Guatemala and Integrated Rural Development: Towards Inclusive Growth in the Rural Sector

Abstract

Access to land and its associated power has stratified society for millennia. Non-market functions of land have historically delineated political power structures, arranging hierarchical relationships predicated on land ownership. The productive functions of land, for agriculture or associated environmental services, have defined its economic significance. In the past 30 years in Latin America, paths to development have been navigated with private property as the guide, prioritising formalised structures of ownership and dispossessing traditional, communal forms of land use and control. Though State policies may recognise the political-cultural rights of marginalised populations in their pursuit for equal access to land, the “extension of the discussion into the economic realm” is often discouraged (Hale, 2009), and unequal land policy arrangements that maintain rural poverty and exclusion persist. (…)