Property Rights from Below: Commodification of Land and the Counter-Movement

Recent years have seen a globalization of property rights as the Western conception of property over land has extended across the world. As formerly community-owned land and natural resources are privatized and titling schemes proliferate, Property Rights from Below questions the trend toward treating land as a commodity and explores alternatives to the Western model.

As we enter an era of resource scarcity and as competition for land and associated natural resources increases, purchasing power cannot become the sole criterion for land allocation; and the law of supply and demand in increasingly financialized markets cannot become the sole metric through which the value of land is determined. Using a range of examples from around the world, Property Rights from Below demonstrates that alternatives to this model often emerge from social innovations supported by local communities and that there is an urgent need for a broader political imagination when it comes to land governance.

This innovative cross-disciplinary perspective on the pressing problems surrounding global property rights will be of interest to academics, students and professionals with an interest in property law, development economics and land governance.

Olivier De Schutter is Professor at the University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium, and at SciencesPo (Paris). He is also a member of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. He was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food between 2008 and 2014 and has been a visiting professor at Columbia University and at Berkeley University, USA.

Balakrishnan Rajagopal is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, where he is the head of the International Development Group at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the founding director of the Program on Human Rights and Justice and the Displacement Research and Action Network. He is an active member and one of the founders of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) network of scholars.