Land Brokers Research Articles

Property-work, work of property: figuring land and caste in an urbanizing frontier

Property talk has gained a new amplitude amid soaring land prices in India’s agrarian-urban frontier. This article focuses on what is colloquially described as property ka kaam—property-work and ethnographically traces how property is continually made and remade on the ground. It heuristically identifies some of the key figures—the private developer, the religious leader, and the land broker—who, in their own specific ways, creatively improvise and draft the contours of an urbanizing frontier. It draws attention to everyday practices and discourses through which agropastoral land is turned into urban real estate and shows how the figures, working at different scales and capacities, navigate the complexly layered social-spatial dynamics of caste, class, community, and brotherhood to secure widespread consensus about urban transformation and coproduce an emergent agrarian-urban geography. This article opens a window into the opaque and dense world of property and highlights the contingent nature of property and place- and caste-based connections that undergird property-work.

Institutional Factors Influencing Urban Land Governance

The study aims to investigate institutional factors affecting urban land governance conducted in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It uncovers how institutions, formal and informal, shape crucial aspects of urban land governance, including land tenure. Using a mixed-methods approach, it gathered rich data from diverse stakeholders: land officials, residents (formal and informal), brokers, and land managers. Interviews, questionnaires, and focus groups revealed a positive correlation between the quality of institutions and effective land governance. Strengthening both formal and informal rules, upgrading informal settlements, digitizing land management, and regulating land brokers were identified as key steps towards a more fair and sustainable land system in the city

Agrarian change through speculation: Rural elites as land brokers for mining in Colombia

AbstractThis paper studies the connections between the expansion of mining capital, speculative forms of land grabbing and agrarian transformation. It is argued that in periods of commodity boom, the landowning rural elite benefits from mining through speculative land deals with mining companies. They act as ‘land brokers’ for the mining firms, helping them to overcome a significant barrier to land accumulation through the de facto abolition of landed property. The analysis is based on a qualitative case study on the expansion of coal mining in central Cesar in northern Colombia. To develop my arguments, I refer to the concept of accumulation by dispossession as defined by Michael Levien, and historical materialist approaches on rent, and speculative land dispossession. In addition, I use concepts developed for studying coercive land grabbing and agrarian elite participation in armed conflicts to analyse the mechanisms applied to (coercively) acquire rights to land. It is concluded that with high global prices for minerals, metals and fossil fuels, the expansion of mining in the countryside fosters a process of agrarian change through land speculation that is articulated in a reconcentration of landed property, a re‐strengthening of the rural landowning elite and the dissolution of peasant agriculture.

Analyzing actors’ interaction behavior in land transactions in informal settlement settings: A case study of Burayu city, Ethiopia

Informality plays an imperative role in offering housing for households in developing countries when the formal market cannot provide enough to keep up with residents' demands. The actors' interaction, with one another, plays an imperative role in land transactions in informal settlement areas. As informal actors operate outside the formal land transactions their activities and methods of operation are rarely understood. Therefore, based on social network theory, this paper aims to identify and examine informal actors, their functions, interactions, and power relationships in informal settlement areas. To this end, this study employed key informant interviews, focus group discussions, structured questionnaires, and a review of published literature, as well as official documents. In the study area, most residents acquired land through informal mechanisms. Major actors include farmers, local land administrators, speculators, land brokers, residents, government officials, and religious leaders. The study also uncovers that the role of each actor varies from information provision to price fixing. Their roles and interactions are governed by dynamic networks and occasionally overlap functions. Among the network actors, land brokers are considered the most influential and powerful because they possess a high degree of centrality, closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector. They hold a pivotal position in the network and act as a liaison between the network's actors. Therefore, the roles of land brokers, who often actively influence the land transaction process, should be considered in urban land governance and incorporated in policy formulation and implementation.

Land Mafias in Indonesia

ABSTRACT: In Indonesia, “land mafias” (mafia tanah) proliferate, alongside mafias that cluster around other commodities and state functions. We analyze the composition, character, modes, and sources of resilience of Indonesian land mafias, noting similarities with formations elsewhere, especially India. While taking care to avoid reifying the category, we view land mafias as opportunistic networks, or assemblages, of diverse actors including land brokers, investors, lawyers, gangsters, bureaucrats, law enforcement officers, and politicians. Their goal is to harvest rents from the transfer of ownership and control over land. They feature two elements: first, reliance on coercion (not always physical violence but always entailing transfer of property without freely-given consent, often via fraud or manipulation); second, institutional amorphousness crossing the state-society boundary. We analyze four modes of land mafia operation, though their nebulousness defies easy categorization. In explaining land mafia resilience, we acknowledge Indonesia’s property boom as a driver, but note that the ubiquity of mafias points to a more fundamental explanation: a variety of state formation involving pervasive engagement by state actors in illegal behavior in collusion with wealthy private actors. Mafias are central to Indonesian state formation, rather than aberrations. Feedback loops that incentivize illegal behavior make land mafias difficult to eradicate.

Unleashing speculative urbanism: Speculation and urban transformations

The papers and commentaries constituting this special issue offer new insights into speculative urbanism from the perspective of two southern metropolises. Based on an international and interdisciplinary collaboration comparing speculative urbanism in central and peri-urban Jakarta (Indonesia) and Bengaluru (India), and interrogating the literature triggered by a seminal 2011 paper by Michal Goldman, this issue extends existing speculative urbanism scholarship in four ways. First, the papers in this special issue take a multi-scalar approach, placing speculative urban practices within the broader spatio-temporal conjunctural contexts shaping their emergence. Second, extending currently economistic framings, they show how speculation also is socio-cultural. The diverse actors engaged in speculative urbanism do not simply seek to accumulate wealth; they do so with aspirations in mind for differentially imagined, but yet-to-be-realized, urban/peri-urban futures. Third, they highlight how speculative urbanism involves a broader range of actors than the usual suspects (developers and financial institutions), including land brokers, individual landlords, the state and its actors, and residents displaced from informal settlements. Fourth, they draw attention to diverse objects of urban speculation; not only land and property, but also more-than-human phenomena such as urban socio-ecologies and socio-technical networks.

A study of citizen preferences regarding legal land conflict resolution: The importance-performance analysis

This paper addresses the critical issue of land ownership in society, given the increasing conversion of undeveloped land into developed property. The indicators include land certificates, regulations on land ownership rights and use, regulations on land use, the presence of land brokers, and the existence of a task force for eradicating the land mafia. The main findings show that the type of land certificate, regulations on land use, and regulations on the use and rights of land ownership are currently performing well, while the task force for eradicating the land mafia had the lowest level of urgency, indicating a possible overkill. The study also highlights the need for serious consideration when eliminating brokers, as it can lead to the rise of brokers/land mafia. Additionally, the study indicates that the community’s readiness to seek legal aid for land disputes is directly proportional to the quality of law enforcement performance. Effective regulation and law enforcement are crucial in resolving land disputes to ensure the equitable distribution of land resources. The paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on land ownership and disputes and provides valuable insights for policymakers, landowners, and communities to develop effective strategies for resolving land disputes of land resources.

Discourse on Land in Kathmandu

With increasing migration, commodification of land, and urbanization in Kathmandu, there is growing interaction and antagonism between local landowners and groups who wish to own land, which has generated a discourse about land. This paper considers perceptions, beliefs, practices, and policies about land as discourse on land. Such discourse included meanings and uses of land. On discourse about landownership, land seekers think that Newars do not need the land that they are historically owning, and land brokers (dalāls) are suggesting landowners to sell land and build houses or live off on the interest of the money by depositing it in the bank. Dalāls act not only as intermediaries between owners and buyers in the land market but as amplifiers and communicators, and often as creators, of discourse. The physical and socio-economic environment of Kathmandu is changing in such a way that landowners are unable to hold, or hold for long, their land, and they are becoming increasingly influenced by the discourse that land is a high-value commodity that should be sold. Such discourse can be explained by the political economic theory that considers the city as a growth machine that commodifies space for private profit-making and capital accumulation.

Legal Existence of Brokers in Land Sale and Purchase Binding Agreement

This study aims to analyze the legal position of the broker (broker) as an intermediary trader in the binding agreement for the sale and purchase of land in Indonesia, as well as the legal implications of the actions of the land broker in the binding sale and purchase agreement (PPJB) which resulted in the occurrence of defect of will(wilsgebreken/ defect of consent). This type of research uses the normative type, normative legal research is a process to find the rule of law, legal principles, and legal doctrines in order to answer the legal issues faced. The results of this study indicate that legal position of a broker (broker) as an intermediary trader in a binding agreement for the sale and purchase of land in Indonesia in the KUHD arrangement is classified based on an official broker and an unofficial broker. Related official brokers have been regulated in the provision of Article 62 of the KUHD that he must obtain an official appointment fromrequired state officials. Meanwhile, unofficial brokers through the provisions of Article 63 of the KUHD do not grant a monopoly position to brokers, in fact there is an article that allows the existence of unofficial brokers, namely without an appointment from the Minister of Justice and without an oath, namely Article 63 of the KUHD bsd 1792 of the KUHPER. In this case, this unofficial broker is seen as a normal power holder

Everyday speculation in the remaking of peri-urban livelihoods and landscapes

Peri-urbanization is transforming the urban-rural interface of metropolitan areas across the global south. Large-scale planned developments and infrastructure projects result in the widespread displacement of residents and the disappearance of agricultural fields, vegetable plots, and small enterprises. Through multi-year fieldwork in eastern peri-urban Jakarta, we shift the optic from the large players driving these transformations—developers, land brokers, and investors—to examine how residents of peri-urban settlements (kampungs) respond to unexpected developments and manage the uncertainties associated with market-induced displacement. We conceptualize their practices as everyday speculation, extending speculation beyond its financial meaning to include social and cultural aspects. Both displacees in relocation kampungs and holdouts in kampungs subject to displacement make the most of emergent spatiotemporal rent gaps to devise ways to improve their livelihoods and accumulate wealth, but they also attempt to realize their social and cultural aspirations of reproducing kampung ways of life characterized by dense social networks and commoning practices such as mutual aid. Speculation reinforces pre-existing economic inequalities among kampung residents but is not obliterating social and cultural values that contest the norms of neoliberal global urbanism. Scaling up from everyday speculation by individual households, we identify three paths of kampung transformation that are concatenating across a shape-shifting speculative kampung landscape that coexists in a complex and synergistic relationship with the planned developments. Understanding residents’ everyday actions is thus important to grasping the full scope of peri-urbanization.

The ambiguity of price and the labor of land brokers in Kathmandu, Nepal

Few figures are more at odds with convenience than the informal land broker. Lambasted for corruption, opacity, and inefficiency, at best such brokers are portrayed as necessary bridges between different embedded markets, at worst as crooks profiting from their monopolizing of relationships and information. Yet, little attention is given to how brokers can affect the formation of markets and the meaning of price. Herein I offer an analysis of land brokerage in Kathmandu, Nepal. Though families have seemingly little control over the price of their land, I argue that their employing of informal land brokers allows their personal valuations of their own land's worth to influence its market price, helping to create a market where land prices seemingly “never go down.” I explore the ways different potential framings of land value illuminate each other—what I call “crosstalk”—and how this phenomenon paradoxically depends on owners being bracketed out of the negotiation over their land's sale, a service that brokers provide. Through ethnographic accounts of land sales and brokerage techniques, I present brokers as key to the formation of an unusual market, one that allows for the commodification of land while eliding the determinative effects of supply and demand.

Process of informal land transaction: A case study in the peri-urban area of Addis Ababa

Addis Ababa attracts many people creating need for land. But, formal land delivery is hopelessly inefficient. As a result, many people opt for buying urban fringe land informally. The aim of this article is to understand informal land transformation process in Kolfe Keranyo, a sub city of Addis Ababa. Observation, interviews, focus group discussions and a questionnaire survey were used to obtain the empirical data. This study has also benefited from various secondary sources. As the results of the study shows, the process of informal land transformation passes through different stages. These include identifying a land for sale, negotiating on land size, bargaining on land price, demarcating the land to be sold, and finally, documenting land right transfer though traditional letter of agreement (contract of sale). Land brokers, local residents, gatekeepers, local laborers, friends/relatives and local officials serve as sources of information about availability of land for sale. Elders, leaders of traditional social institutions, community leaders, neighbors, and relatives/friends play important role in regulating informal land transformation. Informal land delivery is a response to inefficient formal land delivery. It is, thus, important to create efficient formal land delivery system to suit the requirements of all for whom it is intended and make state rules and regulations appropriate to the situations they are meant to mediate. It is also necessary to give a space for informal actors in urban management and incorporate positive innovations in policy formulation.

From Kampungs to Condos? Contested accumulations through displacement in Jakarta

Across cities of the global South, major initiatives are underway to assemble land from informal settlements in order to make it available for large-scale infrastructure and commercial real estate projects. Driven by global city aspirations, profit-seeking developers, demands from emergent middle classes for modern residential, consumption and recreational spaces, and, last but not least, the availability of finance, these land transformations seek to commodify and enclose residential urban commons and involve the displacement of thousands of urban residents. Through an examination of two field sites, a ‘legal’ kampung where land is being acquired through negotiations between kampung residents with land rights and developers’ land brokers, and two ‘illegal’ kampungs whose residents were evicted in the name of flood mitigation, we conclude that the default theory for explaining these processes—accumulation by dispossession—is inadequate for capturing the variegated and complex nature of such processes. By thinking through Jakarta, we seek to provincialize the dominant concept of accumulation by dispossession, proposing an extension that we suggest is better attuned to capture the distinct features of Southern cities: Contested accumulations through displacement.

New Challenges in Land Use in Nepal: Reflections on the Booming Real-estate Sector in Chitwan and Kathmandu Valley

ABSTRACTDomestic commercial land acquisition is a recent phenomenon in Nepal; it is rapidly expanding and increasingly occupying productive agricultural land for real estate and other non-agricultural commercial purposes. This paper analyses the present situation and the implications of domestic land acquisition, and identifies actors and forms of land deals and associated conflicts. The study was conducted in Kathmandu Valley (27° 32′ 13″ N to 27° 49′ 10″ N and 85° 11′ 31″ E to 85° 31′ 38″ E) and Chitwan District (83°54′ 45″ to 84°48′15″ E and 27°21′45″ to 27°52′ 30″ N), the areas of Nepal most affected by domestic land acquisition. In the absence of statistical material, purposive sampling was used to identify households for a survey of 208 respondents; this was complemented by qualitative research and a review of media and other documents. Respondents confirmed that land acquisition is increasing at a very rapid rate and is driven by a nexus of politicians, land brokers and real-estate actors, and that it has caused not only food insecurity but also numerous conflicts between local people and the land deal actors. Existing policies and legislations were found to be inadequate to address the challenges brought about by the domestic land acquisition process in Nepal.

Social Capital as Obstacle to Development: Brokering Land, Norms, and Trust in Rural India

Summary Based on a study of how rural land brokers mediate the arrival of a Special Economic Zone in rural Rajasthan, this paper argues that theories of collective social capital cannot explain how networks, norms, and trust interact in a process of economic change. It then reconstructs Bourdieu’s distinct theory of individual social capital by showing how better-connected farmers are able to broker land and capture profits at the expense of fellow villagers, undermining trust, norms, and collective action. It argues that social capital is most plausibly seen as an aspect of social inequality that hinders inclusive development.

The Impact of Agricultural Expansion on Forest Cover in Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia

In the northeastern Cambodian province of Ratanakiri, agricultural expansion has been a significant factor in the decline of forest coverage. As forests are essential for rural populations’ livelihoods and a healthy environment, this study presents the dynamics of this transformed forest landscape resulting from changes in farming, land accessibility and policy changes. A multitemporal dataset consisting of two ALOS/AVNIR-2 images in 2007 and 2011 were used to compare changes in land cover, and the panchromatic image of 2012 Worldview-1 acquired at 100 km2 was used to access specific land-use patterns. Qualitative research methods ranging from an ethnographic method to qualitative data analysis were performed for gathering in-situ information to understand human-induced changes in land use. The results illustrate three triggers found at the local level, actively changing the forest landscape: (1) indigenous people transforming the swidden farming system to the mono-cropping system without external support and agricultural market information, (2) chaotic property market resulting from migrants purchasing existing farms or forest lands from indigenous people via land brokers, and (3) the introduction of land concessions by government via the 2001 Land Law, which allows agricultural cooperation to develop plantations.

Urban transformations: brokers, collaborative governance and community building in Karachi’s periphery

This essay reflects on the complexity of urban life in Karachi by exploring the politics of planning and community building in its urbanizing periphery. The periphery is an agrarian-pastoral stretch and sparsely populated region where villages (goths) were given usufruct rights during British rule. During General Pervez Musharraf’s (1999–2007) post-9/11, post-liberalization and decentralization phase, this vast expanse was subdivided and administratively merged with the City District Government Karachi (CDGK). The attempt to reshape the periphery by bringing it under the control of decentralized governance has unfolded in conjunction with the rapid growth of unplanned settlements. This essay delves into the roles of key state and non-state players around whom the market for land in the periphery is evolving: the NGO Orangi Pilot Project-RTI, land brokers or dalaals, and Board of Revenue officials or land masters. These players compete, negotiate and collaborate in diverse ways to control land and use their economic and social capital to engage the different layers of the state. The contestations and fluid negotiations between key social agents who facilitate land conversions and tenure rights provide a lens through which we can critically examine the urban politics that undergirds land and homeownership for poor groups.

The Political Construction of Wasteland: Governmentality, Land Acquisition and Social Inequality in South India

ABSTRACTThrough a micro‐level study of a biofuel‐related land acquisition in rural Tamil Nadu, India, this article reveals how state–subject relations are shaping modern land deal politics. Through its political construction of the concept of ‘wasteland’ and its associated wasteland development programme, the Indian state has facilitated a series of questionable land acquisitions, reshaping agrarian livelihoods in the process. A class of land brokers has emerged to help carry out the state's project of converting ‘wastelands’ to more ‘productive’, state‐defined uses such as biofuel cultivation and industrial expansion. Those whose lands have been acquired as part of these programmes have undergone a transition to wage labour, increasing the prolitarianization of agrarian communities. By documenting the mechanics of this ‘wasteland governmentality’, this study contributes to a political sociology of the state by unpacking the linkages between the state and agrarian subjects in the context of the ‘global land grab’.

Regimes of Dispossession: From Steel Towns to Special Economic Zones

ABSTRACTThis article compares land dispossession for industrial development under state‐developmentalism and neoliberalism in India. Drawing on interviews, ethnography and archives of industrial development agencies, it compares earlier steel towns and state‐run industrial estates with today's Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and argues that they embody different regimes of dispossession. While steel towns and industrial estates reflected a regime of land for production with pretensions of inclusive social transformation, SEZs represent a neoliberal regime of land for the market in which ‘land broker states’ have emerged to indiscriminately transfer land from peasants to capitalist firms for real estate. The present regime has been unable to achieve the ideological legitimacy of its predecessor, leading to more widespread and successful ‘land wars’. The article argues more broadly that variations in dispossession across space and time can be understood as specific constellations of state roles, economic logics tied to class interests and ideological articulations of the ‘public good’.

Mudhakkirāt Simsār Arāḍī Ṣuhyūnī [Memoirs of a Zionist land broker], being an Arabic language translation of the ‘Diaries of Yosef Nachmani [also spelled Naḥmani]’, collected and edited by Yosef Weitz, translated and annotated with a Forward by Elias Shoufani, Damascus, Dār al-Ḥaṣād, 2010, 366 pp.

Mudhakkirāt Simsār Arāḍī Ṣuhyūnī [Memoirs of a Zionist land broker], being an Arabic language translation of the ‘Diaries of Yosef Nachmani [also spelled Naḥmani]’, collected and edited by Yosef Weitz, translated and annotated with a Forward by Elias Shoufani, Damascus, Dār al-Ḥaṣād, 2010, 366 pp.