Political arenas around access to land: a diagnosis of property rights practices in the Nicaraguan interior

Abstract

Land property issues remain firmly on the agenda in Nicaragua. Revolutionary land reform, followed by additional land redistribution and overnight liberalisation of land markets, are assumed to have caused severe insecurity of land tenure. Dominant received wisdom is that only significant state intervention through full-scale legal titling cum registration can put an end to the ongoing struggles that cause insecurity as well as injustices against poor agrarian reform beneficiaries. This view, inspired by economic and legal engineering perspectives on land rights, has however successfully been challenged in other development contexts, particularly Africa, where a legal pluralist view turned out to be more adequate to describe the complex social processes that define land rights. This view argues for a need to understand the detailed land right practices where legitimacy (and thus security) of land access and tenure is socially constructed by calling upon state as well as non-state sources of land rights. Policy conclusions do not call upon state intervention to remedy allegedly chaotic and unjust informal land practices, but rather calls for an institutional reorganisation that contributes to a greater synergy between different sources of rights, thereby reducing insecurities and injustices due to prevailing incompatibilities. Inspired by the legal pluralism view, our paper provides an attempt at interpretation of the real world land rights practices in an agricultural frontier region in Nicaragua.