Behind every land dispute, revolution or treaty are rules nobody wrote on the wall. This episode makes them visible by asking what owning land actually means and who decides. It introduces land tenure as an institution and the four categories every society draws from: private, communal, state and open access.
Timeline
- 2002FAO publishes Land Tenure and Rural Development, setting the series' working vocabulary
Still debated
Critics call the FAO's four categories a Western-inflected simplification that many real systems blur. Whether turning customary rights into registered private title helps or harms, and whether ownership is a universal bundle or a culturally specific idea, remain open.