The night of July 20, 1992, residents of the upscale Lima neighborhood of Miraflores were jolted by an ear-piercing blast. An explosion had torn through the building of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), a think-tank led by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, leaving three people dead. It was not the first time a bomb had been planted at the ILD, and there was no question about who was behind the driverless car that careened into the building packed with 400 kilos of explosives and ammonium nitrate. Outside, surveying the partially demolished building, de Soto’s employee Mariano Cornejo turned to his boss and said, “What more proof do we need that we have the Shining Path on the run? They have run out of arguments. They can only make statements with gunpowder. They don’t know what to do anymore.”[1]

Since 1980, the Shining Path, a ruthless Maoist guerrilla group, had wreaked terror in the Peruvian countryside. Later in the decade, the group began filtering into urban areas to carry out their self-professed “people’s war” against the government; explosives were a favored weapon. The ILD had essentially declared an intellectual war against the Shining Path in 1986 with the publishing of de Soto’s book, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third Word (the post-9/11 edition was renamed “The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism”). The book examines the staggering growth of informality in Peru and argues that informal activities are a response to a restrictive legal system that discriminates—through excessive costs and endless bureaucratic procedures—against people in one of the most dynamic sectors of the economy: the informal, or “extralegal” sector, as he calls it. This “legal apartheid,” says de Soto, prevents Peru from taking advantage of a vast reservoir of wealth by relegating it to informality. He advocates reengineering this legal system “to provide everyone the tools for entrepreneurship” so that “Peru will eventually thrive.”[2]

De Soto expands on this thesis in his subsequent book, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, arguing that the work of economic development should consist of bringing this untapped wealth, which he dubs “dead capital,” into the formal realm of the market economy.[3] He says this process will improve the welfare of informals while simultaneously generating economic growth. Exhibited in both books, the cornerstone of the ILD and de Soto’s strategy is to grant urban squatters formal title to the land they already occupy. In de Soto’s analysis, title to land transforms the plot and the structure built upon it into assets that can be leveraged for credit; cash and credit, in turn, can be accumulated and invested, thereby creating more income.

De Soto’s provocative ideas have made him the darling of world leaders and global development agencies. His books have received ringing endorsements from neoliberal gurus like Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman, while others on the left-side of the economic spectrum have either cautiously considered (and in some cases accepted) his proposals or roundly denounced them as flawed, misguided and/or deceptive, saying they provide little to no benefit for the poor or actually make them worse off.

Why would quintessential neoliberal ideologues like Friedman and Thatcher—ever so concerned with the enforcement of property rights, non-intervention in the free operation of markets and the rule of law—be such uncritical advocates of awarding a squatter’s illegal seizure of property with a legal title? And why would scholars and development practitioners that claim to be fundamentally concerned with the poor and the marginalized be so critical of this proposal? Indeed, it seems uncontroversial that poor people suffering daily deprivation, exclusion, general insecur ity and, above all, the ever-present threat of physical displacement should enjoy a mechanism that protects them from—or at the very least alleviates—these injustices.

The case of Peru’s urban land titling project, carried out under the instruction of de Soto and the ILD, provides an instructive example for investigating the intricacies of this broader debate. In teasing apart this strange, even contradictory, constellation of positions it is important to consider the various social and economic registers used by groups to define the goals of the project—economic growth, development, security, inclusion and the rule of law. Furthermore, since property regimes have informed the basic foundations of liberal economic and political thought, the ILD project provides an insightful technical lens and a revealing case study for the identification and assessment of contemporary liberalisms, and the varied ways liberal forms are presently being deployed.

A description of the technical aspects and the stated goals of the formalization process will be followed by a review of the literature on de Soto and the ILD’s proposals. The ILD proposal will then be considered within the traditions of liberal thought. In essence, the question in this final section becomes: in what sense is the ILD project neoliberal?

Peru’s Urban Land Titling Program

In 1940, two-thirds of Peru’s population lived in rural areas, but by 1981 this proportion was reversed with two-thirds of the country’s population residing in urban areas.[4] Massive rural-to-urban migrations in the 1940s, and even before, were not the only reason for this shift; high fertility rates among these new city dwellers, lower infant mortality rates and natural population growth, more generally, were also pivotal factors. Most of this new population inhabited land secured through extralegal means. In 1982, 47% of Lima’s total population lived in informal settlements, i.e. without legal title to the land (for a brief outline of the historical evolution of informal housing in Peru and the state’s response, see Appendix 1 on page 23).[5] Estimates from 1996 indicate “such settlements contained more than one million properties in eight of the country’s largest cities.”[6]

In this context, and under de Soto’s direction, the ILD began a property titling pilot-project in Lima in the early 1990s. By 1996, the project had blossomed into a full-fledged nationwide urban property titling program under th e auspices of the government’s newly created Commission for the Formalization of Private Property (COFOPRI), partly funded by a $38 million loan from the World Bank. The project sought “to create a system assuring formal and sustainable rights to real property in selected, predominantly poor, settlements in large urban areas, thereby creating greater security of ownership, which would enhance the owners’ welfare.”[7] By 2003, over 1.3 million urban households—more than 3.6 million people—had gained formal title to their property in Peruvian cities, making it “the largest government titling program targeted to urban squatters in the developing world.”[8]

In the 1980s Peru was emerging from decades of autocratic rule by the reformist military regime of Gen. Juan Velasco (1968-1980), marking a movement away from the “bureaucratic authoritarianism” of the military government.[9] After a string of ineffective administrations in the first decade of the democratic opening, Alberto Fujimori won the presidency in 1990. Despite campaigning on a populist platform, he immediately began implementing orthodox macroeconomic policies and the package of free-market reforms associated with the “Washington Consensus”: trade liberalization, fiscal austerity, drastic tariff reductions, subsidy cuts, tax reform and the privatization of state-owned enterprises. The lightening-fast application of these policies in the country of 22 million helped create a jump in poverty from nine to 14 million.[10]

De Soto had become one of Fujimori’s top advisors and several other staff of the ILD had been incorporated to various parts of Fujimori’s administration. The ILD’s early efforts to lobby for legislative property rights and registry reforms in the late 1980s and early 1990s had laid the groundwork for a complete overhaul of the country’s urban land titling system. In 1996, COFOPRI assumed national control of the urban land titling system, which had been progressively taken out of municipal control. When the government decided the state and the economy had been sufficiently adjusted, it turned its attention to policies that were meant to compliment these reforms and tackle some of the country’s most pressing social and economic deficiencies. Under the tutelage of ILD staffers, the government focused its efforts on the formalization of informal urban settlements. The World Bank noted:

In making this important change in policy, the government recognized that while growth, macroeconomic stability, and economic reforms were essential for growth and poverty reduction, they were not enough in themselves. The Informal Real Estate Property Formalization Program was so important to Peru’s economic programs, in fact, that the country’s annual commitments with the World Bank related to the program were incorporated into agreements the country signed with the International Monetary Fund.[11]

Another indication of the government’s commitment to the project was the degree of autonomy and latitude that COFOPRI was granted in the design and implementation of its mission. What’s more, since most squatted land was under the state’s jurisdiction, COFOPRI was given title to all state land, federal and municipal. And what was previously under the administrative control of 14 different public agencies became consolidated under COFOPRI; it was also allowed to make its own administrative rules. It designed a three-step process. The first part involved a survey of informality in which a technical team went into the settlements to collect data—on cadastre base and information on each property—and consult with landholders and settlers’ organizations. In most cases, the technical team relied on the existing survey and mapping data collected over the years by the settlers’ organization through a consultative process. The second step, which was also managed in a participatory fashion with landholders’ organizations, mainly involved analyzing the physical and legal status of properties. At this stage, settlers’ groups elected liaisons to work with COFOPRI to inform and monitor formalization procedures like mapping, legal documentation and other necessary activities. In the final step of the process, after the individual parcels of land were recorded, and the owner identified, the title was issued by the provincial municipality and registered in the urban real estate registry. The entire process took an average of 45 days, with an average per-title cost of US$50. According to the ILD, under the previous system, this process could have taken anywhere from between three to 20 years and with a cost of as much as US$2,200.

Inclusion of a substantial portion of Peru’s urban population into the formal sector, as articulated by a World Bank-sponsored case study and echoed by the ILD, included not only economic benefits, but also social benefits:[12]

Preliminary data indicate that the economic results of the program have been mixed. The most substantial gains have been made in the areas of property values and transactions: property values by 2003 increased by 25%, while property transactions in the period between 1999 and 2003 increased by an astounding 134%. But the ILD’s central thesis that formal title increases access to credit is where the program had the most disappointing results. Princeton economist Erica Field, who has conducted the most cited and in-depth study on the subject, states, “Property titles were found to have no significant effect on residents’ access to business credit.”[13] One of the studies she references, authoritatively concludes, “loan acceptance rates of both standard commercial banks and informal lenders are unaffected by residential ownership status.”[14] Finally, investment in home improvement showed a marked increase: 75% of households with property titled invested to improve their homes, while only 39% of those without title did so.[15]

The social aspects of the program seem to be largely confirmed by preliminary surveys of formalized landholders—around 50% of which are women—cited in the World Bank case study. Another benefit of the project confirmed by Field is that “for the average squatter family, granting of a property title is associated with a 17% increase in total household work hours, a 47% decrease in the probability of working inside the home, and a 28% reduction in the probability of child labor.”[16] This outcome is attributed to the security of tenure afforded by a formal title, allowing household members to go about their daily lives without having to keep watch on their property.

De Soto’s Delusions?

Jeff Madrick mainly questions de Soto’s premise that formal property rights, and other forms of creating “live” capital, will increase economic growth. In formalizing extralegal businesses, for example, Madrick counters, “It seems likely that many people will prefer to take a dollar of tax savings today, and remain underground, rather than wait for two dollars of possible but uncertain gains in the future.”[17] He also argues that de Soto fails to acknowledge that although a correlation may exist between the advance of property rights and economic growth in the history of developed countries, these measures coincided with improvements in education, technology and market expansion. More fundamentally, Madrick points out that “de Soto’s contention that capital itself is the main ingredient of growth is a disturbing oversimplification. Referring to Adam Smith, [de Soto] writes, ‘Capital is the force that raises the productivity of labor and creates the wealth of nations.’” Using Smith’s much-cited pin factory example, Madrick reminds de Soto that increased productivity in the factory arose not from expendable capital, but from an expanding marketplace. “To Smith, a large and expanding market for goods was critical to the increased specialization of labor. De Soto's informal economies also need markets,” writes Madrick.

From a more scholarly perspective, Christopher Woodruff also raises serious doubts about de Soto’s ideas. Putting aside the claim that formal titles increase access to formal credit, an assertion he largely accepts, Woodruff presents a more complex view: “Capital markets function poorly in developing countries for reasons other than property title. Unlocking capital will require more than just recognizing existing informal property rights. At minimum, a set of complementary reforms—for example, of bankruptcy laws and banking regulations—will be required.”[18] He warns that the next generation of reforms is much more politically challenging and requires significant institutional reforms and financial market restructuring. Lastly, Woodruff rightly points to the widely held contention that “inequality hampers growth because loans cannot be collateralized,” and says this is one of the many obstacles de Soto sweeps under the rug:

The policy prescription from [de Soto’s] view is quite different. Transfers of wealth are not the solution. Formalizing ownership provides the collateral needed to allow lending and to align the incentives of lenders and borrowers. Of course, even in de Soto’s world, there are people without assets. So the results of the inequality models still apply to some parts of the population.

Timothy Mitchell also considers the arguments put forth by de Soto’s books, which he says “describe the forms of wealth and material activity that exist outside the capitalist economy, diagnose the nature of the barrier that keeps them out, and propose techniques for bringing them in.”[19] Drawing on research conducted on an ILD titling project in Egypt, Mitchell raises specific questions about the outcomes of land titling, adding that “the social-technical design and implementation of these mechanisms has become one of the most popular solutions to the problem of economic development in the global south.”[20]

Mitchell agrees that squatters want title to the property they occupy, but he does not assume that landholders will then automatically try to leverage their property for credit. “A further problem with using property as collateral for credit is that the poor are seldom able to recover from asset losses,” notes Mitchell.[21] And because of their limited threshold for absorbing the slightest economic shock, poor owners of property are often forced to sell at the most inopportune times. “Such distress sales,” he says, “play an important role in the concentration of property ownership, and are connected with the loss of local ways of managing risk.”[22]

The ILD’s trumpeting of the increased property values that comes with titling is another reason to worry, according to Mitchell. In Peru values increased by 25%, but in other cases, such as Brazil land values doubled after formalization.[23] Mitchell found that in the Egyptian ILD project “legalization increased the value of land by a factor of at least ten,” and in some cases by as much as 30 or 40.[24] But the formalized landholders of valuable property were unable to benefit from the increased value by selling their land: “that would leave them homeless; and in any case the need to purchase another property would eliminate any gain. Only those holding property not for their own needs but for speculation would benefit.”[25] This reproduction of inequality is another reason Mitchell is critical of the ILD program. He projects that over time, legalization creates cycles for the concentration of property into fewer and fewer hands of those able to afford the more expensive land, creating speculators and a rentier class. Furthermore, says Mitchell, the process creates “an intergenerational transfer of wealth,” because the increased value and the concentration of property make future housing more expensive.[26]

Mitchell found that small landholders with bank loans were actually the most vulnerable. In the case of loan default-related land seizures, he notes, “Within a few years there were several cases of farmers losing their land by this mechanism, in every case the defaulters being small owners.”[27] For de Soto, it is precisely this accountability that greases the wheels of capitalism: “The lack of legal property,” writes de Soto, “thus explains why citizens in developing and formerly communist nations cannot make profitable contracts with strangers, cannot get credit, insurance, or utilities services: They have no property to lose…. People with nothing to lose are trapped in the grubby basement of the precapitalist world.”[28]

Taking this claim a step further, land titling insures a level of insecurity by introducing mechanisms of coercion, discipline and the power of obligation. De Soto himself admits formal property systems provide “a stake in the capitalist game” and that what makes “this stake meaningful is that it can be lost.”[29] Mitchell concludes that the project “will produce not live capital out of dead, but a transfer of wealth from the less affluent to the more secure, and in particular to enrich the more prosperous among the present generation at the expense of the future poor.”[30]

In sum, Mitchell considers the ILD project a Trojan Horse that first renders alternative property arrangements “defective” and then makes the poor “a novel apparatus” through which new wealth is created; a wealth that they are in turn excluded from accumulating; all this, with the cooperation and alliance of “local politicians, international financial institutions, property developers, and even spokespersons for the poor.”[31]

Understanding the ILD and (Neo)Liberalism

Many of the aforementioned critiques of de Soto’s proposals wonder what makes his ideas so popular. Madrick points to their seeming pragmatism; Woodruff suspects it’s because they propose economic development with that elusive “free lunch” economists always speak of; while Mitchell agrees, he also gives a role to the crisis of formal property markets in the wake of economic restructuring programs. I would add an important factor to these claims: despite the widely held notion concerning the “sanctity” of private property and the importance of the institution in liberal traditions, the ILD’s proposals have been well-received because of their profoundly liberal orientations.

It may seem contradictory that the liberal tradition, which so centrally prizes private property, could in any way endorse an infringement of private property rights. But Stephen Holmes writes, “Because inherited concentrations of property, even in a free enterprise system, can produce inherited concentrations of power, private property must be a source of distress as well as solace to the heirs of the liberal tradition.”[32] For John Locke, in some ways it was more so the latter (solace) in the sense that he viewed private property as an institution that limited the power of the monarch. But Locke’s writings on property and those by some of his early liberal descendants also reveal their distress concerning its concentration. Even David Hume, acknowledged, “Where the riches are in few hands, these must enjoy all the power.” Locke ascribes government with the purpose of preserving private property: “To avoid these inconveniences, which disorder men’s properties in the state of nature, men unite into societies, that they may have the united strength of the whole society to secure and defend their properties, and may have standing rules to bound it, by which every one may know what is his.”[33] And by what virtue does one acquire property? Locke is explicit:

Whatsoever then [man] removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.[34]

Locke’s liberal heirs, particularly those in the Untied States, were equally distressed about property concentration and its being bundled with inherited political authority. They reasoned that the market was the most anonymous, de-politicized way of de-concentrating this power. “Indeed, liberals valued the market itself as the most efficient vehicle for redistributing social wealth and, thus, for redistributing security,” says Holmes. In part, this equality is insured by an equal treatment under the law, which for Locke was the mark of good government: “They are to govern by promulgated established laws, not to be varied in particular cases, but to have one rule for rich and poor, for the favourite at court, and the country man at plough.”[35]

If Locke and his immediate descendants were primarily concerned with protections from the state (as well as from their fellow members of society), then with the development of industrial relations in the 1800s, the emphasis began to shift toward security from the vicissitudes of the market. Again, Holmes is precise: “For historical reasons, classical liberals focused on state-induced insecurity, whereas proponents of the welfare state emphasized market-induced insecurity. The source of insecurity changed in both cases. But the value of security stayed the same.”[36] Holmes subsequently adds that liberals routinely assumed that, when conditions demanded it, that the state should “infringe upon the property rights of the rich to satisfy the subsistence needs of the poor.”[37] A basic standard of subsistence supposedly provided all members of society the opportunity of participating in the market system—somewhat of a necessity, it was assumed, for it to function properly.

With this cursory survey of early liberal views on private property, the ILD project’s liberal orientations begin to emerge. For one, de Soto paints his fight for institutional reforms—with property formalization leading the charge—as a battle against an exclusionary mercantilist system. He attributes the rise of informality to an arcane Peruvian-style mercantilism, in which politics, arbitrariness and bureaucracy figure more prominently than economic rationality and efficiency. Vested interests, in his view, impinge on the rights of others, forcing those excluded no other recourse than an extralegal existence. De Soto wants to disassemble this irrational legal system through deregulation: “By ‘deregulation’ we mean increasing the responsibilities and opportunities of private individuals and reducing those of the state. Like democratic lawmaking, deregulation gets to the very roots of mercantilism.”[38] Similar to Locke, de Soto lobbies for a legal system that indiscriminately serves both “the favourite at court, and the country man at plough.” The distribution of property titles takes on a similarly egalitarian juridical component.

Before receiving formal title, squatters are vulnerable to the whims of the state and encroachments, requiring a near-constant state of vigilance against forced displacement. This is not to say that squatter settlements are chaotic lawless enclaves of society. In fact, far from it, informal settlements are spaces subject to their own particular forms of regulation and order, some borrowed from the formal sector and others created in situ. But with formal titles, landholders are ostensibly secured tenure, allowing them to make informed calculative decisions under a regime of rules and regulations not subject to arbitrary fluctuations. Squatters undoubtedly welcome this enhanced security, but the “rule of law” and de Soto’s contention that with a formal title, landholders become economic agents with “something to lose” entails a much more complex marriage of relationships than Jeremy Bentham’s maxim on the ties between law and property: “Property and law are born together, and die together. Before laws were made there was no property; take away laws and property ceases.”

The widespread warm reception of ILD projects stems from the variety of social and economic registers used to justify taking land (usually the state’s) and awarding to a squatter. In the tradition of the early liberals, the ILD’s formalization process fits firmly within the liberal aim of dispersing power and limiting the state’s ability to create parallel systems of rules for certain classes of individuals; yet, as liberals would have it, the state is also given the power to distribute titles and create the rules of the game. De Soto’s argument is that this not only includes an excluded swath of the population and increases the political and economic opportunities available to them, but that it also increases economic growth to the benefit of the whole society. Echoing Locke, Mark Becker argues that “people who have occupied property for a period of years with government acquiescence (indeed, cooperation) throughout, who have invested their money and sweat in improving it, and whose lack of de jure rights owes more to their position in the social order and to bureaucratic statism than to any fault of their own, should be granted such rights in the interests of equity, democracy, freedom, and development.”[39]

As Timothy Mitchell convincingly shows, what de Soto seemingly fails to address is what eventually caught the attention of the early liberals: market-induced insecurities. However, de Soto has this insecurity clearly in mind; in fact, says de Soto, that insecurity is what drives the entrepreneurial spirit that makes the market system “work,” which leads him to believe that a bit of property and the rule of law are enough to create the wealth needed to lift millions out of poverty. Such reasoning makes apparent the parallels between ILD projects and early liberal ideas concerning property, markets and the state’s role in setting up the rules of the game. But there is also something new, something neo about the liberalism of the ILD.

In defining what he means by “rule of law,” F.A. Hayek—who was once an invited guest of the ILD in Peru—wrote: “Stripped of all technicalities, this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand—rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge.”[40] In the case of the ILD in Peru, and elsewhere, this is exactly what is being established—the rule of law. And by marrying this process to the expansion of formal property rights, the ILD creates a novel social and economic technology for the creation and maintenance of a market society of calculative rational actors. “For just as economic rationalism is dependent on rational technology and rational law,” acknowledges Max Weber, “so also it is dependent on the ability and disposition of people [Menschen] in favor of certain kinds of practical rational conduct of life [Lebensführung].”[41] De Soto’s vision of making the poor stakeholders “in the capitalist game” and that what makes “this stake meaningful is that it can be lost,” lies at the foundation of engineering formal economic and juridical rationalism with the consent, for better or worse, of the poor. As Becker notes, the ILD project “successfully combined a legal-institutional approach to reform and a thoroughly liberal ideological standpoint with a complex strategy that includes both ‘top-down’ (elitist) and ‘bottom-up’ (populist) elements.”[42]

Indeed, on closer examination, the quintessentially neoliberal features of the ILD project become stark. Nikolas Rose skillfully defines this form of rule, by identifying that “it seeks to the degovernmentalize the State and to de-statize practices of government, to detach the substantive authority of expertise from the apparatuses of political rule, relocating experts within a market governed by the rationalities of competition, accountability and consumer demand. It does not seek to govern through ‘society’, but through the regulated choices of individual citizens.”[43] Indeed, the ILD land formalization project is not merely a privatization of real estate and the distribution of titles, but an attempt to create a new governmentality. (A process, it’s worth noting, aided by existing forms of extralegal structures and forms of organization, as exemplified by the survey and mapping work of squatters’ organizations and their role as bodies of arbitration for internal settlement disputes.) Another scholar of liberalism, adds that what differentiates modern liberalisms from its earlier forms “is that they do not regard the market as an existing quasi-natural reality situated in a kind of economic nature reserve space marked off, secured and supervised by the State. Rather, the market exists, and can only exist, under certain political, legal and institutional conditions that must be actively constructed by the government.”[44]

Both of these statements could have been uttered by de Soto in espousing the benefits, process and/or goals of the land formalization project. For Mitchell, despite his convincing argument of economic marginalization, that the process amounts to poor people’s “inclusive exclusion” partly misses the point, because the implications of the process, as noted in the above conceptions of neoliberalism, actually entails a far deeper and robust form organizing collective life; that is, in Stephen Collier’s words, “through the autonomous choices of formally free and calculative actors, whether as individuals, collectivities, or organizations.”[45] However, in a practical sense, Mitchell is right to emphasize that formalization may lead to the constriction of spaces exploited by informals to negotiate the fundamental precariousness of urban life in the developing world, whether it be through tapping into public services or extralegal means of economic exchange. Indeed, de Soto fails to consider what one World Bank official acknowledged about a land formalization process in Argentina: “Inclusion in the formal system had added to their stress and reduced the quality of their lives instead of improving it, because reform did not consider the root causes of their marginality: their inability to meet the economic costs of life.”[46]

Another reality left out entirely by de Soto relates to the use, particularly by informals, of spaces in ways that defy public–private dichotomies. In an interview architect José Castillo said, “Informal urbanism thus includes a dynamic and temporal use of the street as a space that defies categorization as private or public. Nowadays, what defines publicness includes notions of civicness, identity and accessibility as much as commercialism, pluralism and dynamism, regardless of whether the space is privately or state owned.”[47] He adds, “Ultimately open spaces tend to be reclaimed anyway: streets are used in more than one way, as plazas, markets, political arenas, etc.”

So far, in the land titling debate such considerations have been obscured, as exemplified by the work of the ILD and its supporters, by a vision of the individual freely engaged “in a whole array of programmes for their ethical reconstruction as active citizens—training to equip them with the skills of self-promotion … programmes of empowerment to enable them to assume their rightful place as self-actualizing and demanding subjects of an ‘advanced’ liberal democracy.”[48] Rose uncertainly concludes that an alternative rationality will require a rationality that is “as compelling as that inherent in the rationality of the market and the and the ‘valorization’ of choice.” The example of ILD land titling demonstrates that articulating an actionable alternative rationality that takes into account both formal and substantive values is no simple matter.

APPENDIX 1