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).

Stephen Munzer advances some theories on property that can be quantified along several compatible spectrums. The first spectrum is the stretch between commons to anticommons – in between lies state and private property. This correlates with two theories of property more generally – the bundle-of-rights analysis and the rule-governed entitlements analysis.

The bundle-of-rights analysis further breaks down into 8 normative modalities of rights and their correlatives – claim-right, liberty-right, power, and immunity, with their respective correlatives of duty, no-right, liability, and disability [these modalities were developed by Hohfeld [1919] 1978). Then Honoré (1961) “sought to specify the standard ‘incidents’ of ownership common to Western legal systems” (149) by “taking the fundamental legal conceptions and making them more specific by indicating certain actions or events – for instance, to use, to sell, to exclude – in relation to other persons with respect to things” (149). Munzer theorizes the way that the bundle-of-rights also further clarifies our understanding of property: “If someone has all or almost all of the incidents with respect to a given thing, one can speak of ownership. If someone has rather less than the full package of incidents – as with easements or bailments – there is limited property” (149).

These four definitions of property are repeated throughout much of the literature on property. They are not legal categories, but universal definitions of the types of property ownership prevalent around the world. The authors acknowledge that many property regimes mix and blur these categories.

This guide is useful, I think, in representing dominant understandings of property use in the West. Especially in that private property is seen as having the unique potential "to transfer or alienate a share of resources," which, according to the theory (that dates back to the 17th century) underpins and enables labour productivity.