RENOWNED economist Hernando de Soto says he has found an answer to global poverty. “Let’s give poor people individual titles to land so they can access credit, loans, and investment, and transform it into live capital,” he once said. His ideas have been peddled across the developing world by development agencies. In SA, the notion of providing individual title to land previously owned through customary or collective land rights has become fashionable in development circles. De Soto’s approach is intended to “capitalise the poor”, as in the west, where every piece of land is documented as part of a vast legal process that endows owners with the potential to use it as collateral or capital. Land titling in SA has engendered strong opposition from nongovernmental organisations, social movements, and some land rights experts.
Why aren’t they celebrating De Soto’s prescriptions?
Because his policy prescriptions oversimplify the complexities of informal economy and land rights.
While SA has made progress in many aspects of development, it has one of the world’s highest levels of inequality, and the gap between rich and poor is widening. De Soto claims that this inequality is caused by the absence of formal rights to assets owned by the poor. He insists that capitalism can be made to work for the poor through formalising their property rights in houses, land, and small businesses. But the reality on the ground is different.
In Ekuthuleni, for example, a rural community of 224 households in KwaZulu-Natal, residents live on state-registered land that they wish to formally acquire through land reform and hold in collective ownership. Community members say they want to hold land in common to “prevent strangers from coming in and causing conflicts”, and because they cannot afford to procure individual titles. Most households survive on welfare grants supplemented with subsistence agriculture and natural resources harvested from the commons.
Individual ownership doesn’t make sense in this context. In Ekuthuleni, property ownership is never exclusive to one person and is always shared by a changing number of family members. The fields are used exclusively at some times, jointly at others. People borrow them from one another, sometimes for generations, until it’s no longer clear whose field it is. Boundaries between properties are not clear. Some follow rivers and ridges. There are few straight lines and access to plots is via footpaths that follow contours or cattle-made paths and crisscross other people’s land.
The experience of Ekuthuleni clearly reveals the limitations of the dominant system of property rights, which requires that an individual rights holder be identified, describes the exclusive rights of the rights holder, and depicts boundaries through beacons and geo-referencing. It reveals that there is often incompatibility between property rights in community-based systems and the requirements of individual, private property.
Some features of extralegal property regimes found in SA’s informal settlements and communal areas provide a key to the solutions: their social embeddedness; the importance of land and housing as assets that help secure livelihoods; the layered and relative nature of rights; and the flexible character of boundaries. Approaches based on western property regimes fail to acknowledge and respond to these features.
Attempts to address the problem through one-off solutions involving high levels of state investment need to give way to a more nuanced, incremental, integrated development approach that would extend infrastructure, services, and economic opportunity linked to legal recognition of diverse tenure forms.
Further, the enormous inequities in property ownership inherited from the apartheid era remain a fundamental constraint on the livelihoods of the poor. Poverty reduction policies must therefore include a central focus on large-scale redistribution programmes.
Meaningful reform requires a rigorous and far-reaching approach. Tenure reform remains necessary and important, but is far from sufficient. Much more attention should be paid to supporting existing social practices that have widespread legitimacy rather than expensive western solutions that try to replace them.
‖Cousins is director of the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of Western Cape. Hornby is an independent researcher formerly employed by the Association For Rural Advancement.‖
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