Improving land tenure security by increasing access?

Abstract: Securing access to land around the world is an issue that pervades many development agendas. Often promoted through legal and administrative systems, secure land tenure is used in the battle against poverty and to reduce land based conflict. Conceptualizations of secure tenure tend to differ between international institutions and academia. This thesis aims to understand how the World Bank conceptualizes secure tenure by investigating World Bank policy documents and other discursive material available online. The Bacchi“What’s the problem represented to be” (2009) method guides the analysis and asks how the World Bank constructs ‘the problem’ of insecure tenure and the proposed solutions to make it secure. The networks of access and the accompanying exclusionary effects, based on the ‘Powers of Exclusion’ theory from Hall, Hirsch and Li (2014) are not acknowledged in the World Bank discourse on secure tenure. Instead, the World Bank advocates for increased market involvement and legal regulation. This has exclusionary effects that remove access to people’s land and livelihoods. Furthermore, the composite view of secure tenure which includes customary, formalized legal and perception based security is less prevalent (van Gelder, 2010). The analysis finds that the World Bank promotes formalized legal frameworks as the main mechanism to secure tenure. These findings embed the discourse of the World Bank into larger theoretical discussions about the purpose and use of land. However, more comprehensive studies of international institutions' discourses on land tenure security are still needed to fully understand the consequences of such conceptualizations.