Property Law for Development Policy and Institutional Theory: Problems of Structure, Choice, and Change
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Description
Published in The Mystery of Capital and the New Philosophy of Social Reality, Barry Smith, David M. Mark & Isaac Ehrlich, eds.
This paper brings the institutional and ontological assumptions of development-by-incorporation theorists such Hernando De Soto into dialogue with modern property scholarship. The central argument of the incorporationists is that state-based legal systems should simply recognize and incorporate the informal property rights of urban squatters and rural villagers, thereby creating the necessary institutional conditions for successful economic development in those communities. While not directly addressing the consequentialist side of the argument, this paper argues that our knowledge of modern property systems poses several significant challenges to this prescription. The most significant of these are that modern property systems have often resisted incorporating informal property rights, and indeed often suppressed them, that they typically involve a great deal more indeterminacy than institutional theorists assume, that the very boundaries of modern property systems seem to be shifting beyond the nation state system, that incorporation decisions will necessarily involve significant normative choices, and that some traditional systems may simply be inconsistent with the institutional ontology of modern economic institutions.
Publication Date
2008
Publisher
Open Court Publishing
City
Chicago
ISBN
9780812696158
First Page
193
Last Page
227
Keywords
Custom, Deontology, Development, Economic Growth, Indigenous Rights, Informal Rights, Institutions, Legal Pluralism, Nongovernmental Organizations, Ontology, Property
Disciplines
Land Use Law | Law | Property Law and Real Estate
Recommended Citation
Errol E. Meidinger, Property Law for Development Policy and Institutional Theory: Problems of Structure, Choice, and Change in The Mystery of Capital and the New Philosophy of Social Reality 193 (Barry Smith, David M. Mark & Isaac Ehrlich, eds., Open Court Publishing 2008)
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