Publikation

Scarce natural resources, or scarce economic factors of production, provoke competing claims among various social groups within the state and in society. Such competitions tend to lead to conflict, often violent, within and between these groups. Thus, resolving violent conflict and forging peacebuilding process to rebuild and reconstruct communities and societies often requires resolving underlying and (pre-)existing resource-oriented conflicts.  Yet, it is quite common to see such conflicts being absorbed – but not resolved – in the process of peacebuilding, leading to relatively peaceful transition in communities but marked by lingering resource-oriented social fault-lines that often erupt sometime in the future.

Disaggregating approaches to land policies into statedriven, market-based, or community approaches may be relevant only to some degree; it is limited and problematical in a lot of easy. It is almost always a false division. In the end, reasonable and feasible land policies in the context of resolving conflict requires engagement with all these three institutions. Whatever attempts as packaging and labeling any of these approaches as ‘pro poor’ does not necessarily makes it so. Our point is: the discussion should not be on whether it should be statedriven or community approaches, or market-based; it should not be whether it should be land restitution or forest reallocation program, and so on. It can be any of these, or combination of these, depending on the particularly circumstance. The key is to specify the key features of what a pro-poor land policy is. The key is to be clear of what we mean by pro-poor land policies that can contribute towards conflict resolution and push for peacebuilding but at the same time resolving often persistent social conflict among community members. An underlying assumption here is that for any land policies to be socio- economically and politically sustainable in the future it has to be pro-poor as well. We now turn our discussion to this topic.