Competing Views and Strategies on Agrarian Reform: Philippine Perspective

Winner, National Book Award (Social Sciences), Philippines, 2009

This volume is one of the two broadly distinct but closely related books. Competing Views and Strategies on Agrarian Reform: International Perspective aims to broaden the discussion by focusing on international political, policy and theoretical debates, as well as on some empirical cases from different countries that are relevant to the study of agrarian issues in the Philippines. Competing Views and Strategies on Agrarian Reform: Philippine Perspective aims to deepen the discussion by focusing on the Philippine agrarian reform experience, but drawing lessons that are relevant to theory-building and to policy discourse and political actions in situations elsewhere. The overarching theme of the twin books is critical thinking : conventional assumptions are interrogated, popular propositions critically examined, and new ways of questioning proposed.

Borras shows that agrarian reform accomplishments need to be examined in a disaggregated fashion and judgments made locally about the redistributive content of particular reform processes. Here he sets an important theoretical and methodological standard for all subsequent studies of reform in the Philippines and elsewhere. . . . One of the more important insights of his work has been to demonstrate why the redistribution of public, or forest, lands, often excluded from analysis of redistributive reform, can have important redistributive content (necessitating an analysis of effective property arrangements within lands formally considered public ). Here again Borras sets a new standard for future studies of agrarian reform. From the Foreword by James Putzel (London School of Economics).

Borras is one of the few outstanding scholars on land issues and peasant studies who have rightfully elevated the concerns of the rural poor into the mainstream of intellectual discussion and debate. The importance of [this book] lies in the alternative interpretation of various contentious land reform issues which, in many ways, go against conventional and traditional critiques from both the elite, NGO, and peasant/farmworker viewpoints. Eduardo Tadem, University of the Philippines