Sara Berry's article on Asante, Ghana highlights the centrality of propertization to the agenda of privatization (“Tomatoes, Land and Hearsay: Property and History in Asante in the Time of Structural Adjustment.” World Development. 25:8, pp. 1225-1241, 1997).
The problem of the article is framed by what seems like a bewildering turn-around of international lending institutions – first, through SAPs, they pushed for market liberalization, and now they are pushing for firmer state controls and regulations -- in particular getting the state into land enclosures and privatization. Berry contends that both actions are undertaken in order to promote "Democracy," i.e. "agricultural productivity" and "sustainable development," but both strategies of imposed property rights regimes fail to address the real issue: “Calls for privatization continue, despite accumulated evidence that transfers of ownership do not necessarily transform patterns of resource management” (1226).
In other words, international lending institutions, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, promote private property systems, essentially in the name of neo-liberal economic progress. However, the assumption that enclosing the land will lead to increased agricultural productivity and greater ecological care for the land is built on the false premised that positive property law regimes invoke these particular relationships to the land.
However, in Asanta, PARTICIPATION in property regimes is key. It’s not even the formal/legal regimes themselves that impose this system of property rights, but the reifying, ahistorical process of ascribing social relations and describing African institutions. When international lending institutions come in and influence or impose rules for land ownership, they trample on the stories of land that give meaning to the community's relationships to the earth and to each other.
Berry blames the “new institutionalists” for this – saying that there is an assumed consciousness that these scholars ascribe to members of institutions, much in the way of Marx’s proletariat class. Berry advocates a processual rather than structural analysis of property relations.
Ownership of land does not amount to secure land tenure in Asante or elsewhere in Ghana – scholars refuse to acknowledge that processes of contestation and negotiation constitute African political and economic realities by repeatedly “cling[ing] to the colonial administrator’s conviction that ambiguity and indeterminacy are obstacles to progress” (1237). Negotiations are the name of the property game in Asante, reflecting the dynamics of social and political relations in town.
So, what is the meaning of property in Asante (GHANA)?
As in many places in the world, property is not “owned” by individuals, instead “most land is subject to multiple, overlapping claims by several different kinds of social agents” (1233), and “hearsay” is a common form of establishing whose claims will be honoured and how.
In this sense, “land in Asante has served as important sites for the (re-)production of history” (1225). Knowledge of the past is essential to these disputes – so it is performed regularly – “the value of history depends not on scarcity [as in market commodities], but on the social dynamics of production” (1236). Further, “the production of history is a performative as well as an archival process” (1236).
“Their participation also runs counter to one of the central arguments of for ‘privatization’ – namely, that security of tenure depends on the creation of exclusive, unambiguous rights to property by bringing an end to the proliferation of potential claims and the historical precedents on which they are based… In a community such as Kumawu, where property rights are defined through on-going processes of negotiation, people are more likely to gain reasonably secure access to land by participating in the negotiations, and the accompanying proliferation of historical precedents, than by setting on a single story which secures some people’s rights at the expense of others” (1237).