Paper short abstract:

This article proposes the conceptualization of the “formality model,” an entangled set of discourses that enact formality as a modern and sine-qua-non component of property conducive to security and argues that it poses a constrain to challenge current deeply unequal agrarian structures.

Paper long abstract:

Land administration policies situate formalization as a precondition for ‘development’ and poverty reduction in the Global South. Sponsored by multilateral organizations and international agencies worldwide, land administration policies have become a crucial component of neoliberal development. Critical development and critical agrarian studies scholarships have extensively documented the problematic relations between these policies and capitalist accumulation, land grabbing, and land dispossession. However, these critiques have taken for granted the meaning and stability of the notion of property across different geographies and temporalities. This article draws from critical legal studies and legal geography scholarships that center property and highlight its intrinsic relationality. It introduces the conceptualization of the “formality model”, an entangled set of discourses that draws on a teleological view of property to enact formality as a modern and sine-qua-non component of property conducive to security. This article focus on an emblematic case of the Colombian land restitution policy (LRP), a progressive land administration policy, to examine how the formality model is productive of and produced through legal, administrative, spatial and mundane everyday practices of property that go into the policy. This study argues that the formality model poses a severe constrain to the Colombian campesinxs’ possibilities to maintain control over land and to contest current deeply unequal agrarian structures, as it obscures the violence and exclusions embedded in the everyday practices of land administration policies, which should be considered a key site of scholarly scrutiny.