Is “pro-poor land administration” a realistic proposition? How a land survey in Bangladesh reproduced and reconfigured gendered and racialised poverty

Abstract

Ensuring land administration interventions achieve equitable, “pro-poor” outcomes continues to be a prominent focus for scholars and practitioners. While welcome, it is uncertain how this turn towards questions of justice and equity within the field can be implemented, not least because there are strong indications that land administration scholars are only just beginning to grapple with a number of major problems long recognised in development studies, including how to engage with complex, internally variegated “communities”. Analysis of how a recent land administration project in Bangladesh reinforced both gendered and ethnic exclusion provides additional empirical material that demonstrates the limits of current land administration theory and practice. In order to be realistic, land administration frameworks would benefit from a more precise understanding of what social justice outcomes are desirable for land administration interventions to achieve, how social mobilisation is necessary in order to do this, and what the implications of broader governance issues are for these proposed ends and means.