Land E-Book

Derek Hall

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: PRS - Polity Resources series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 328

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Land is one of the world's most emotionally resonant resources, and control over it is fundamental to almost all human activity. From the local level to the global, we are often in conflict over the ground beneath our feet. But because human relationships to land are so complex, it can be difficult to think them through in a unified way. This path-breaking book aims to change that by combining insights from multiple disciplines to develop a framework for understanding the geopolitics of land today.

Struggles over land, argues Derek Hall, relate to three basic principles: its role as territory, its status as property, and the ways in which its use is regulated. This timely introduction explores key dimensions of these themes, including inter-state wars over territory, the efforts of non-governmental organizations to protect property rights and environments in the global South, and the ‘land grabs’ attempted by contemporary corporations and governments. Drawing on a wide range of cases and examples - from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to the Canadian Arctic, China’s urban fringe to rural Honduras - the book provides new ways of thinking about the political dynamics of land in the 21st century.

This richly detailed and authoritative guide will be of interest to students across the social sciences, as well as anyone interested in current affairs and contemporary geopolitics.

Leseprobe

Land

Resources

Peter Dauvergne & Jane Lister, Timber

Michael Nest, Coltan

Elizabeth R. DeSombre & J. Samuel Barkin, Fish

Jennifer Clapp, Food

David Feldman, Water

Gavin Bridge & Philippe Le Billon, Oil

Land

DEREK HALL

polity

Copyright © Derek Hall 2013

The right of Derek Hall to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-6353-1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Contents

Figures and Tables

Acronyms

Acknowledgements

1  Introduction

2  Interstate Struggles

3  Frontiers

4  Land Booms

5  Titling and Conservation

6  Social Movements

7  Conclusion

Selected Readings

Notes and References

Index

Figures and Tables

FIGURES

3.1  Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan

3.2  The Canadian Arctic

5.1  Growth in nationally designated protected areas, 1911–2011

TABLES

2.1  Results of interstate territorial aggressions, 1946–2000

5.1  Percentage of terrestrial area protected, by region, 1990 and 2010

Acronyms

BCN

Biodiversity Conservation Network

BIA

Bangalore International Airport

BINGO

big international non-governmental organization

BMIC

Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor

BSP

Biodiversity Support Program

CBNRM

community-based natural resource management

CFS

Committee on World Food Security

CIA

Central Intelligence Agency

CITES

Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora

CMWMA

Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area

COW

Correlates of War

EEA

European Economic Area

EEZ

Exclusive Economic Zone

FAO

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

FATA

Federally Administered Tribal Areas

FCR

Frontier Crimes Regulations

FDI

foreign direct investment

FIAN

Food First International Action Network

GDP

Gross Domestic Product

GPS

Global Positioning System

ICDP

integrated conservation and development project

ICJ

International Court of Justice

IFAD

International Fund for Agricultural Development

IFI

international fi nancial institution

ILD

Institute for Liberty and Democracy

ILO

International Labour Organization

IMF

International Monetary Fund

ISI

Directorate for Inter-Service Intelligence

IT

information technology

IUCN

International Union for Conservation of Nature

KIADB

Karnataka Industrial Areas Development Board

LRAN

Land Research Action Network

MCA

Millennium Challenge Account

MLAR

market-led agrarian reform

MWC

Mahindra World City

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NGO

non-governmental organization

NWFP

North-West Frontier Province

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

PA

political agent

PNG

Papua New Guinea

PRC

People’s Republic of China

RAI

Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment

RCF

Research and Conservation Foundation of Papua New Guinea

ROC

Republic of China

SEZ

Special Economic Zone

TNC

transnational corporation

UN

United Nations

UNCLOS

UN Convention on the Law of the Sea

UNCTAD

UN Conference on Trade and Development

UNDRIP

UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

UNEP

UN Environment Programme

UNESCO

UN Educational, Scientifi c and Cultural Organization

USAID

United States Agency for International Development

WCMC

World Conservation Monitoring Centre

WCS

Wildlife Conservation Society

WDPA

World Database on Protected Areas

WWF

World Wide Fund for Nature

Acknowledgements

My thinking about land has been deeply shaped by two highly enjoyable experiences. One was my participation in ChATSEA (Challenges of the Agrarian Transition in Southeast Asia), a research project funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and coordinated by Rodolphe De Koninck. It was through ChATSEA that I had the opportunity to co-author Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia with Philip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li, and this book has been strongly influenced by what I learned about land from them. The other was the year I spent as an S. V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. My participation in ‘Land Lab’ and my conversations with, especially, Mike Dwyer, Louise Fortmann, Alice Kelly, Christian Lund, Nancy Peluso, Noer Fauzi Rachman, Kevin Woods and Megan Ybarra helped me greatly in the initial formulation of the framework of this book.

The first draft of this manuscript was the subject of a January 2012 book workshop that was generously funded by the Balsillie School of International Affairs. I would like to thank Lauren Judge for her organizational work on the workshop, and the participants whose detailed and thoughtful feedback made this a much better book: Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Kim Burnett, Taarini Chopra, Jennifer Clapp, Will Coleman, Michael Eilenberg, Ariane Goetz, Eric Helleiner, Tania Murray Li, Sarah Martin, Marie-Josée Massicotte and Yasmine Shamsie. I also received invaluable comments and advice from Jennifer Beck, June Hall, Elizabeth Havice, Michael Levien, Dann Naseemullah, Matthew Rudolph, Vasundhara Sirnate, John Wadland, Wendy Wolford and an anonymous reviewer, and Gail Ferguson did a wonderful job of copy editing. Louise Knight and David Winters at Polity were terrifically supportive and did an enormous amount to make the writing and publishing process as smooth as possible. Lisa Stadelmeyer provided excellent research assistance in the early stages of the project. I am extremely grateful for all of this help, but I alone am responsible for any errors in the final product. Anne-Marie Colpron and Alicia Sliwinski gave me the bottle of whisky mentioned in chapter 7.

Finally, I would like to thank Tanya Richardson for her encouragement, her comments on and suggestions for the manuscript and for taking care of our own plot of land while my head was stuck in this book.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Huang’s saga

In August 2011, Chinese businessman Huang Nubo announced that his company, Zhongkun Group, intended to buy a large tract of land in north-eastern Iceland.1 Huang’s intention was to invest more than US$100 million (including US$9 million for the land) to build an ecotourism resort that would feature among its attractions a luxury hotel, a golf course, a race track and hot-air balloon rides. Huang, who was described in media coverage as an adventurer and a poet, hoped that the resort would appeal to tourists from China and India keen to get away from their crowded city lives and experience solitude and wilderness. The site, in Grímsstaðir, offered plenty of both: 300 km2 of land (about 0.3 per cent of Iceland’s territory) in a bleak and sparsely populated region just south of the Arctic Circle. To buy the land, however, Huang needed to do more than hand over the money. The deal required government approval not only because the proposed area included both private and state-owned land but because of a law restricting land sales to investors from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) from buying large amounts of land in Iceland. Huang duly applied for an exemption to this law.

Huang’s proposal split Icelandic opinion, and the ensuing debate raised profound questions about the place of land in Iceland’s national life and international relations. Proponents pointed out that Iceland was in desperate need of foreign investment as it struggled to recover from the devastating financial and currency crisis that had struck the country in 2008. Some felt that China would be an excellent source of such investment. Iceland’s president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, stated pointedly that after the crisis ‘China and India lent Iceland a helping hand in many constructive ways, whereas Europe was hostile and the US was absent.’ Critics of the deal, on the other hand, raised concerns about selling such a large tract of national land to a foreigner. They also pointed to Huang’s past as a government official (in China’s Ministry of Construction and in the propaganda department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee) to argue that his bid should not be taken at face value as a private business proposition. Rather, they suspected that the geopolitical ambitions of the Chinese government lay behind the deal. With both land and sea ice receding in the Arctic, the region is seeing rapid growth in resource exploration and extraction, and the Arctic Ocean may soon become viable as a shipping route between Europe and East Asia. Icelandic officials have in fact been promoting their country as a logistics hub for Arctic resource exploration and shipping, and Chinese diplomatic activity related to the Arctic has been increasing. Critics thus saw in the proposed deal not an innocent ecotourism resort but a toehold for the Chinese government. Proponents countered that these claims were hard to square with the fact that the project would include no land with access to the coast. Huang, for his part, called the accusations absurd and emphasized the purely private nature of the deal – though he may have undermined his case by playing with his cat during a video interview, a move uncomfortably reminiscent of the James Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld (not to mention Dr Evil in the Austin Powers movies).

The deal did not go through. In late November 2011, Iceland’s Minister of the Interior Ögmundur Jónasson announced that Huang’s application for an exemption from the law had been turned down. The ministry listed a number of criteria that non-EEA companies looking to buy land had to meet and found that the Zhongkun Group did not meet any of them. It also argued that the sheer amount of land involved meant that an exemption would set a dangerous precedent. Jónasson worried, too, about the ‘fire sale’ characteristics of the deal, stating that ‘When a nation is in distress and its currency is weak, that is the time to be on your guard against those who would attempt to buy our national resources cheaply.’ While the decision was the interior minister’s to make, the two governing parties had by now taken quite different stances on it, with the Left Greens (Jónasson’s party) opposed and the Social Democrats more in favour. The prime minister and the foreign and economic ministries joined President Grímsson in supporting the investment, and one Social Democrat MP described the rejection as ‘crazy’, ‘deplorable’ and ‘devastating’. A former finance minister argued in favour of the deal by invoking the reputation that Icelandic businessmen had acquired since the financial crisis, asking ‘Who would you prefer to own a large Icelandic farm: a poetry-writing, nature-loving Chinese businessman, or one of our homegrown criminal Viking raiders?’ The poet, meanwhile, lashed out at the rejection, claiming that he had not been made aware of the criteria cited by the Interior Ministry in turning down his application. He also made the broader point that this was far from the only example in recent years of western rejection of Chinese investment. Huang complained that ‘The Western world asks us to open the Chinese market without restrictions, but when it’s a question of their resources they close the door on us.’ Other commentators, however, rushed to point out that China forbids land sales not only to foreigners, but to its own citizens.

Combining as it does the ongoing fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, the rising economic power of China and western responses to it, and the politics of Arctic resource development and shipping in a warming world, Huang’s saga2 dramatically illustrates the changes taking place in the global political economy in the early twenty-first century. The story also calls attention to the complex and multifaceted role that land plays in relations between countries. It highlights, for instance, a common debate over the purchase of land by foreigners. In Iceland as elsewhere, one side of this debate emphasizes the economic benefits that such investments are meant to bring (including job creation and contributions to government revenues), while the other focuses on the threats – economic, political and otherwise – they may pose. Starkly put, one side sees an idle resource that someone wants to put to productive use, while the other sees the alienation of part of the national territory. Such debates are not carried out in a legal vacuum: Iceland, like most countries, has laws and regulations governing the acquisition of land by foreigners.

The Grímsstaðir case also shows that concerns over land acquisition can be given extra impetus by the nationality of the would-be purchaser. This is far from the only large piece of land in a foreign country that Chinese investors have tried to purchase or lease in recent years. Arguments over Huang’s resort took place in the shadow of widespread concerns about a global ‘land grab’ in which transnational corporations and states are moving to take control over vast areas of land in foreign countries. The fact that some of these investments are being orchestrated by state agencies from non-democratic countries like China has deepened the nervousness that usually attends foreign purchases and long-term leases of land. Control over land, indeed, is wrapped up with anxiety over national security and geopolitics. In the Icelandic case, the worry is over China’s alleged drive to project power in the Arctic; elsewhere, the key issue may be the ability of countries to grow enough food to feed themselves, or the acquisition by foreigners of land in sensitive border areas.

Land and the human relationship with it are enormous topics, far too big to cover in a short (or even a long) book. I argue, however, that we can gain particularly valuable insights into contemporary dynamics around land by focusing on the transnational relationships associated with it. I define these as the efforts made by various actors to exert control over land across international borders, together with the cross-border politics and relationships (including corporate connections, activist networks and flows of ideas) that help to shape control over land. I argue as well that, in order to understand these dynamics, we need to recognize that they concern three different and very fundamental things. These are the relationships between land, authority and identity that create territory; regulation, or the governance of how land is held and used; and the control of specific pieces of land as property.3

Transnational dynamics around territory, regulation and property are far from new. In each of these areas, however, there are major changes afoot that this book seeks to explain. With respect to territory, the most important contemporary issues relate to the efforts of states to exert control of land both across borders and within their own, and the responses by other states and by non-state groups to those efforts. The aspects of these struggles that most demand our attention are the near-disappearance, since the late 1970s, of the redistribution of territory through interstate war; the complex politics of control over the extensive ‘frontier’ areas that exist within many states; and the rise of transnational movements pressing for recognition of indigenous rights to land. In the sphere of regulation, there has been an enormous increase in attempts by transnational actors to influence the rules that govern land use, especially in the South. Such attempts have been spearheaded by a remarkably wide range of groups, including states, international financial institutions (IFIs), transnational corporations (TNCs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), organizations of the United Nations (UN), private foundations, and environmental certification organizations. These groups have sought to transform regulations regarding how property is held, the rights of indigenous peoples and environmental conservation. With respect to property, finally, the most high-profile recent changes have involved TNCs and states seeking to buy or lease land in other countries, and activists organizing transnationally to resist this ‘global land grab’. Transnational relations have also been central to the widespread expansion of conservation areas and of special economic zones in the South, both of which have seen changes in the property status of large amounts of land.

This introductory chapter lays the groundwork for the analysis of the transnational dynamics of territory, regulation and property in the chapters to come. In the next section, I ask what land is, and discuss some of the aspects of land that differentiate it from other resources and complicate efforts to understand it in a unified way (while also making the project an especially interesting one). The subsequent section explains the concepts of territory, regulation and property that underpin the book’s analysis. I then provide brief introductions to the main themes of the book’s topical chapters, themes which add up to an overview of the key issues involved in transnational struggles over land control today. The last section highlights other issues related to land control that the book does not address.

What is land, and how is it different from other resources?

Asking ‘what is land?’ may seem like an odd, and unnecessary, place to start. What could be more concrete and obvious than the ground beneath our feet? The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ‘land’ as ‘The solid portion of the earth’s surface, as opposed to sea, water’4 seems straightforward enough. But things are not so simple. There is, first, something peculiarly abstract about ‘land’ when you stop to think about it. If you were to remove all the vegetation and soil from a hectare of land, you would still have a hectare of land (though rather less productive and of rather lower elevation). If you continued on into the rock and minerals below and started removing them in turn, it is not clear how deep you would have to dig before there would no longer be ‘land’ there. Indeed, the OED definition means you cannot get rid of land in this way; for a given area to stop being land, you have to drown it. This abstract quality makes it difficult to visualize ‘land’ as such, as opposed to the soil and rocks that constitute land and the vegetation that sits on top of it, all of which can be carted away without diminishing land’s landness. Second, the OED’s seemingly clear definition of land as ‘not-water’ hides a good deal of ambiguity. Plenty of areas straddle the boundary between the solid and the liquid. River deltas, floodplains, tidal zones, seasonal ponds, marshes and swamps all combine land and water. New technology (like underwater drilling) and new legal frameworks (like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) have also increasingly led to parts of the seabed – unambiguously under water, all the time – being treated in many respects as land. The question of whether such areas should be considered ‘land’ – and, if so, when – is not settled by the objective physical definition in the OED but by human laws and regulations that determine how these areas can be used and held.

This book is part of a series on resources. Land, however, differs from other resources in fundamental respects. An overview of some of the key differences provides context for the approach to analysing land control outlined in the next section. The first difference is a very simple one that follows from the discussion in the previous paragraph: land does not move. Land is fixed in place and cannot be exported, or even relocated to the next town or down the road (even if, again, the soil and minerals that constitute land can be so moved). If you want to use land, it will not come to you – you have to go to it, or convince other people to go to it for you. For this reason, this book cannot take the common approach to studying resources of investigating the ‘commodity chain’ connecting the point of production or extraction with the point of consumption. We cannot follow land, as we can corn, coltan, coffee and cocaine, as it changes hands and is transformed on its journey to the final consumer. Partly for this reason, too, the phenomenon in which control of a resource is intensely concentrated at some point in the commodity chain does not apply to land. Fifteen companies control four-fifths of the world’s proven oil reserves, and 75–90 per cent of world trade in grains and oilseeds, like corn, soy and wheat, is in the hands of just four firms.5 While the control of land – in all the different senses of that term to be discussed in the next section – is highly unequal, it is not as unequal as this. No private company owns more than a minuscule portion of the earth’s surface, and even the territory of Russia, the biggest country by area, covers only around 11 per cent of the world’s roughly 149 million km2 of land.

Land, second, is extremely heterogeneous. Many resources are seen to have a world market price that, while certainly a simplification (one common measure of the ‘price of oil’, for instance, actually refers to the price of West Texas Intermediate light sweet crude), is still a meaningful indicator that conveys information about what you could expect to pay for a barrel of oil, a bushel of wheat or an ounce of gold. The price of land is more like the price of labour. Land and labour both vary so dramatically in location and quality that the notion of a benchmark world price for a generic day’s work or hectare of land is nonsensical. One thousand hectares of land can be had in plenty of places for literally nothing (or less), while a few square metres in some downtown business districts can cost as much as – well, if you have to ask, you wouldn’t be able to afford it. There is no reason to expect that a spike or collapse in the price of land in one part of the world will be accompanied by similar movements elsewhere. Land price variations can verge on the bizarre. It has been estimated that if the people of Japan had sold all of their country’s land at the peak of a land-price bubble in the late 1980s, they would have been able to buy all the land in the rest of the world with the proceeds.

A third difference is that control over land is indispensable to almost all human activity. Some form of control over land is often (though by no means always) necessary for access to both non-renewable resources, like uranium, iron ore and coltan, and to renewable ones, like water, trees and soil. In terrestrial environments, land control is also wrapped up with control over ecosystems. Conservationists wishing to preserve biodiversity generally need to exercise some kind of control over land to do so. Land can also be a sink – a place to dump stuff that you no longer want. Finally and most basically, land provides space for human action, whether it be used for agriculture, housing, industry, infrastructure, tourism or what have you. Land, in short, is different because efforts to control it are woven together with almost everything that people do.

A fourth difference, and one that harks back again to the abstract nature of land, is that land is commonly rented. This is not true of other resources. It is difficult to think of circumstances (other than the staging of an avant-garde play) under which someone might want to borrow 12 tons of iron ore or 500 kilograms of fish. The reason holders of a piece of land are often willing to lend it to someone else is that land as such is not consumed through use in the way that other resources are, even if overuse can degrade or ruin land for specific purposes. Land that has been stripped of its fertility by grazing or cultivation, or polluted by mining or factory effluent, or even so badly irradiated that people can no longer go anywhere near it, is still land. Indeed, people not only rent land, they do so for very long periods. In agriculture, forestry and mining, land leases of periods like 30, 50 and 99 years are the norm. The Guinness brewery in St James Gate, Dublin, has been operating since 1759 under a 9,000-year lease. We will see in the next section of this chapter that leases (like ownership) can convey some or all of a wide range of different rights to make use of the land. A forestry concession, for instance, might include the right to plant, harvest and manage timber, but not to plant cotton or to extract sub-surface resources. One lease is not at all the same as another.

Finally, land differs from other resources as a result of the power and depth of the attachments people feel to it. This is true at the level of individuals and families, who may have strong emotional connections to the family home, farm, ranch, or cottage. It is true of the ties people can feel to the neighbourhood or village in which they live or in which they grew up. More importantly for this book, it is also true at the level of larger political and ethnic groups, which almost always understand some part of the earth’s surface to be their land or, in the terms I use here, their territory. Connections to and images of this land may form an important component of a group’s identity. People do, of course, relate to resources other than land in emotional and identity terms. All of a country’s resources, for instance, can be understood to comprise a part of the national patrimony; one has only to put the words ‘hands off’ in front of ‘our oil’, ‘our fish’ or ‘our water’ to see this. The depths of our emotional relationships to land, however, are unusual in this respect, and the consequences of this difference run through this book.

Territory, regulation and property

The different facets of the contemporary transnational politics of land that we encountered in Huang’s saga, and some of the discussion of how land differs from other resources in the preceding section, suggest that there are a number of forms of control over land. This diversity can be organized by highlighting territory, regulation and property as the three central elements of land control over which people struggle within and across international borders. While there are enormous literatures dealing with each of these three terms and a vast range of conflicting definitions, I use them in this book to mean specific things. Territory refers to the relationship between land and identity, and to the existence of (or aspiration for) political authority over land. Regulation means the rules that govern the possession and use of land. And property involves the question of who has the right to decide what will be done with any particular piece of land within existing regulations.

The concept of territory calls attention to the ways that groups see themselves (and are seen by others) as having a deep and special connection to some reasonably specific piece of the earth’s surface, an aspect of their identity that usually includes a claim to at least some political authority over ‘their’ land. This claim goes well beyond the regulation of land use (to be discussed below) to encompass the much wider set of powers involved in governing people, including powers over things like taxation and law. The claim can be made by many different kinds of groups – by, for instance, the residents of urban neighbourhoods or villages. In recent times, the collectivities that most commonly have been seen to have legitimate claims to authority over ‘their’ territory are states, nations and ethnic and indigenous groups. Other eras, however, have seen things differently: the relevant groups in medieval Europe, for instance, would have included aristocratic lineages that viewed their territory in patrimonial terms. The kinds of relationship that are taken to exist between identity, authority and land have also varied a great deal with time and space.

The dominant modern understanding of the relationship between territory and authority is historically unusual in several core respects. This understanding, first, locates authority over territory with states which now claim sovereign authority over virtually all of the earth’s land (outside Antarctica). Most of the earlier political orders, on the other hand, were characterized by a sharing of authority between different types of bodies, including monarchs, towns, villages, aristocracies and religious orders, and did not assume that all land was subject to somebody’s sovereignty. Second, the dominant understanding sees land as being under the authority of one and only one state, and assumes that states (like sub-national political units and pieces of property) will be separated from one another with surgical precision by linear borders. Third, states are taken to have exclusive authority within their own borders and no authority outside them; this distinction is often taken to mark the boundaries between domestic and international politics. All of these features of the dominant understanding add up to a very close relationship between territory, authority and the state – indeed, states are now defined in part by their borders, and a state cannot exist if it does not have any land.

The modern territory–authority relationship is also profoundly structured by our understanding of the relationship between states and nations. The nation can be defined for our purposes as a political community that is limited, sovereign and made up of members who are understood to be equal.6 Modern states are usually conceptualized as representing and governing on behalf of nations. This tight connection between ideas of state and nation – so tight that the terms are often used interchangeably – contributes to the very strong emotional attachments citizens feel to the territory (land) of their state. The silhouette of a state’s boundary is on a par with the national flag as one of the most immediately recognizable and evocative ways of graphically representing the state.7 The modern combination of sharply defined borders, unitary sovereignty and nationalism means that once-common ways in which rulers related to territory, including receiving it through inheritance or giving it away, are now unthinkable. It also gives understandings of territory a peculiar precision: this piece of land two metres inside the country’s border is our territory, to be defended to the death, while that piece two metres outside the border is no concern of ours.

Three issues complicate too-easy assumptions about the relations between linear borders, state sovereignty and nations. Care must be taken, first, with the assumption that the nation comes first and the state ‘represents’ it. Many of the nations we take for granted today are substantially the creation of state leaders through a process Benedict Anderson (following Hugh Seton-Watson) calls ‘official nationalism’. Often, too, the ‘people’ – the citizens of the state – end up being a very different group to the putative nation. Second, there is a ‘vertical’ hierarchy of levels of government within states. This hierarchy generally includes not only the central government but also governments at the provincial/prefectural/state and at the county/municipal level. Identity and authority are distributed between these various levels of ‘the state’. In countries with federal systems, in particular, provincial or state governments may have substantially more constitutional authority over land use than does the central government. Third, non-state groups also have deep territorial attachments and want to have authority over ‘their’ territory. In extreme cases, this can lead to separatism, a group’s desire to form its own independent state. More interestingly from a conceptual point of view, non-state groups can exercise or push for forms of territorial authority that differ from the dominant understanding. Movements for indigenous self-determination within and across state borders are an extremely important example of this. It has been widely argued, too, that globalization is helping to replace modern territory with new, postmodern forms. These dynamics show that, while the dominant understanding is a central component of our territorial practices, we also need to be aware of the ways that reality often sits uneasily with, or flatly contradicts, ideas of linear borders, unitary sovereign authority and the state–nation connection.

Regulation refers in this book to the rules that people are meant to follow with regard to what they may, may not and must do with land. It also refers to the rules that specify how property is supposed to work: what kinds of rights people can have to land, who can have them and how they are to be recorded and enforced. There is an obvious overlap between the concepts of territory and regulation, given that a group that has authority over an area of land will also create and enforce regulations over it. Indeed, one of the core projects of states over the last two centuries has been the division of their land into zones that are regulated in different ways.8 Most readers of this book will be familiar with the formal division of land between residential, industrial, commercial, agricultural, conservation and other uses, and with the idea that what can, cannot and must be done with land differs according to the way it is zoned. Someone living in a suburban residential area, for instance, might be obliged to keep their grass mown and forbidden from hanging their clothes outside to dry; they might be allowed to cut the trees on their property but be forbidden from operating a hog-fat rendering plant. Regulations might also prevent people from converting land from agricultural uses without permission, or make it difficult or impossible for non-citizens to buy any land at all (as we saw in Huang’s saga). It should go without saying that regulations are not always followed.

While the connection between territory and regulation is deep, the overlap is not perfect for at least three reasons. First, some groups may feel an intense identity connection to an area of territory without having any practical ability to regulate land use there. The most obvious example of this involves people who have lost the land they consider their territory when it was seized from them by another group. Second, within states, the ability to regulate land is distributed both ‘vertically’, between levels of government, and ‘horizontally’, between different ministries and agencies at the same level. Within the state of California, for instance, a bewildering array of jurisdictions regulate different aspects of land use, including not only cities and counties but also districts in charge of fire prevention, flood control, parks and even mosquito abatement.9 While this distribution is meant to correspond to different state functions and priorities, it may in practice lead to confusion and competition over just who is meant to regulate what where. In many countries in the South, horizontal and vertical regulatory competition is intense, there is extensive ambiguity over who has the formal authority to regulate which aspects of land use in what areas, and control over regulation in practice may bear little relation to what is envisaged in law.

Third, state agencies are not the only bodies that regulate land, and the regulations they do create are shaped by the influence of other organizations. Across much of the South in particular, village and neighbourhood groups and powerful local figures continue to regulate the use and the property characteristics of both rural and urban land. Regulations are also influenced, and in some cases created, by other non-state groups, including NGOs, private certifying bodies, and international organizations like UNESCO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Influence is the more common dynamic and occurs when, for instance, NGOs push for stricter conservation measures and restrictions, the World Bank helps to rewrite property law, or the IMF pushes countries seeking funds from it to open up land sales to foreigners or to decentralize important land regulation functions from the national to local governments. Less common but still important are situations where international organizations and NGOs create their own rules for land use that states and other actors choose to respect, as happens when governments seek to have parts of their territory declared to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site or forestry companies seek sustainability certification for their operations from the Forest Stewardship Council.10 I will pay special attention in this book to situations in which actors exercise sway over the regulation of land without seeking to acquire property or to claim any formal authority to rule over territory.

If regulation is the making of the rules regarding how land may, may not and must be used, property refers in this book to the right to make decisions about how a specific piece of land is in fact used within that structure of regulation. Many different kinds of rights are in play here, including the right of access to the land, the right to withdraw products from it, the right to decide how it will be used and managed, the right to exclude others from it, and the right to sell, lease or otherwise transfer rights to it.11 As in the territory case, there is a dominant modern conception of property: private property, in which all of the rights to the land are held by the same entity. We usually conceive of private property as being held by individuals, families or private businesses, but in the sense used here it can also be held by states. Indeed, a very substantial proportion of the earth’s surface is claimed by states as property – as Crown land, forest reserve, national parks, military bases and even as residential and industrial land. In some countries, all land is owned by the state. There is thus an important distinction to be made here between state claims to authority over land as territory, and the role of states and state agencies as property owners who may act as landlords in leasing land to private actors.

The last 500 years have witnessed a worldwide movement towards private property as the dominant form of property in land.12 Within this broad trend, however, property rights continue to be defined and distributed in an almost infinite variety of ways. Many farmers in the South hold rights to use their land, to decide what to do with it, and to exclude others from it, but not to sell it. Agnes Varda explored a more circumscribed but still fascinating variation on full private property that continues to exist in France (and elsewhere) in her beautiful film The Gleaners and I: the right to glean, or to take what food remains after a crop has been harvested on someone else’s private property. Property is also diverse, however, because of the tricky word ‘rights’ in our definition of the term. As noted above, across much of the world, multiple authorities – states and customary authorities in particular – claim the ability to decide which rights apply to any particular piece of land and who holds those rights. As multiple approaches to the regulation of property come into conflict, or as even relatively well-entrenched regulations are informally modified or set aside, property rights can become extremely unclear.

Several other points about property should be kept in mind. First, the various rights that go towards making up property can, again, be rented or leased. This point adds yet more complexity to the analysis of property, especially because the power relations in a rental arrangement can vary so spectacularly – from large landholders in poor, densely populated areas renting out land to desperate farmers at exorbitant rates,