Property Rights in Land: Institutions, social appropriations, and socio-economic outcomes

GELMAN JORGE, ROSA CONGOST Y RUI SANTOS

Property Rights in Land. Issues in social, economic and global history

Routledge

Lugar: New York; Año: 2017; p. 177 - 204

Our argument in this final discussion chapter starts out from two assumptions. The first one is that the weight of the processes mediating between a given institutional innovation affecting property rights, on the one hand, and its economic and social outcomes in different societies, on the other, is the result of the concrete social appropriations of institutional rules and norms, that is, of how, by whom and to what purposes they are actually used to legitimize the power inherent to property relations, or resistance to that power. The second is that social appropriations result from historical processes engaging multiple agents and are too deeply embedded in social contexts to be reduced to an account of the interests and actions of the state and elite organizations, important though these doubtlessly are.