Reacquiring Bayanihan: A community-level analysis of land reform in Leyte, Philippines : A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Lincoln University

Abstract

This thesis investigates how a local community has responded to a seemingly ‘complete’ land reform programme in the Philippines. The Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Programme (CARP) has spanned nearly thirty years and was declared to be finished in 2014. Studies of its implementation have centered on its national economic and structural effect, with ensuing discussion polarised between accounts of the programme as a success or failure. Yet this thesis argues that the implications of CARP are more complex than these binary descriptions suggest. The study provides a situated analysis of how local community members in Ormoc, Leyte, have experienced land redistribution. The local perspectives are examined through analysis of in-depth interviews, documentary sources and observational data, collected in the period July-December 2018. This thesis argues that, far from ‘finished’, land reform in Leyte was protracted, conflicted and transitional. The analysis identifies multiple protraction points across all stages of the land reforms process that have left local beneficiaries suspended in a situation of land without rights or rights without land. Rather than a linear process that could be completed, what appears to be emerging in Leyte as a result of CARP is a productivity-tenure security loop. The findings also consider a ‘silent conflict’ that appears to persist in day-to-day experiences of exclusion and marginalisation by beneficiaries at the local scale, especially the continued need to defend themselves and their right to their land. It shows that landlord disposition is not the sole determinant for the resistance; in Leyte, the community also appeared to be in a process of rejecting and accepting change. This thesis also identifies an emergent process at the local scale, which is conceptualised as ‘reacquiring bayanihan’. Reacquiring bayanihan is advanced to describe multifaceted response by the local community to an open-ended land reform process. It acknowledges the limitations of CARP in the reallocation of space, recognises the complexity in the reordering of roles, and centres the agency of communities in adapting to these reforms. This thesis is suggestive of the fragility of community relations that can underlie land reforms, and the importance of conceptualising land reform beyond its neoliberal roots and embedded within a wider socio-cultural context and the broader sweep of history.