In the shadow of benchmarks. Normative and ontological issues in the governance of land

Abstract

The last decade witnessed the flourishing of monitoring systems that produce new metrics to diagnose and benchmark land governance at country level. One of the most influential initiatives is the Land Governance Assessment Framework, a diagnostic tool developed by the World Bank to evaluate land policies, monitor progress and point towards global best practices. Although presented as a neutral tool, the Land Governance Assessment Framework dispositif has the effect of distributing light and shadow on the complex and multifaceted politics of land. This article aims at conducting a close analysis of the Land Governance Assessment Framework standard in order to explore how it defines ontologies and norms. These two levels are successively explored by asking two questions: ‘what is land?’ and ‘land for which people?’. Thus, the analysis shows that, although the World Bank discourse has evolved towards the recognition of ‘a continuum of rights’ and multiple forms of proof of ownership, the main focus of the Land Governance Assessment Framework is to make land a productive and investible resource. In the process, it relegates to the shadow social movements’ normative claims and alternative land ontologies that this article proposes to untangle relying on the French school of pragmatic sociology.