ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the frequent disparity in power between those who seek to expand the conservation estate and those whose livelihood and sense of place, home, identity, and security come from its internal frontiers. It attempts to show, using the Dominican Republic as a case in point, that land reform is a reasonable way to operationalize Murphree’s law on property and power. Land reform is large-scale experimentation in restructuring property relations with both social and environmental implications. The case for utilizing land reform to advance adaptive comanagement rests not only on its ability to restructure power relations nor on the conservation potential of greater title security. Social equity, an intended by-product of most land reforms, is believed to correlate with low human fertility rates, a critical component in conservation planning. The controversial Salvadorean land reform and that of the former Soviet Union employed land reform to check soil conservation as a cornerstone of national food security.
