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Paper short abstract

This paper studies how land brokers, construction syndicates, and other middlemen produce a speculative market in land and become actors in a regime of localised land governance aimed at managing dispossession and based on political patronage.

Paper long abstract

Real estate booms have dominated neoliberal South Asia’s development trajectory. In India, the land market underlying real estate growth has placed middlemen as unique development actors. The politics of development—the distribution of its damages and benefits—are controlled by these informal land brokers and suppliers of materials and labour, often organised through localised political patronage. Through fieldwork in peri-urban villages in West Bengal, India, this paper studies land brokers and syndicates as agents facilitating a speculative land market and enabling real estate development in an environment of opaque, chaotic, and unlawful transactions. It asks what political forces organise these intermediaries and why. By studying a market requiring several extra-economic interventions and comparing findings to similar studies across South Asia, this paper highlights how the politics and trajectories of neoliberal development involve informal actors organised through the local party society. Real estate remains attractive for private capital because organised intermediaries allow it to bypass regulations and control uncertainties to successfully commodify otherwise volatile land. Rather than retreating from the market, the state devolves into a localised governance of development when political parties capture informal actors and bureaucratic channels of the land market. Thus, capital taps into possible windfalls of uncertain markets and the party benefits from controlling the few profitable livelihoods arising from such development. Such an inquiry can produce new understandings of the politics of neoliberal development in South Asia, the changing nature of the state in the developing world, and the internal dynamics of land markets.