3 Blockchain

Blockchain technology, the design of which was originally seen as facilitating an egalitarian, peer-to-peer sharing economy, is not necessarily neutral and apolitical.

3.1 Land Registers

Daivirt

There is a need for more empirical insights into the ways how blockchain-based property relations create new territories of accumulation and resistance, and intersect with existing legal and political systems.

This essay explores the abstraction of blockchain as employed for formalizing land rights in emerging economies. 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. This highlights the need to explore blockchain-based land registries as distributed knowledge infrastructures, uncovering their broader embeddedness in older, non-digital modalities, and the “peopled infrastructures” of informal networks with their histories and cultural repertoires. As digital technologies can facilitate an illusion of enhanced visibility of some elements while obscuring others, I argue that more attention is needed to the role of broader colonial legacies and enduring North-South inequalities that frequently remain backgrounded in the adoption of such technologies.

An increasing number of governments are investigating the prospects of transferring their land registries to blockchain. Blockchain applications are explored as enabling the formalization of property rights in the countries of the Global South, as well as providing more efficient coordination of real property markets in the Global North. Blockchain registries have several advantages as compared to centralized digital or paper-based databases. Records on blockchain are distributed and verified by a multitude of nodes in a peer-to-peer digital network, affording them more transparency and resilience. As new additions to the chain of blocks are cryptographically time-stamped, this makes tampering or accidental data loss less likely. Auto-executing “smart contracts” that transform legal agreements into code could mediate contracts

Blockchain-based digitalization of land records should be viewed within a broader framework of land tenure formalization in the Global South, where land titling has been advocated as enabling economic development by turning land into tradable asset and a source of credit. Contrary to the expectations of the proponents of neoliberal land reforms, recent land titling initiatives in Africa and Latin America have fueled speculative investment and land concentration.

Many communities in the Global South follow local, alternative rules of property, where land is held under customary tenure and managed as part of a complex system of obligations and debts within a broader kin or territorial group. Reforms that introduce exclusive land rights may exacerbate political conflicts especially in unstable and transitional settings.

Daivirt (2021) Land, property, technology: interrogating an infrastructural promise