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A Theory of Access*

Jesse C. Ribot Institutions and Governance Program World Resources Institute

Nancy Lee Peluso Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management Division of Society and Environment University of California

Abstract The term “access” is frequently used by property and natural resource analysts without adequate definition. In this paper we develop a concept of access and examine a broad set of factors that differentiate access from property. We define access as “the ability to derive benefits from things,” broadening from property’s clas- sical definition as “the right to benefit from things.” Access, following this definition, is more akin to “a bundle of powers” than to property’s notion of a “bundle of rights.” This formulation includes a wider range of social relationships that constrain or enable benefits from resource use than property relations alone. Using this fram- ing, we suggest a method of access analysis for identifying the constellations of means, relations, and processes that enable various actors to derive benefits from re- sources. Our intent is to enable scholars, planners, and policy makers to empirically “map” dynamic processes and relationships of access.

Introduction

The notion of access has not been adequately theorized, even though it is used frequently by property analysts and other social theorists.1 In this paper, we argue that access differs from property in multiple ways that have not been systematically accounted for within the property and access literature. We define access as the ability to benefit from things—including material objects, persons, institutions, and symbols.

*The authors have been talking about the ideas in this paper on and off for some five years. The order of authors is thus arbitrary and should not be taken to indicate some relative amount of thinking or actual paper writing. Many thanks are due to Janice Al- corn, Arun Agrawal, Louise Fortmann, Sheila Foster, Charles Geisler, Donald Kruecke- berg, Svein Jentoft, Bonnie McCay, Donald Moore, Allyson Purpura, Harriet Ribot, Peter Vandergeest, and the peer reviewers for their constructive comments on drafts of this ar- ticle. Direct correspondence to: Jesse C. Ribot; Institutions and Governance Program; World Resources Institute; 10 G Street, NE, Suite 800; Washington DC 20002; [email protected] or Nancy Lee Peluso; Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management; Division of Society and Environment; 135 Giannini Hall MC #3312; Uni- versity of California; Berkeley, CA 94720-3312; [email protected]

1 The term access is already often used in the literature to include property rights and other means of benefiting from resources. See de Janvry et al. (2001), Newell (2000), Mamdani (1996), Mearns (1995), Lund (1994), Agarwal (1994:19), Berry (1989, 1993), Peluso (1992b), Shipton and Goheen (1992), Bruce (1988), Blaikie (1985).

Rural Sociology 68(2), 2003, pp. 153–181 Copyright © 2003 by the Rural Sociological Society

By focusing on ability, rather than rights as in property theory, this for- mulation brings attention to a wider range of social relationships that can constrain or enable people to benefit from resources without fo- cusing on property relations alone.

We theorize access and then examine a broad set of factors we view heuristically as strands that constitute and configure webs of access. Our intent is to enable scholars and others to map dynamic processes and relationships of access to resources—locating property as one set of access relationships among others. The concept of access that we present aims to facilitate grounded analyses of who actually benefits from things and through what processes they are able to do so. Access retains an empirical “. . . focus on the issues of who does (and who does not) get to use what, in what ways, and when (that is, in what circum- stances)” (Neale 1998:48—italics in original). “Use” can be seen to mean the enjoyment of some kind of benefit or benefit stream (Hunt 1998).

Focusing on natural resources as the “things” in question, we ex- plore the range of powers—embodied in and exercised through vari- ous mechanisms, processes, and social relations—that affect people’s ability to benefit from resources. These powers constitute the material, cultural and political-economic strands within the “bundles” and “webs” of powers that configure resource access. Different people and institutions hold and can draw on different “bundles of powers” lo- cated and constituted within “webs of powers” made up of these strands.2 People and institutions are positioned differently in relation to resources at various historical moments and geographical scales. The strands thus shift and change over time, changing the nature of power and forms of access to resources.

Some people and institutions control resource access while others must maintain their access through those who have control. Attention to this difference in relations to access is one way access can be seen as a dynamic analytic. Access analysis also helps us understand why some people or institutions benefit from resources, whether or not they have rights to them. This is a primary difference between analyses of access and property. If the study of property is concerned with understanding claims, particularly the claims that MacPherson (1978) defines as rights, then the study of access is concerned with understanding the multiplicity of ways people derive benefits from resources, including, but not limited to, property relations.

The following section, Theorizing Access, compares access to prop- erty. We detail and exemplify our notion of access as bundles and webs

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2 We borrow the term “bundles of powers” from Ghani (1995:2).

of powers that enable actors to gain, control, and maintain access. This section also briefly outlines an approach for analyzing access. The next section, Mechanisms of Access, enumerates the parallel, complemen- tary, conflicting, sequential, and nested mechanisms—processes or means of access that make up the strands in our bundles and webs. In the conclusion, we summarize our key points and discuss the analytic and practical importance of a fuller understanding of access.

Theorizing Access: Putting Property in its Place

One author teaches that property is a civil right, based on occupa- tion and sanctioned by law; another holds that it is a natural right, arising from labor; and these doctrines, though they seem opposed, are both encouraged and applauded. I contend that neither occu- pation nor labor nor law can create property, which is rather an ef- fect without a cause.

What is property? 1849 (Proudhon 1993:13)

Writing on the subject over 150 years ago, Proudhon began to ques- tion the analytical constraints of analyzing property on its own. In the- orizing access and differentiating it from property, we emphasize some key differences between the two terms. We define access as the ability to benefit from things. MacPherson (1978) characterizes property as “. . . a right in the sense of an enforceable claim to some use or bene- fit of something” (also see Commons 1968:17).3 An “enforceable claim” is one that is acknowledged and supported by society through law, custom, or convention. The term, “benefit” is common to defini- tions of both access and property. Property and access are concerned with relations among people in regard to benefits or values4—their ap- propriation, accumulation, transfer, distribution, and so forth. Benefits are important because people, institutions, and societies live on and for them and clash and cooperate over them.

A key distinction between access and property lies in the difference between “ability” and “right.” Ability is akin to power, which we define in two senses—first, as the capacity of some actors to affect the prac-

A Theory of Access — Ribot and Peluso 155

3 A comprehensive survey of the property literature is beyond the scope of this paper. We have selected some key property theorists to include in our discussion.

4 We use the term benefit similarly to the term value. An important difference, how- ever, between labor or scarcity approaches to value and an access stance is that the ori- gins of value do not need to be problematized in our model. It could be, as Proudhon (1993) points out, that value is, like property, “an effect without a cause.” Perhaps the values that exist are all composed of “dead” labor. Perhaps they are present in nature— as Marx (italics in original) also noted. We assume that value is present wherever bene- fits from “things” are pursued. For a broad discussion of origin of values issues see Ap- padurai (1986), Marx (1972[1875]:8).

tices and ideas of others (Weber 1978:53; Lukes 1986:3) and second, we see power as emergent from, though not always attached to, people. Power is inherent in certain kinds of relationships and can emerge from or flow through the intended and unintended conse- quences or effects of social relationships. Disciplining institutions and practices can cause people to act in certain ways without any apparent coercion (Foucault 1978a, 1979).

Access is about all possible means by which a person is able to benefit from things. Property generally evokes some kind of socially acknowledged and supported claims or rights—whether that acknowledgment is by law, custom, or convention. Rights-holders enjoy a certain kind and degree of social power. The rights associated with law, custom, and convention are not always equivalent. Some actions may be illegal under state law, while maintaining a socially sanctioned base in customary or conven- tional realms of collective legitimacy, or vice versa. Access may also be enabled indirectly through means that are not intended to impart prop- erty rights or that are not socially sanctioned in any domain of law, cus- tom, or convention. Without allocating rights per se, ideological and dis- cursive manipulations, as well as relations of production and exchange, profoundly shape patterns of benefit distribution. Likewise, socially and legally forbidden acts can also shape who benefits from things.5

The massive and growing literature on common property and re- source tenure has shown that law (whether written or oral, formal or customary) can never completely delineate all the modes and pathways of resource access along complex and overlapping webs of power.6 Even earlier theorists did not reduce property to matters of law. Locke saw property as the moral claim to rights arising from the mixing of la- bor with land (MacPherson 1978; Neale 1998:54). This right was then codified in law to be protected by the state. For Marx (1964:78, 136; 1977) property is appropriation. It is the fact or act of obtaining, which he traced back to relations of production based on previous appropri- ations in an unfolding historical process, that at particular junctures was formalized in law.7 Thus, for Marx, the rights that derived from

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5 Socially and legally forbidden means may include violence (Hunt 1998:3; Peluso 1993), corruption (Bardhan 1980; Gupta 1995), and theft.

6 For a small sampling, see Fortmann and Bruce (1988), McCay et al. (1989), Berkes (1989), and Schlager and Ostrom (1992).

7 Marx (1964:78,136) equates property to appropriation—the alienation of other’s la- bor embedded in material things (also see Marx 1977). Commodities have value and are objects of appropriation because they embody alienated labor. Going beyond his labor theory of value, Marx (1972:8—italics in original) admits nature as a source of value: “Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the mani- festation of a force of nature. . . .”

combining labor with land or resource use were superceded by state- backed institutions of property, causing him to regard property as theft, in direct opposition to Locke’s idealistic formulations. Further, as property theorists introduce notions of forum shopping—the ability of some actors to select the arena of law, custom, or convention that will favor their objectives—the importance of political-economic and cultural forces beyond the legal sphere becomes more evident in de- termining who can use law, custom, or convention, when, and for what purposes (Meinzen-Dick and Pradhan 2002; Lund 1994; Griffiths 1986; Moore 1986; von Benda-Beckmann 1995, 1981). Thus, as Bell asserts, “There can hardly be a word more freighted with meaning than ‘prop- erty’” (Bell 1998:29).

Many dimensions of access that we discuss have been explored or in- cluded somewhere within the broad definitions used in property stud- ies.8 “Property” has tended to be linked in much of the literature and in daily usage to ideas of ownership or title as defined by law, custom, or convention (Singer 2000; Bell 1998; Bromley and Cernia 1989), though this has changed radically over the years. Even the terms “property relations” and “tenure” examine only relations of resource ownership and control sanctioned in some way by some social institu- tions, even though they are used sometimes to mean more than prop- erty rights sanctioned by states in written law.9 Our move from con- cepts of property and tenure to access locates property as one set of factors (nuanced in many ways) in a larger array of institutions, social and political-economic relations, and discursive strategies that shape benefit flows. Some of these are not acknowledged or recognized as le- gitimate by all or any parts of society; some are residues of earlier le- gitimating institutions and discourses. Hence, access analysis requires attention to property as well as to illicit actions, relations of produc- tion, entitlement relations, and the histories of all of these.10

We recognize that many property theorists have made a move away from the formal. Tawney (1978:141) began to extend ideas of property to ownership of exchange and market access in the 1920s. Christman

A Theory of Access — Ribot and Peluso 157

8 See Marx (1964:341, 1977:349), Proudhon (1993), Rose (1994), Ghani (1995), Fort- mann (1988b), Singer (2000), Geisler and Daneker (2000).

9 For some early definitions of property and some reviews, see Maine (1917), MacPher- son (1978), Fortmann (1988b). For examples of more recent nuancing of the terms property and property relations, see Agarwal (1994:19), Shipton and Goheen (1992), Berry (1988, 1989, 1993), Blaikie (1985), Bruce (1988), Mearns (1995), Peluso (1992b, 1996), Nugent (1993), Vandergeest (1996), Geisler and Daneker (2000).

10 For discussions of illicit action see Hunt (1998:16), Gupta (1995), Bhagwati (1982), and Krueger (1974). On relations of production see Marx (1977[1858]), and Polanyi (1944). On entitlement relations see Singer (2000), Leach et al. (1999), Ribot (1995), Watts and Bohle (1993), Dréze and Sen (1989), and Sen (1981).

(1994), in talking about “things tangible and intangible,” takes another step away from physical possession or appropriation and the embodi- ment of value in physical things. Even Henry Maine’s early (1917) no- tion of “bundles of rights,”11 which disaggregated property into com- ponent rights—such as the rights to own, inherit, use, or dispose of— provided a nuanced understanding of the many social relations around things. More recently, Geisler and Daneker’s (2000:xii) theorizing of “bundles of owners” has helped to problematize and blur the distinc- tions between individual and collective claims to the various strands that make up bundles of rights. Further, the literatures on common property and political ecology have expanded the property rights literature by showing how collectively used or held resources are em- bedded in larger sets of political-economic and ecological relation- ships.12

Using insights from these property and tenure theorists, we frame access even more broadly. Thus, like property, we see access relations as always changing, depending on an individual’s or group’s position and power within various social relationships. Generally, people have more power in some relationships than in others, or at some historical moments and not others. As Foucault (1978a) pointed out, power has as much to do with positionality and the particular “imbrications of men and things” as with the formal powers that people might hold. Different political-economic circumstances change the terms of access and may therefore change the specific individuals or groups most able to benefit from a set of resources. Ghani (1995:2) has suggested that property should be represented as a bundle of powers—again, a broader view than Maine’s notion mentioned above. Ghani’s bundles of powers in fact represent a whole new concept that can be incorpo- rated into our notion of access. These bundles of powers become nodes in larger webs and, at the same time, can be disaggregated into their constituent strands. Placing this analysis within a political- economic framework helps us identify the circumstances by which some people are able to benefit from particular resources while others are not (see also Bell 1998:29).

The political-economic aspect of our concept becomes evident when we divide social action into access control and access maintenance. Access control is the ability to mediate others’ access. Control “ . . . refers to the checking and direction of action, the function or power of direct-

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11 Also see Meek (1938:1), Fortmann (1988b). 12 On common property, see footnote 6, and Ostrom 1990. On political ecology, see

Blaikie (1985), Bryant (1992), Hecht and Cockburn (1989), Peet and Watts (1996).

ing and regulating free action” (Rangan 1997:72).13 Maintenance of ac- cess requires expending resources or powers to keep a particular sort of resource access open (e.g., Berry 1993). Maintenance and control are complementary. They are social positions that temporarily crystal- lize around means of access. Both are constitutive of relations among actors in relation to resource appropriation, management, or use. At the same time, the meanings and values of resources are often con- tested among those who control and those who maintain access. The idea of property being composed of rights and duties can be seen as a parallel distinction in which claiming of rights is a means of access control while the execution of duties is a form of access maintenance aimed at sustaining those rights (Hunt 1998:9). We speak of a third term, gaining access, as the more general process by which access is es- tablished.

Access control and maintenance parallel some aspects of Marx’s no- tions of the relations between capital and labor. The relation between actors who own capital and those who labor with others’ capital or means of production parallels the relation between actors who control others’ access and those who must maintain their own access. In both cases, it is in the relation between these two sets of actors that the divi- sion of benefits is negotiated. To maintain access, subordinate actors often transfer some benefits to those who control it. They expend re- sources to cultivate relations or transfer benefits to those who control access in order to derive their own benefit. This kind of analysis can go beyond class analysis, since strands of control and maintenance may re- side in the same person or be shared among cooperating or compet- ing actors.14 One individual may hold a bundle of powers whose strands include various means of controlling and maintaining access. This person will be in a dominant position with respect to some actors and in a subordinate position to others. Because of the fragmented na- ture of control and maintenance and the webs and bundles of powers that constitute them, people cannot be divided neatly into classes, as in a traditional Marxist frame. Various types of power relations around a given set of benefits and beneficiaries must be analyzed to under- stand these webs of access.

The strands in our webs and bundles of power, then, are the means,

A Theory of Access — Ribot and Peluso 159

13 This parallels Weber’s (1978:53) notion of domination. Also see Peluso (1992b), Lund (1994), and Berry (1994) for discussions of the notion of access control.

14 This links us to Hall’s (1980) famous notion of “Marxism without guarantees” i.e., that we should maintain Marx’s “materialist premise” but understand the material con- ditions of existence within historically specific analyses, not just abstract or automatic as- sumptions made based on class analysis.

processes, and relations by which actors are enabled to gain, control, and maintain access to resources. As shorthand for means, processes, and relations in the rest of this paper, we use the term “mechanisms.”15

We see several different kinds of mechanisms at work. Rights-based and illicit mechanisms both can be used directly to gain benefits. Other structural and relational mechanisms of access include or reinforce ac- cess gained directly through configurations of rights-based or illicit ac- cess. An example of illicit access could be stolen produce that may only have commercial value if the thief has access to markets. A rights-based example could be when access to labor may complement property rights in land. Controlling both strands—property in land and labor access—makes the land rights more lucrative (de Janvry et al. 2001:5). Someone might have rights to benefit from land but may be unable to do so without access to labor or capital. This would be an instance of having property (the right to benefit) without access (the ability to benefit). Mechanisms of access may operate sequentially, as when ac- cess to labor opportunities are contingent on prior membership in a particular organization or having a particular social identity. Labor op- portunities may depend on having a certain kind of knowledge and the certification of that knowledge or education by a professional or- ganization or the state (Blaikie 1985).

Locating access in a political-economic framework provides a theo- retical model of social change. Social relations and differentiation emerge from cooperation and conflict over benefits (value in Marx’s terms) within particular political-economic moments. Laws may be formed from these relations or precede them. Benefits can be redis- tributed and captured in the course of changing social relations and legal frameworks as new conflicts and cooperative arrangements emerge. Because of the interdependence of some mechanisms of ac- cess, an absolute or abstract hierarchy of mechanisms cannot be im- posed. The ways various access mechanisms fit into political-economic moments must be determined empirically. Access analysis is, thus, the process of identifying and mapping the mechanisms by which access is gained, maintained, and controlled. Moreover, because access patterns change over time, they must be understood as processes (Berry 1993; Lund 1994:14–15; Peluso 1996).

Given the framework outlined above, access analysis involves 1) iden-

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15 We choose the term “mechanisms” because “means” implies agency, whereas access is not always a matter of agency. The manifestation of mechanisms in power relations be- tween people in other realms of social interaction may have the disciplining effects of controlling someone’s access to the resources by favoring the access of others (Foucault 1979; Moore 1993).

tifying and mapping the flow of the particular benefit of interest

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