land use from ‘land for food production for

consumption and local market’ to land ‘for food and biofuel production for export’

(Borras and Franco 2012). It is relevant to map out the broad patterns of land use change,emphasizing the terms of the rural poor’s insertion into the emerging food-biofuel agro-

industrial complex, in the broader context of food regimes (McMichael 2009), livelihood

displacement, or indeed dispossession caused by the latter, regardless of whether the processes are driven by TNCs and foreign governments or not, and whether food and

 biofuel production is geared for export or not. Focusing our query this way will

necessarily require a political economy framework, which in turn uses a class analyticlens. This will entail disaggregating concepts that are popularly, and rather casually, used

in everyday discourses of civil society, policy experts and some researchers, e.g., ‘local

community’ or ‘local people’. In many places, ‘local community’ or ‘local people’

include kulaks, cacique, chiefs, petty landlords, traders, lumpen elements, andmoneylenders who may all want to shift to commercial food-fuel production and

exchange, for export or domestic markets, or to other related extractive activities, perhaps

in contrast to the position of many small scale farmers. Local communities are usually

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comprised of social classes and groups with different, often competing, interests and

varying degrees of political power. These different social classes and groups have highly

differentiated access to, control over, and use of land resources. Hence, changes in landuse and land property relations brought about by the emerging food-fuel agro-industrial

complex will have a differentiated impact on these groups; partly because of this, various

groups are likely to eventually have different views of and political reactions to thecurrent (trans)national commercial land deals. The only way to have a firm grasp of what

is going on at the local communities therefore is to deploy in our analysis the four key

interlinked questions in agrarian political economy as explained by Bernstein (2010):

Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? And what do they do with the wealthcreated?

Third, and partly following James Scott (1998), instead of reproducing the neat andsimplified grid, standard records, and processes on land property as conceived and

enforced by the state, it is critical to take the complex and messy actually existing land-

 based social relations as the starting point of our analysis and political actions — 

regardless of state-sanctioned or imposed land property categories. By doing this, we will be able to directly engage with the most appropriate unit of critical inquiry and analysis,

and the key object of any policy reform and political action, namely: existing land-based

social relations. By doing so, we will be able to understand better the political dynamicsof the nature, direction, pace, and extent of land property relations change as a result of

(trans)national commercial land deals.

Fourth, it seems to us that while land reform – or even agrarian reform – has become an

important rallying call by many organized movements of the rural poor today, this

concept has been rendered quite narrow and limited. For example, contemporary landgrabbing activities are being carried out, or are planned to be carried out, in settings

where successful land reforms have been implemented in the past, such as Brazil,

Mozambique, Philippines and India — just to name a few. Therefore, conventional landreform cannot be a panacea for land grabbing. Land reform is more important than ever,

 but alone cannot represent as a comprehensive rallying framework against contemporary

land grabbing. Conventional land reform is taken to mean what Griffin et al. (2002, 279– 

80) have defined: redistributing ‘land ownership from large private landowners to small peasant farmers and landless agricultural workers,’ emphasizing that it is ‘concerned with

a redistribution of wealth.’ The bias is towards formally privatized large tracts of land,

such as Latin America’s latifundia. This is the strength of land reform — but this is alsoits weakness. Most agricultural land in the world has non-private (state, public,

communal, common, and so on) institutional property arrangements. In fact, much of the

targeted lands in the on-going global land grab are non-private lands, outside the usualdomain of conventional land reform. In addition, the conventional notion of land reform

is always associated with agricultural landholdings in developing countries. It is therefore

a non-starter – politically speaking, at least at present – in contemporary developed

countries, such as Europe or North America where, as discussed earlier in the paper, arealso confronted by major land concentration issue. The many urban and peri-urban land

issues, as well as rural-but-not-agriculture related land issues, such as land for hiusing

issues, are not captured by the conventional land reform frame. Therefore, to confront

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global land grabbing and land concentration with a land reform demand — as is the case

among civil society groups — is analytically and politically weak.

When using the term land reform or agrarian reform, some groups such as La Via

Campesina implicitly mean more than just large private landholdings. However, without

an appropriate concept, what is meant by land reform is unclear and so is less effective, intheir campaign and lobby work. For example, Via Campesina (2008: 10) explained:

We will fight for a comprehensive genuine agrarian reform that upholds the rights

of women, indigenous peoples, peasants, fisherfolk, workers, pastoralists,migrants and future generations and enables the coexistence of different

communities in their territories. Customary rights to territory must be recognized

 but must be adapted if they discriminate against women or marginalizedcommunities. Agrarian reform must ensure priority in the use of land, water,

seeds and livestock breeds, etc. for food production and other local needs rather

than production for export (Via Campesina, 2008: 10).

 Not only is there a certain amount of discrepancy as to the definition of land reform, there

are inherent problems in conventional land reforms. One fundamental problem in land

 policy/land and reform discourses is that states have always engaged in trying to simplify — ‘make legible’ — existing complex, dynamic and fluid land-based social relations as

 part of the logic of modern state-building (Scott 1998). In fact, Anna Tsing (2002),

 pointed out that these types of land policy processes are more interested in ‘things’, suchas papers, title deeds, and so on — even when these simplified property categorizations

do not actually conform to existing realities; for example declaring as ‘empty’ a public

forest despite the historical presence of communities therein.

Fifth and finally, and as already emphasized in the beginning of this paper, while land

grabbing is indeed a raging and urgent land issue today – it is not the only urgent andimportant one. The issue of generic ‘land concentration’ generally caused by structural

and institutional processes outside of what can be broadly defined as land grabs remains

 perhaps the more widespread and most urgent land issue today. Two sets of studies have

reiterated this point empirically. The first one is the FAO studies on land issues in 17countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2011, an abridged version of the

collection is published as special issue of Canadian Journal of Development Studies

(CJDS) in December 2012. The other is the action research compilation by the EuropeanCoordination Via Campesina (ECVC) and the land advocacy campaign alliance ‘Hands-

Off The Land’ (HOTL) and published by the Transnational Institute in June 2013 which

is a study of land grabbing and land concentration in European Union (Franco and Borras2013). This is a critical point: not all urgent and important land issues are land grabbing;

not all non-land grab land issues are non-important. It is crucial to look at contemporary

land issues from the interlinked processes of land grabbing and land concentration. This

has a far-reaching implication in terms of what is to be done about alternatives.

In short, land has been put back onto the centre stage of development debate, provoked

 by the recent convergence of multiple crises, resulting in land grabbing and continuing

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land concentration. The tendency among several rural social movements and their allies

is to quickly re-argue for the conventional land reform, as the counter policy framework

that would protect the land rights of the rural poor. This in our view is relevant andimportant, but is also limited and very weak. We need a comprehensive and flexible

concept that can serve as political platform.

‘Land Sovereignty’ as an alternative conceptual framework

In so many ways, the conventional land reform discourse has internalized the same

 problems of many state land policies; it avoids complex existing land-based socialrelations and relies heavily on official standard censuses and data on land property

relations. As a result, land reform scholarship misses a significant portion of actually

existing social relations that are not captured in these official records, which should bethe object of redistributive reforms. The inherent problem within conventional land

reforms has become an important one in the midst of contemporary (trans)national

commercial land deals, especially because the non-private (‘public lands’) have become

the principal target of enclosure. Instead, we need a framework that takes the messy,complex, actually existing land-based social relations as the starting point, while

emphasizing rural poor people’s effective access to, control over, and use of land. We

therefore propose a shift from the call for ‘land tenure security’—or indeed, ‘landgovernance’—to a call for ‘land sovereignty’ (Borras and Franco 2010b).

Our starting point is to problematize the notion of the conventional call for ‘land tenuresecurity’. In the land policy literature in general, ‘security’ means providing, promoting

and/or protecting the property rights of the exclusive owners and/or users of the land. It

usually means individual and private property rights that include the right to alienate. Itmeans commodification of land, transforming land into something marketable. Titles are

the most important expression of this so-called security. The problem with the notion of

‘security’ is that it can mean anything, pro- or anti-poor. Land tenure security can meanthe property security of big landlords living in the capital city, and relying on tenants or

farm workers to make the land productive. Land tenure security can also mean the

 property security of corrupt government officials, who made property claims over vast

tracts of lands in far-flung public lands through anomalous deals and for speculative purposes. Security in land property can also mean security of the banks that are selling

credit for profit, and need collateral in case of payment default. In the current context of

global land grabbing ‘security’ can, and in fact always, refers to the security of(trans)national capital invested in land, for example, for 99 year lease or outright sale. In

fact, in the mainstream economic discourse security around land property almost always

means security of the elite owners or claimants, most of whom are absentee owners orclaimants.

Looking more critically into the historic demands for land by the various strata of the

rural-based working classes, against our critical re-evaluation of the ‘tenure security’concept, we realize that we need an alternative concept that better captures what we

mean: effective control by the working poor people over land where they live in and

work. Despite the awkwardness of the term, we argue that ‘land sovereignty’ captures the

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The strengths and weaknesses of state-centric and community-oriented views on land can

 be seen as well from the lens of ‘rights’ and ‘empowerment’, two important ingredients

of a land sovereignty concept. In this context, we build on Jonathan Fox’s (2007: 335)argument, as follows:

“Rights and empowerment do not necessarily go together. Institutions maynominally recognize rights that actors, because of imbalances in power relations,

are not able to exercise in practice. Conversely, actors may be empowered in the

sense of having the experience and capacity to exercise rights, while lacking

institutionally recognized opportunities to do so. Formal institutions can helpestablish rights that challenge informal power relations, while those informal

structures can also undermine formal structures.”

Thus, we do not stop with the nation-state; we bring the ‘people’ into the definition of

land sovereignty, and so the notion of ‘popular sovereignty’. Here, by ‘people’ we mean

the working classes. By combining formal state sovereignty with popular sovereignty, we

are able to address some of the key concerns raised in state-centric and community-oriented approaches to land control, and also address issues around rights and

empowerment.

If the bottom line principle is for working people to have effective access, control and use

of land, then the property rights regimes will be necessarily diverse within and between

communities from one society to another, depending on current structural andinstitutional situations conditioned historically. Here, again, it does not make sense to

have the conventional land reform as a catch-all demand or call, nor is the notion of

‘territory’. In terms of systems of property rights then these can be communal,community, state, or private property rights. In settings marked by high concentration of

 private landholdings, redistribution through land reform to create individual freehold

 private property of small plots for land reform beneficiaries make a lot of sense – as inmost capitalist-oriented land reforms historically, such as those in South Korea decades

ago to many of land reform settlements in contemporary Brazil. But conventional land

reform did not only create individualized private property for small plots. There are

several examples historically of non-individualized private property land reforms, fromthe Cuban and Chinese examples in the 1950s to the Mexican ejido for the most part of

the 20th century. Effecting real access, control and use in some settings does not have put

an end to the property claims of landowning elites; this can be achieved by reforming theterms of tenancy or leasehold arrangements, as in the case of West Bengal. Maintaining

communal or community control and arrangement within patches of state or private land

can also be a possible modality, such as in the case of contemporary reservas campesinas (peasant reserves) in Colombia, several initiatives around community land banking in

northeast Thailand, or some relatively successful cases of indigenous peoples’ land

claims in the contemporary Philippines, or ethnic minority forestland claims in Vietnam.

Lands can remain formally owned and/or controlled by the state, but effectively accessed,controlled and used by working people, as in the case of contemporary Vietnam and

China. If we see people’s land control from this perspective what we see is multiple and

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diverse forms of social relations – and thus, formal and informal institutional

arrangements to govern such relations between and within the state and society.

The convergence of multiple crises has, as we explained in the beginning of the paper, re-

valued land in a big way. This pertains to various types of land – and not just agricultural

land. For example, landless rural plantation workers – from the sugarcane belt of Brazil,to the oil palm enclaves of Indonesia, to the banana plantation zone of the Philippines –

may not be interested in agricultural to farm, but are certainly keen on having a piece of

land as housing plots. There indeed is a plurality of land types in rural areas in this

context, including forestlands as well as residential lands. Meanwhile, urban and peri-urban lands are included in this phenomenon, as we can observe not only in mega-cities

in the south, but also in key BRICS countries where corporate lad accumulation occurs in

and around key cities, as in China, India (especially for its Special Economic Zones), andRussia (especially the more recent spread of ‘dachas’). In North Atlantic countries, land

issue is also very much of urban and peri-urban issue. This can be seen in places where

there are ongoing conflicts between urban dwellers who wanted to put to use empty urban

lands versus corporate and state interests over these prime real estate. We see this fromDetroit to Vienna. We see this in vast places where there are struggles between corporate

giants and governments and the one hand and local communities on the other over

questions of gas pipelines as in the case of Canada, or over hydraulic fracturing orfracking) as in the case of the eastern United States. These land issues necessarily

 brought a different set of working people now confronted by some kind of a land

question. The struggle for land today therefore cannot be, and should not be, reduced toagricultural land struggle by farmers. Key is to broaden the land question to encompass

the fantastic diversity of land issues and land struggles by a great mixture of people.

Class and identify politics play an equally key role in these land politics. Only a broadand flexible framework can capture this changing context. And our proposition is that

‘land sovereignty’, however awkward it is, can offer a preliminary framework for a

different kind of conversation around a new way of looking at land questions.

Unlike the limited scope of the several variants of land reform, land sovereignty

simultaneously addresses all the broad and key land-based social dynamics of

redistribution, distribution, non-redistribution and (re)concentration. Land sovereigntyincludes the conventional land reform—but goes far beyond it. The concept of land

sovereignty also addresses the two broad fronts of contemporary land struggles: struggles

against land dispossession and displacement, as well as struggles for land (re)possession,which we will discuss in the next section.

Land sovereignty as a political project

The notion of land sovereignty re-politicizes and historically grounds the popular

mainstream conception of land governance, by bringing in social relations as the key unit

of analysis, and object of policy and political advocacy, rather than ‘things’ like papersand titles. Land sovereignty can thus be used to also contribute to the construction of a

counter-narrative in reaction to the aggressive neoliberal ‘land governance’ perspective— 

which is a technical, administrative approach to land.

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It is important to note however that the notion of land sovereignty as a political project is

inherently a cross-class project involving different strata of the working classes andgroups, both rural and urban, agriculture-related and not, within and across national

 borders – as explained above. It necessarily involves peasants, small and medium family

farmers, landless rural labourers, indigenous peoples, pastoralists, fishers, urban dwellers,community residents, forest dwellers, agriculturalists, environmentalists, food justice

activists, among others. It is therefore a very broad struggle front – which makes it a

more inclusive, encompassing and promising proposition. In this way, it is similar to food

sovereignty as a political project where we can see Indonesian forest dweller, urbangardener from Detroit, Venezuelan campesino, environmentalist in France, Zimbabwean

small farmer, pastoralist in Iran, a community resident in a fracking site in South Africa,

anti-SEZ activist in India, sugarcane cutter in Brazil – linking arms with a commonstruggle for land, forging a common global struggle front.

While the broadness of the land sovereignty political project is the source of great

 potential and promise, it is also its key source of potential weakness. Bringing everyonewith some kind of a land question together also means that the political project

internalizes not only the pre-existing synergies among these different groups – but also

tensions. In many cases, a land sovereignty political project will have to engage withother well-off classes in the countryside: rich farmers, traders, and moneylenders.

Tactical and strategic alliances in and around a land sovereignty project are likely to

emerge and disappear. re-emerge and reappear. However, a workable political project,like land sovereignty, is one that confronts, and does not back away from political

tensions, while exploring potential synergies among diverse groups within a cross-class

coalition.

Land sovereignty represents two dimensions of contemporary people’s struggles for land:

as a people’s counter-enclosure campaign, land sovereignty represents struggles againstdispossession; as a people’s enclosure campaign, land sovereignty represents struggles

for (re)possession of land property. A land sovereignty movement is therefore necessarily

a ‘people’s’ (counter)enclosure movement. We offer preliminary discussion below.

 Land sovereignty as people’s counter-enclosure campaign

A people’s counter-enclosure campaign is one where the rural poor resist political processes that maintain inequitable status quo in land ownership and control, as well as

struggle against trends towards land (re)concentration. In the specific current

international context, it is a campaign where people struggle to resist (trans)national landgrabbers. There are two types of land policy institutional contexts within which a

 people’s counter-enclosure campaign could be launched, or should be launched, namely,

non-(re)distribution and (re)concentration (Borras and Franco 2010c).

The defining character of the non-(re)distribution land policy category is the maintenance

of the status quo, where the latter is a condition that is marked by land-based inequity and

exclusion, such as the existence of latifundia in Latin America, or state monopoly in land

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as in Indonesia. Here, the most typical land policy is ‘no land policy’. Having no land

 policy is effectively the policy framework at play. In settings where there are vast land-

 based inequities and exclusion, a ‘no land policy, policy’ effectively advocates for non-redistribution of land-based wealth and power. In other settings, a similar effect is created

 by having a land policy, even a redistributive land reform policy, but then keeping this

dormant. An example of this is the Basic Agrarian Law of 1960 in Indonesia that existed beyond the 1960s, but was never really actively implemented until the late 1990s regime

transition. The existence of this type of land policy favours and facilitates (trans)national

land grabbing.

However, there are also active land policies that are categorically non-(re)distributive.Formalization of inequality  occurs in agrarian societies marked by socio-economic

inequality and lopsided power relations between various groups and classes in society,where a technical ‘formalization’ of land rights campaign is carried out. Formalizing land

rights of legal claimants in settings marked by high degree of inequality is likely to

formalize land claims by the non-poor, mostly elite claimants, or indeed, the state. In

such cases, formalization policies have only formalized inequality and institutionalizedhistorical injustice. Many earlier private land titling programs, carried out by former

colonial powers, dispossessed the local population and facilitated land grabbing by

colonizers. Formal land rights do not guarantee protection of land rights for the rural poorin the current context of global land rights. The Land Law of 1997 in Mozambique

guarantees land rights of local communities; the same law was used by transnational

large-scale land investors to secure large chunks of lands for their investments,displacing, and even dispossessing many of the local population in the process.

 Restitution without redistribution happens when large-scale land-based wealth and powertransfers are carried out in the name of the poor, who in reality have no significant

effective access to, or control over land resources that are transferred. Examples of this

include post-conflict situations where land restitutions were carried out through largechunks of land being awarded to communities or the state, without any process of

democratizing access to and control over these land resource. Many civil wars were

 partly caused by struggles to control land resources or territories. Therefore, many peace

settlements have included land policies. However, seldom do redistributive reforms inland figure in peace settlements, partly because on many occasions forces opposed to any

redistributive perspective in land policies are located in the warring factions. In cases

where democratization of land was attempted in the peace settlement process, the kindsof land policies adopted were too market-friendly, as in Central America in the mid-

1990s, and the 1980 Zimbabwe peace settlement. As a result, policies benefited the elite

and the central state more than the rural poor.

Finally, there is also a trajectory that can be termed as counter-reform. The conventional

use of resettling potential and actual land claimants to empty public lands may have some

 potential for redistribution, although historically it has impacted negatively on affected pre-existing settlements of local populations (Scott 1998: 69). However, where such a

resettlement policy is done precisely to avoid and undermine political agitation for

redistributive reforms in the larger agrarian society it constitutes a counter-reform. It is in

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this context that the arguments put forward by land reform scholars are important to

recall. Feder (1970) once called the policy of land reform in public lands ‘counter-

reform’. Today, a good example of this is the agrarian reform resettlement program in theAmazon frontier of Brazil. João Pedro Stedile (2007, 203–4), leader of the Movement of

the Landless Workers or MST, explains that in recent years under the Lula administration

the government settled 380,000 families, but 64 per cent of these families were sent to theAmazon, which avoided any expropriation of private land owners: “The families are now

completely out of the class struggle . . . Our people are stranded in the Amazon, lost in a

hostile environment. Not even a small market for their produce is available there.”

The defining character of (re)concentration  is that while land-based wealth and power

transfers do occur, access to and control over the land resource actually gets

(re)concentrated in the hands of the economically and politically dominant social classesand groups: landed classes, capitalists, corporate entities, state or other dominant

community groups such as village chiefs. This kind of change can occur in private or

 public lands. The organization of control over land resources can be through individual,

corporate, state, or community group institutional arrangements in property rights. Thetransfer may involve full land ownership or not. Different variations are possible, but the

 bottom line is the same: the recipients of land-based wealth and power transfers are the

economically and politically dominant social classes and groups, as well as state officialsand bureaucrats.

There are at least three broad trajectories within the (re)concentration category.  Reverseredistribution is where redistributed land-based wealth and power (from the landed

classes or the state to the working poor) was later redistributed back to the landed classes,

other elites or the state. This can occur in a large scale, such as those in Chile afterAllende, or in a ‘micro’ level involving specific landholdings that were previously

redistributed to peasants. In the current context of global land grabbing, an example is the

30,000 hectares of Procana sugarcane plantation in the Gaza province of Mozambiquewhere the local population, beneficiaries of previous land reform, were displaced to pave

the way for the plantation. Perverse redistribution is a trajectory where land-based wealth

and power are transferred from the working poor people to the economically and

 politically dominant classes and groups, as well as state officials and bureaucrats. Thiscan happen under a variety of policies, including notionally pro-poor policies such as

land reform and forest land allocation or management devolution, as well as through

formalization and privatization of land rights, a variety of land-based joint ventureagreements, and land lease arrangements, and so on. Historically, this kind of

redistribution has occurred in many guises and in many places. These include the many

 private land titling initiatives past and present that were captured by dominant classes,groups, state officials, and bureaucrats, where the poor lost access to and control over

land resources, as shown in the vast critical literature on the subject. Examples of this are

 plenty in the current context of global land grabbing; in Cambodia previously farmed and

occupied lands were suddenly appropriated by the state for reallocation to domestic andtransnational investors.  Lopsided distribution is where land-based wealth and power are

transferred from the state or community, directly or indirectly, by policy or through the

open market, to a handful of private or state entities, with the net effect of excluding

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others while benefiting a few. On many occasions, the way state lands are being

reallocated by the Indonesian state to private corporations represents a good example of

this type; it has facilitated the rapid expansion of oil palm in that country in the context ofglobal surge in biodiesel.

In conclusion, these two broad types of land policies—non-(re)distribution and(re)concentration—undermine the fundamental property and livelihood interests of the

rural poor in a variety of ways. In many cases, these policies lead to dispossession of

countless working class people, in others these lead to poor people’s adverse

incorporation into enclaves of corporate-controlled agri-food and bioenergy complexes, both in the South and North.

These policies are being opposed, in various ways and extents—by the rural, fromorganized to unorganized, overt to covert, legal to extralegal, and from local to

transnational arenas of political contestations. The working class people’s counter-

enclosure campaign is a defensive struggle. It is a critical component of land sovereignty

campaign, but represents only half of the picture of the agrarian battlefront today. Theother half is a more pro-active campaign, the people’s enclosure campaign.

 Land sovereignty as people’s enclosure campaign

A people’s enclosure campaign is one where the rural poor pro-actively assert their

 political control over their remaining lands against potential and actual threats of eliteenclosure. It is one that can be done either independently from the central state

(community-based people’s enclosure of the commons) or in direct engagement with the

state. Here, we will focus on the latter type. There are two types of land policyinstitutional contexts within which people’s enclosure campaign can, and should, take

 place namely, redistributive and distributive land policies – both policies privilege the

working classes (Borras and Franco 2010c).

On the one hand, the defining principle for redistributive land policy  is that the land-

 based wealth and power are transferred from the monopoly control of either private

landed classes, or the state, to landless and near-landless working people. It changes therelative shares of social classes and groups in society. It is a ‘zero-sum’ reform process.

Here, redistributed wealth and power is a matter of degree, depending on the net loss of

the landed entities, and on the net gain of the landless and near-landless poor. The policies that expropriate lands without compensation and distribute these to beneficiaries

are redistributive reforms. Lands that are expropriated can in turn be appropriated by the

state to create state farms to benefit the landless poor by giving them employment inthese large-scale farms, as in the case of Cuba, in agricultural context. Redistributive

reforms also take form as land policies that acquire land usually at slightly below the

commercial market value, and then re-sell the same land to peasants at slightly below the

full market value of the land. Arguably, the former is more redistributive than the latter,as illustrated empirically in the cases of Chinese and Taiwanese processes of the early

1950s, respectively.

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The conventional notion of redistributive land reform, applied only in large private farm

lands, is the most commonly understood example of land-based redistributive reform.

These are explained in important works such as Tuma (1965) and Griffin et al (2002).However, in this paper we argue that there are a variety of policy expressions, beyond the

conventional notion, that can result in changing the relative shares of the social classes

and groups in society. These include redistributive land reform, land restitution, sharetenancy or land tenure reform, land stewardship, indigenous land rights recognition, and

labour reform. This is regardless of whether a policy is applied to a private or public land.

The key is to be able to establish the degree of redistributed wealth and power, and to

which direction.

Redistributive land policies can also occur in non-agricultural context, as when state-

directed housing land policies, both rural and urban, or for urban gardening, or forforestry and indigenous people’s land claims. This latter set of redistributive land policy

issues is under-explored, and deserves more extensive empirical research. In the context

of the revalorization of land globally, it becomes necessary to extend the notion of

redistributive land policies way beyond the conventional idea of farmland redistributivereform – to include non-agricultural land issues. It is profoundly important to think of

redistributive land policy, for instance, in the context of Detroit urban land, or rural non-

agricultural land issue such as landless rural labourer’s housing lot issues amongsugarcane cutters in Central Philippines.

On the other hand, the basic defining character of the distributive land policy reform isthat the landless and near-landless working poor are the recipients of land-based wealth

and power transferred to them. However, the original source of wealth and power can

either be the state or community, or a private entity that has been fully compensated bythe state. In many settings, this type of reform would mean affirming and protecting pre-

existing land access and occupancy by poor peasants, whose tenure is insecure, as in

many countries in Africa (Cousins 2007). It is a ‘positive sum’ reform process. It doesnot take resources from one social class or group in society to redistribute to another. In

fact, often such a policy is passed precisely to avoid having to resort to redistributive

 policies (Fox 1993: 10). For example, a piece of land that is officially categorized as

 public or state forest is actually an agroforest land tended and tilled by poor peasants orforest dwellers. A long-term forestland use rights allocation was issued to the poor

 peasants and forest dwellers in order to make their pre-existing access to the forest land

more formal and secure. This is a distributive reform.

Meanwhile, a government may purchase at market price a piece of private land and then

distribute this to the landless for free or for a minimal cost. This type of transaction can,under certain conditions, qualify as distributive reform. The post-apartheid South African

land reform is, arguably, an example because the beneficiaries received a cash transfer

from the government in order to purchase land (Lahiff 2007). Some past and present

 public land resettlement programs, in theory and under certain conditions, may qualify inthis category.

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Similar to the discussion under the redistributive type of reform, the landed property

rights that are distributed can be private, state, or community-owned. Distributed landed

 property rights organizations can be individual, group or cooperative. This distributivetype of reform, in general, is perhaps not as controversial or conflictual as the

redistributive type. This is because the key question here is more ‘who gets what’ and

avoids taking lands from the landed classes (Fox 1993: 10). However, it would be amistake to assume that all reforms involving such lands are conflict-free. This is certainly

not the case. Especially where there is a perception by some elites that such distributive

reforms may actually erode some of their economic privileges, prestige, and

opportunities, whether losses are real or perceived. As in redistributive types, distributiveland reform can be found in a variety of policies, including the conventional land reform,

forest devolution, public land resettlement, and so on.

Here again, it is critical to adjust our unit of analysis and empirical inquiry to go beyond

rural farmlands, to include rural non-agricultural and urban and peri-urban lands. This

may even be the more important and contentious type of reform because as discussed

earlier in this paper, the chief target of current global enclosures are lands that arestate/public lands. This set of issues is way under-developed, and needs further empirial

research and conceptualization.

Stepping back, and looking at the big picture, we suggest that people’s enclosure

campaign through redistributive and distributive land policies can be carried out through

at least three broad strategies, namely, state-centric, social movement or community-led,and state/community-driven. It is not about the mere presence of absence of either state

or community entity that defines these types of strategies, but it is the character and the

extent to which each actor plays a key role that is important.

State-centric. Historically, the most sweeping (re)distributive land reforms were state-

driven (Barraclough, 2001). Examples include China from 1949, Taiwan in the 1950s,Japan and South Korea after World War II and Vietnam in the 1950s and after 1975.

There is emerging evidence showing that the A1 land reform model (small family farms)

of the Zimbabwe fast-track land reform shows some relative success.

As the examples show, successful and significant land reforms were carried out by the

central state not only in the context of socialist transitions, but also in non-socialist

contexts. The central state has played a key and leading role in these sweeping social justice redistributive land reforms. It does not mean to say that other non-state actors

were absent or did not play any significant role. They did; but, the role of the central state

was the key.

State-centric (re)distributive land policies occurred not only in the form of conventional

land reforms, but also in other redistributive land policies, such as forest land

(re)allocation as in contemporary Vietnam, albeit successful cases are limited. A varietyof land restitution experiences were also carried out through time, as in the case of

contemporary east Timor and South Africa, but again with limited success.

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 politically profound as the more dramatic national cases. Contemporary examples include

land occupation initiatives in Indonesia where peasants have mobilized around the Basic

Agrarian Law of 1960 to seize and occupy lands in different parts of the country, theChiapas struggle for land in Mexico, and the ‘village land banks’ initiative by peasants

and indigenous communities in northeast Thailand.

The social movement/community-led redistributive land policies are one of the three

 broad types of redistributive alternatives. However, it is this category that tends to receive

so much attention from the broad community of academics and activists, perhaps largely

 because of its more dramatic forms of actions – although within this broad category, it isreally the national social movement-led sub-type that tends to corner bulk of the public

attention. Here, we remind our reader that the latter is just one of the many redistributive

alternatives, and also the rarest, and most difficult to replicate in the current politicaleconomic context.

The examples in the discussion above and the general framing of the discussion remain

limited to the conventional notion of farmland political processes. In the context of thediscussion in this paper and in our proposition, it will be quite important to start thinking

of the ideas discussed on this subsection in the context of people’s land struggles beyond

agricultural farmlands to include land struggles around rural non-agricultural, urban and peri-urban. There is no shortage of exciting empirical cases here, from Detroit to

Shanghai, from Berkeley to Vienna, from Sao Paulo to Jambi.

State/community-driven. The least popular and least understood type of redistributive

alternatives is the state/community- or state/social movement-driven redistributive land

 policies. The more popular ones have been those with dramatic forms of actions: either avery top down, dramatic state action to carry out sweeping land reform, or a dramatic

action from below by highly organized social movements to implement the state land

law. There are important lessons and experiences in the past, and at present that showhow and when a state/community or state/social movement-driven process resulted in

desirable pro-poor outcomes. This category is somewhat a combination of the first two

types described above: both state and non-state actors have played more or less equally

significant roles in a symbiotic way. There are two sub-types: state/community andstate/social movement-driven; the difference between the two is similar to the earlier

discussion on community and movement-led land policies.

When mobilizations from below are met by actions from above, even less radical state

land reform laws can be carried out to a relatively significant extent. This was what

happened in the Philippines during the limited period from 1993 to 2000, more or lesswhat transpired during the Sandinista land reform in the 1980s, during the Allende

reforms in the early 1970s in Chile, as well as in Kerala in the 19760s-1970s. This was

the same process in West Bengal’s share tenancy reform in the 1970s and onward. There

are also several cases of successful subnational, localized state/community-drivencommunity forest land reallocation and management, community mapping, and land

restitution in various parts of the world.

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The state/community and state/social movement-driven category is an important

redistributive alternative, especially in places where the state on its own in unable to

overcome structural and institutional obstacles to reform, or in settings where powerfulnational social movements do not exist. Combining the limited forces of state and societal

actors become central to any redistributive alternative.

Again, the discussion above limited to conventional farmland reform context. It will be

important to extend the discussion of the concepts discussed here to include land

struggles beyond rural agricultural lands, as argued earlier.

Concluding remarks

Our main intention in this essay is to help raise preliminary critical questions about thestrengths and limitations of current analytical and political frameworks employed by

engaged academics, progressive researchers, and radical social movement activists in

order to better understand and mobilize effectively around land issues within the current

global context, where land-grabbing and food crisis have become important features. Wedo not offer any firm answers to some of the questions, but we put forward some

 propositions for critical discussion on how to go about with some concrete alternatives in

the global land front.

In this essay, we offer an initial and rough discussion about the concept of land

sovereignty: why we need to transition the people’s demand for land from ‘land tenuresecurity’ to land sovereignty. We have explained that in our concept, land sovereignty is

anchored on two inseparable types of sovereignty: state and people. We also explain why

and how land sovereignty is both an alternative analytical framework that can help usunderstand better the complexity of land issues in the current context, as well as an

alternative political platform that can help us confront more effectively the challenges

confronting the global land and agrarian fronts today. Land sovereignty as a campaignrepresents the defensive struggle of the rural poor—people’s counter-enclosure

campaign, and the pro-active struggle—people’s enclosure campaign. The two are

intertwined.

Finally, the discussion above tells us that the components of land sovereignty being

 proposed here are actually existing realities, and not newly invented abstract concepts..

Some of these concrete alternatives are dramatic expressions of struggles that havecaptured the imagination, and inspired vast numbers of people worldwide. Others are

equally politically profound, but tend not to get any romantic reaction from people

outside the concerned communities. What land sovereignty is trying to do, is tocontribute to clarifying the basic principles of what a truly pro-poor land policy is, and

 provide a broad and flexible framework that can collectively bring such policies,

 programs, actions, and endeavours into a singular, common alternative framework.

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