Titling of Land

Responding to an international trend that regards the state as an oversized, unsustainable and uneven jurisdiction that cannot effectively intervene in the economy to promote development objectives, nor impose a proper presence over its territory and population, the reform of the Colombian Constitution in 1991 installed local development as one of the primary strategies to recuperate the nation-building project in Colombia. Bogotá has greatly benefited from the introduction of this normative framework: within the spatial limits of its jurisdiction, Bogotá has been able to achieve a remarkable level of community engagement, measured urban growth and financial stability, as well as high per capita levels of education, health and public utility provision. However, the successful decentralization of state activity in Bogotá has implied an intensification of the systemic violence that traditionally accompanies nation-building projects. Through practices of classification, demarcation and disciplining of space and subjects, Bogotá has used a cartography of legal and illegal urban spaces in order to circumscribe its developmental target. Reflecting upon the contradictions that arise from the encounter between the weaknesses of Colombia's sovereignty and Bogotá's successful development, this paper examines the relationship between development and sovereign consolidation through the multiplication of levels of governance and the creation of increasingly smaller, more accountable sub-national jurisdictions in Third World states.

Both policymakers and scholars have suggested that informal land tenure contributes to the perpetuation of illicit drug crop cultivation and, conversely, that land formalization programs serve counternarcotics aims. This article examines some of the key causal mechanisms said to underlie the posited relationship between land tenure (in)formality and the cultivation of crops used for illicit drug production. Our analysis is grounded in the context of Puerto Asís, Colombia-one of the most important coca-producing municipalities in a country that produces the majority of the world's cocaine. The case study is based on extensive fieldwork in Puerto Asís, including in-depth interviews with peasants who cultivate(d) coca, community leaders and local officials. We found: (i) that informal and semiformal institutions provide a basic level of land tenure security for both those with and without state-recognized property titles; (ii) that peasants invest considerable amounts of money and labor in their farms and community infrastructures, despite lacking formal land titles; (iii) that coca cultivation itself is a comparatively costly investment, with eighteen months minimum before payback; (iv) that peasants' access to credit is not conditioned on them having a formal land title; (v) that bank loans do not make people less dependent on coca cultivation; and that (vi) farmers find it difficult to survive with legal livelihoods and thus permanently exit the coca economy for a long list of reasons, which are not addressed via land titling and registration programs. These findings are contrary to popular policy narratives. We conclude that formal titles are an important tool for Colombian peasant farmers to defend their land against powerful external actors but will not necessarily serve the purposes commonly presented in the literature on illicit drugs.

In their widely read discussion paper, the FAO, IFAD, UNCTAD and World Bank propose systematic property rights formalization – “the identification of rights holders, the legal recognition of rights and uses, and their demarcation and registration” – as a central first step in addressing the problem of irresponsible agricultural investment. This paper examines the case of Cambodia, one of at least a dozen countries where systematic land titling and large-scale land grabbing have proceeded in parallel in recent years. Cambodia’s experience exemplifies the challenges of what I call the “formalization fix”, and highlights the geography of land titling (and property formalization more generally) as a question that, despite substantial debate in Cambodia, has yet to receive adequate attention internationally. Examining three dimensions of Cambodia’s less-than-successful “formalization fix” efforts – (i) the spatial separation of systematic land titling and agribusiness concessions; (ii) the fact that property formalization can also be a means of land grabbing; and (iii) the political arena of efforts to legitimize “state land” – this paper questions the formalization fix as a policy solution, argues that the problem of unmapped state land needs to be addressed head on, and calls for greater geographical transparency in property formalization efforts in the global South.