What is it about?

Blockchain technology has been explored recently for digitalizing land administration in different parts of the world. It has been viewed as contributing to formalization of property rights in the Global South, and enhancing coordination of real estate markets in the Global North. The article explores the integration of blockchain with existing modes of land administration in three countries. It argues that blockchain-based land registries hold divergent and seemingly contradictory promises that accommodate individualist aspirations of smoothly executing private property rights and collectivist pursuits of more transparent and organic collectivities. Instead of serving as a panacea for fuzzy or nonexistent title registries, these registries link into existing dilemmas of property rights and tensions between their individual and collective dimensions. The article points out that at its current technological capacity, the technology seems to remain more productive in contexts with pre-existing digital infrastructures and their efficient integration with other components of real property markets.

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Why is it important?

Behind the seemingly neutral façade of the technology, diverse aspirational claims and narratives guide its implementation in different societies, shaped by particular histories and socio-political contexts. Blockchain technology, originally seen as facilitating egalitarian, peer-to-peer exchange, is not neutral and apolitical. Rather, digital technologies can facilitate an illusion of enhanced visibility of some elements while obscuring others.

Perspectives

Infrastructures can evoke and make visible ideas that are of central ethical concern at a particular moment—such as the promised transparency of blockchain registries in environments of plurality and uncertainty. The blockchain registry may signify a desire to 'lock away' debates and contestations over land. Paradoxically, it renders historical patterns of power visible and makes infrastructures available to broader political debates around the incomplete or unrealizable fruition of promises made.

Daivi Rodima-Taylor

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This page is a summary of: Digitalizing land administration: The geographies and temporalities of infrastructural promise, Geoforum, June 2021, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.04.003.
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