The poverty reduction and developmental role of land titles has been a contested issue since the concept was popularised in the early 2000s by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto and the World Bank. Among other things, land titles were held to provide vital local economic development impetus...

Cambodia’s microcredit sector – the world’s largest (in per capita terms) and most profitable – has created a raft of negative economic and social phenomena that are increasingly undermining the functioning of the economy and cohesiveness of society. Three especially damaging...

Starting with the work of Hernando de Soto in the 1980s, the role of land tenure soon took centre-stage in a neoliberal-oriented theory of change based on the possession and use of private individual land titles by the poor. One of the major mechanisms proposed by de Soto involved a three step...