Rights and Exclusion in Tenure: Implications to Tenure Policies in the Philippines

Abstract

"The concept of tenure security as a function of rights is examined from the point of view of claimants' capacity to exclude others from a claim as a behavioral aspect of enforcing rights. Two cases in the Philippines and one in Mexico are presented to support the views that in different resource access regimes: (1) exclusion and rights are differentiable explanations of tenure security, (2) in certain intensities of competition over claims, tenure security is effected more by exclusion than by rights, and (3) policies to strength tenure security among farmers in the Philippines should focus less on defining rights than on improving their capacity to exclude other claims on their lands and crops."