Mobilizing for Land and Power: Agrarian Land Rights Institutions in Bihar and West Bengal, India

• In Event: 349 - Section on Sociology of Development Paper Session. Emerging Issues in the Sociology of Development

Abstract

Most of the world’s poor live in rural areas and overwhelmingly depend on agriculture as a central source of livelihood. Yet poor agriculturalists vary markedly in the rights they hold vis-à-vis the land they farm and they value they are able to glean from it. By which mechanisms are land rights institutions shaped and by which do they exert their effects? What implications might a deeper understanding of how these mechanisms vary across diverse institutional settings hold for the practice of development? The present paper reviews econometric studies on land reforms and the colonial legacies of India’s land institutions. To overcome the limitations that I identify within the literatures, I develop a model that integrates gradual institutional change and path dependence frameworks from comparative historical sociology and political science. I then employ this model to address an empirical puzzle that is inexplicable within current frameworks: why was West Bengal able to (relatively) successfully implement land reform, while the neighboring state of Bihar was not? I find that the answer hinges on the role of mobilization. While patterns of class-based mobilization facilitated effective land reform implementation in West Bengal, patterns of caste-based mobilization corroded stable programmatic alliances in Bihar. I conclude by contrasting the policy implications that can be drawn from my analysis with those presented by Banerjee and Iyer (2005). While their approach lends weight to the proposition that cross-class collaboration is the most promising avenue to agrarian development, mine suggests that redistribution-oriented mobilization may be the more advantageous strategy.

Author

• Andre Joshua Nickow, Northwestern University