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Document Type

Book Section

Publication Date

2021

Publication Title

Land Law and Disputes in Asia: In Search of an Alternative for Development

Abstract

In The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi described the modern era in terms of the transformation of labor, land, and money into commodities, and the expansion of the market as the basic organizing principle of society—a transformation championed by liberal economic theory. This transformation brought enormous social dislocation and mass poverty, while the wealthy benefited the most. Polanyi opposed the nigh total destruction of traditional communities that had previously given meaning to peoples’ lives, and the dismal living conditions and economic insecurity of laboring masses that resulted. Central elements of Polanyi’s account are playing out today across the terrain of Asian land disputes. The modern incarnation of liberal economic theory is neoliberalism of the “Washington Consensus,” involving titling property, enforcing contracts, removing market restraints, and other reforms, promoted across the Global South in the name of economic development. Special emphasis has been placed on the need for formal, individually held land titles, and free transferability. In theory, this produces security, predictability, and certainty, transforms land into capital, allows property to serve as collateral for loans, and facilitates the transfer of land to more economically productive uses. In location after location, however, the introduction of formal property rights has exacerbated uncertainty and insecurity over property, creating conflicts with customary land tenure and understandings in the community; people fear dispossession or are being dispossessed when their claim to the land is unrecognized or when governments appropriate land and transfer it to private enterprises for commercial uses. All too often, the results have been socially unjust, enhancing the rich at the expense of the poor. Nevertheless, the harmful consequences from land titling and expropriation is justified by governments and theorists as a necessary short-term price to pay to achieve long-term economic development. This essay is a commentary chapter for Land Law and Disputes in Asia: In Search of An Alternative for Development (forthcoming 2021), a collection of essays on land issues in Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. This essay begins with a brief description of Polanyi’s thesis, then it discusses the chapters in connection with the following topics: Subsistence versus Productive Ideologies; Socialist Liberal Market Economies; State Expropriation of Land for Private Uses; The Survival of Community; State Law Monism versus Community Customary Law; The Fallacy of the Long Term View; Guidelines for Equitable Land Development.

Keywords

Asian Law, Law And Development, Land Conflicts, Global South, Neo-Liberal Economics, Land Expropriation

Publication Citation

Brain Z. Tamanaha, Asian Land Conflicts and the Great Transformation, in Land Law and Disputes in Asia: In Search of an Alternative for Development 274-296 (Yuka Kaneko, Narufumi Kadomatsu & Brian Z. Tamanaha eds., 2021)

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