| The land question taken here as multifaceted political, economic, and social questions remains unresolved in most developing countries today. This is despite the series of state-led agrarian reform initiatives for the most part of the past century. Recently, a competing proposition has emerged, market-based agrarian reform, the neoliberal blueprint in resolving persistent land questions. However, unexpected, varied and uneven outcomes characterize the results of both frameworks. In both approaches, theories have uneven and varied policy adaptations. In both approaches, policies have been implemented with unanticipated and variegated outcomes despite broadly similar structural and institutional contexts. Dominant approaches in public policy, social and political sciences have difficulty explaining these types of policy results. Glances at different country cases, it is revealed that political dynamics and political strategies of key actors do matter in shaping and reshaping policy outcomes. They are partly responsible for the uneven and varied policy outcomes between and within countries, across farm and crop types, spatial locations, policy components, and over time. Public policies are important, but alone they do not make outcomes. Therefore, the central question asked in this research is: within agrarian reform policies, whether state-led or otherwise, why and how can political dynamics in general and political strategies of key actors in particular contribute toward successful land redistribution and attainment of favorable conditions in post-land transfer farm and beneficiary development? The Philippine Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program is a good case study because it does not fit quite well in the typical categories of either state- or market-led agrarian reform. It is somewhere in between, possessing key features of both approaches. It will therefore allow research access to empirical materials relevant to both paradigms. |
