Adaptive landscapes: planning, property, and informality under climate change

Climate change is transforming landscapes and land use practices. As the state territorializes climate risk via land use planning instruments, it transforms the operation of legal rights. In the Global North, this is generally understood as imposing constraints on private property rights. In the Global South, the literature focuses on the way planning instruments create or transform property rights. Using case studies from the Philippines, this paper demonstrates that, in property orders marked by high levels of informality, the land use planning process does not constrain state-given property rights, nor only create or attenuate rights. Instead, it can transform entire property orders, displacing long-term systems of informal land tenure derived from possessory interests and reifying state-sanctioned forms of title. This reordering of systems has significant consequences for the emergent, nominally climate-resilient landscape and the operation of state power.