Pro-poor change in the aftermath of disasters – Exploring possibilities at the intersection of disaster politics and land rights issues in Central Philippines

This article demonstrates how natural disasters can rearrange arenas of contestation over land use, ownership and titling. It analyses how state agents, organized civil society, communities and powerful business groups in three cases in rural Philippines dealt with the challenges and opportunities for agrarian reform after being hit by typhoon Haiyan in 2013. Understanding this connection between agrarian reform and disasters will become increasingly important to address the vulnerabilities of the marginalized in the context of climate change and related rise in disasters. An actor-oriented perspective and a case study method was used to unravel how specific communities engage with processes of agrarian reform after a disaster and how a crisis can change dynamics between actors from above and below in agrarian reform processes. This is needed since the people’s perspective on these processes is often missing and knowledge on the everyday experiences of social change is limited. The cases show that disasters are a window of opportunity to reverse or accelerate complicated agrarian reform processes: by restructuring dynamics between actors from below and above in existing, sometimes stagnated agrarian reform processes, by revealing political dynamics that were invisible before or by creating new possibilities to mobilize actors from above and below to claim access to land.