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Promising information:
democracy, development, and
the remapping of Latin America
Kregg Hetherington
Available online: 07 Dec 2011

To cite this article: Kregg Hetherington (2011): Promising information: democracy,

development, and the remapping of Latin America, Economy and Society,
DOI:10.1080/03085147.2011.607365

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 Economy and Society 2011 pp. 1
24, iFirst article

Promising information:
democracy, development,
and the remapping of Latin
America
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Kregg Hetherington

Abstract

‘Information’ is an enormously promising, if ambiguous term in post-Cold War

development thinking. In the last three decades, international development agencies
have argued that Latin American land reform policy should focus not on
redistributing land but on creating more information about land and making it as
widely accessible as possible. These proposals, which I call ‘cadastral fixes’ to rural
underdevelopment, are understandably attractive and seem to fit well with
democratic values of transparency and openness. But I argue that the use of the
word ‘information’ to connote both democratic rights and the apparatuses devised
by economists to improve the rural economy is misleading. ‘Information’ is
productively vague, allowing development experts to change their projects in the
face of failure without questioning the fundamental economic premises on which
their reforms are built. As I show in this case study of Paraguayan cadastral reform,
the history of these refinements shows a shift, under the rubric of open information,
towards increasingly disciplinary forms of intervention in the politics of land.

Keywords: information; international development; bureaucratic reform; land

reform; rural politics; cybernetics.

Kregg Hetherington, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie

University, Halifax, NS, B3H 4P9, Canada. E-mail: Kregg.Hetherington@Dal.ca

Copyright # 2011 Taylor & Francis

ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2011.607365
 2 Economy and Society

In the mid-1980s, as Latin American governments reeled from debt crisis,

recession and rural conflict, international development institutions began
prescribing a new solution to their woes: national cadastres, giant property-
mapping exercises that would modernize agriculture, expand the tax base and
stimulate the rural economy. Rural development in the two preceding decades
had been dominated by land reform initiatives, part of the region’s Import-
Substituting Industrialization programmes which sought to bring the country-
side under more efficient cultivation by redistributing parcels to the landless
poor. But now international creditors, led by USAID, would suggest that the
problem with land was not that it was too concentrated or insufficiently
cultivated, but rather that it was insufficiently mapped and catalogued. Their
proposed solutions were explicitly linked to democratic reforms, and the hope
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that more transparent government would bring with it not only more rights,
but also economic growth.1 Few Latin American countries had fully
functioning cadastres at the time, and land transactions were governed by
baroque and unreliable legal registration systems. This was slowly to change
over the next three decades as one international organization after another got
into the business of creating expensive and complex land information systems
and promising impressive developmental returns.
This paper argues, however, that the cadastral promise that blossomed in
Latin America towards the end of the Cold War relied on an ambiguous
definition of ‘information’ that allowed development experts to invoke
democratic ideals while exerting increasing control over rural politics. I focus
on the example of Paraguay, a small country rife with many of the problems
that cadastral reformers claimed they could fix: market stagnation, land
conflicts, a legacy of authoritarianism and government corruption. In 1989,
after a coup ended the thirty-five-year reign of General Alfredo Stroessner,
Paraguay was awash with hopes that the circulation of information could
improve the lives of its citizens, and several key events during the
democratization process that followed seemed to support this idea. A new
access-to-information provision in the constitution of 1992 revealed millions of
documents about human rights abuses during the dictatorship as well as a long
history of misappropriation of land and other resources by military figures and
civil servants (Hetherington, 2011). But the new constitutional right to access
government documents did not by itself guarantee economic returns for the
country. To connect the idea of government openness to the promise of
growth, a quite different set of economic theories and apparatuses was
required, one of which would be the national cadastre. Since information
barriers prevented some people from participating equally in markets, the
reasoning went, better land information would even the playing field, make the
market more dynamic and allow buyers and sellers to act more rationally,
discover optimal land prices and produce the most efficient possible
distribution of the resource. In Paraguay, development experts have had
enormous difficulties fulfilling this promise. But the long story of attempts, the
 Kregg Hetherington: Promising information 3

reasons for failure and the rationales behind repeating the projects offer a
fascinating ethnographic window into the world of development thinking.
My argument is a modest one. I in no way mean to deny that the civil right
to access government documents can be a good thing and a necessary
cornerstone of democratic reforms. But I do want to suggest that the use of the
word ‘information’ to connote both constitutional rights and the apparatuses
devised by economists to improve growth is at best very misleading. Following
on the work of a number of historians of economics,2 I argue that the word
‘information’ has remained far too mutable throughout the late twentieth
century to deliver on the promises attributed to it. In development circles, the
word acts as a kind of placeholder for the hypothetical proposition that
improving communication will generate more efficient markets, and therefore
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growth, and the overall vagueness of this proposition makes it resistant to

failure. As with previous intellectual movements heavily invested in the
concept of information (specifically cybernetics and the economics of
information), cadastral reformers use the word information to name without
describing the relationship between an input and an output, an initial cause
and the desired effect. This means that development experts have significant
room to change the mechanisms they propose without questioning the
fundamental economic premise which describes the causal relationship they
are working with.3 Tracking two decades of reform proposals in Paraguay’s
cadastre and land registry,4 I found that, as development experts tried to use
information to unleash the potentialities of the market, they began to digress
from the kinds of institutional arrangements normally associated with
democratic access. They discovered that, for their models to work, they
needed to exercise increasingly restrictive disciplinary controls over economic
behaviour, controls which they continued to refer to as ‘information’.

Information for development

‘Knowledge is like light. Weightless and intangible, it can easily travel the
world, enlightening the lives of people everywhere. Yet billions of people still
live in the darkness of poverty - unnecessarily’ (World Bank, 1998-9). This is
the opening line of the World Bank’s World Development Report of 1999, in
which the words ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’ are used more or less
interchangeably. But, in the report itself, information is a lot more complicated
than light. Entitled Knowledge for Development, the report is divided into two
sections. The first is about the production and possession of technical
knowledge - it evokes inequalities between the north and south in terms of
technical capacity and promises to bolster public research and development
and to foster international knowledge transfer. The second half of the report
deals with systems for the dispersal of market signals, what it calls
‘information’, within the national economy, claiming that more efficient
signalling mechanisms generate economic growth. The report does not explain
 4 Economy and Society

why these two things are the same, or even similar. Instead, they simply hang
together on the apparent self-evidence of the words ‘knowledge’ and
‘information’. This vagueness of the report goes a long way, I think, to
explaining why information holds so much promise in development circles.
For, while information is evocative of many democratic ideals, these ideals may
have little to do with what reformers actually do in pursuit of market-based
economic growth.
Among the architects of cadastral reform in Paraguay, the word information
remains similarly ambiguous. During interviews I conducted with bureaucrats
and consultants about the latest cadastral reform project currently under way,
the word ‘information’ cropped up in patently self-contradictory ways. The
project, run by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), was called
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PROCAR, short for ‘Cadastral Registration Project’, and aimed to develop a

state-of-the-art land information system for a country beset by endless land
disputes. The ten-million-dollar project basically took old land titles from the
Public Registry (housed in the Supreme Court) and plans from the National
Cadastre (housed in the Ministry of Finance), scanned them into a new digital
system and provided the legal infrastructure for people from both institutions
to communicate more effectively with each other.5 The project was supposed
to be completed in three years. It had not finished by year nine, but those at the
helm were still confident that they would soon have an important new tool at
their disposal. The new system would, I was told, modernize the state, deter
corruption, allow a land market to emerge where there was none and generally
contribute to jump-starting a moribund rural economy.
But how was a giant scanning and storing operation actually supposed to
achieve this? Answers to this question all evoked information, but quite
differently. One senior bureaucrat put it succinctly: ‘We can’t really know how
to fix the problem [with the rural economy] unless we have a full measure of
what the problem is. What Paraguay really suffers from is a profound lack of
information.’ Others would discuss the frustration of investors, and blamed the
lack of information for high transaction costs in buying or selling land. Many
top-level bureaucrats and consultants I spoke to pointed me to the book that
had popularized this version of development more than any other, Hernando
de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital (2000), which contends that the problem with
third-world assets is that they do not have a ‘representational life’, ‘missing
information’ that allows them to be collateralized and turned into capital which
can grow.
If these problems were caused by something called information being
‘missing’, it was notable that many people in the same conversation equated the
problem with having a surfeit of documents. As one top administrator in the
national cadastre put it to me in an interview, there are parts of the country
‘that are plans, plans, plans. We have properties upon properties, sometimes
five on top of each other. The plans were made badly, the work was bad, so we
have plans with no numbers, titles that have been stolen and retitled.’ Excessive
documents, indeed hundreds of rooms stuffed to the rafters with paper, were
 Kregg Hetherington: Promising information 5

the source of confusion and conflict all over the country. After saying
something like this, the speaker would invariably tell me that the project was
really about ‘streamlining’, that is, reducing the amount of stuff that everyone
had to deal with so as to make the process clearer and more efficient.6 Indeed,
as many reformers said at one point or another, the ideal reform should start
with the destruction of the registry in its entirety and start from scratch. But
even this was not straightforward. Though most people agreed that reduction
of documents was necessary, the proposed remedy actually increased the
amount of stuff lying around. New digital copies only supplemented the paper
copies, and a large part of the cost of the project was figuring out where to
store all the paper once people’s desks had computers and scanners on them.
After PROCAR, the land information could be read off a screen, but only until
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someone questioned what was on that screen, at which point the paper would
be consulted again. All the project could do was add to the paper, which is
what PROCAR did, increasing the physical volume of the registry and the
layers of mediation involved in accessing its contents.
What, in such a context, can ‘information’ possibly be? This is a hard thing
to parse from interviews, because the definition seems either to go without
saying or quickly becomes too vague to be helpful. But one can begin to find
regularities in the way that information is talked about. Grammatically of
course, information is an object, and in most usages it has one or more of the
following qualities: representativeness, clarity and quantifiability. In fact,
despite the discursive effort to do so, I do not think these projects ever in fact
produce a stable object which we might coherently call information, and for
that reason, I do not offer an analytic definition myself. But interpreting the
way the unstable object shifts over time does tell us a lot about the projects
themselves.
The first quality of information is that it is referential. More precisely,
information refers to a relationship, not to a snippet of language but to the
relationship that a snippet of language is presumed to have with an idea or
thing that exists independently of it. In the Peircian view of language,7 there
are many forms of signification other than representation, and, in fact, most
linguistic anthropologists argue that representation is little more than an
elaborated form of indexicality - that is, that the relationship that any bit of
language has with the thing it is said to refer to is irreducibly social and
contextual. But the special value given to the representational mode of
language is part of what makes information a specifically modern invention
(Day, 2001).8 For people who manage cadastres, information lies in the
relationship between some sort of inscription and some identifiable section of
land, between a title and a property or between a geo-referenced polygon and a
piece of territory. One effect of this on the way bureaucrats speak is that it is
often difficult to tell whether or not one has information. As one tireless
reformer explained, with evident difficulty, ‘we have information that we don’t
know we have. That is, we know we have it, but we don’t know if it’s valid.
There’s no certainty. Sometimes we don’t even know if it exists. It could be
 6 Economy and Society

that it doesn’t exist. There are so many ways that you can have a land title and
it’s only paper, because the land doesn’t exist.’ The difference here between
‘only paper’ and ‘information’ is clear - it lies in the validity of a
representational relationship between the paper and something else.
But it is not just the intangibility of the relationship that causes problems
here. The history of bureaucratic reform in Paraguay shows just how difficult
it is even to identify what that something else is to which the document is
supposed to refer. Paraguay’s Public Registry was created on 3 April 1871, just
after the end of a devastating war in which the country lost half its territory
and almost all of its records.9 The Registry was created by inviting all major
landowners to the courthouse to declare what they owned; their declarations
were written down, one after another, in a massive ledger. As a registry of
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declarations this worked fine; property was institutionalized as a written

declaration of personal estate. But, as these declarations were traded, it became
increasingly complicated to keep track of the relationships between them.
People writing land policy in early twentieth-century Paraguay struggled over
how to divide up the documents they were creating. In the early 1930s, the
Registry moved from a system of ‘personal estate’ to one of ‘real estate’, where
the property was filed according to the object owned rather than the owner.
But unlike organizing a registry according to names, this new practice meant
naming (or rather numbering) the arbitrary subdivisions that made up these
things.
A subtle shift happens here. During the initial inscription, the paper refers
to a person already recognized as an individual, bearing a name registered
elsewhere; the paper merely preserves a declaratory moment or makes a legal
statement durable. But, in the case of real estate, owners become the dependent
variable, changing all the time, and a new object must be created and named to
which the paper can stably refer. It was not obvious at the beginning whether it
was better to number these objects sequentially (i.e. the first property was
registered as Property 1) or according to a spatial grid that would make it easier
to find them later. After a tussle between ministries, a parallel system
developed in the early 1930s: the National Cadastre, housed in the Ministry of
Finance, numbered properties spatially to make them easier to see in the
aggregate and therefore make them easier to tax, while the Public Registry
numbered them sequentially in ledgers called finqueros, to make the legal
narrative of the objects themselves coherent. This quickly led both ministries
into different sorts of problems when properties divided. The cadastre found
that its spatial system broke down after a couple of years as the renumbering
could not catch up with the subdivision of properties, while the Public Registry
ended up with subdivided properties whose parts were scattered throughout
completely different ledgers.
What is clear here is the point, obvious to anyone familiar with actor-
network theory but rarely acknowledged in most conversations about
information for development, that the objects being represented are in large
part constituted by the representational practices themselves. Indeed, what is
 Kregg Hetherington: Promising information 7

most interesting about this claim that information is something more than ‘just
paper’ is how completely paper-focused the activities and concerns of
bureaucrats actually are. Paraguayan bureaucrats use words like ‘land title’
and ‘file’ to mean both the paper object and the rights, processes or things to
which they refer. In the public registry, the physical qualities of certain forms
are critical to the functioning of the registry but also absorb people’s attention.
For instance, the original protocol for noting mortgages, in pencil in the
margins of the title, later had to be reformed when it became clear that
mortgages had a tendency to disappear after the documents were consulted by
owners. Once the notes were written in pen instead of pencil, the pages began
to disappear, until a major legal intervention in 1997 which made it impossible
for almost anyone to consult the documents at all. And most bureaucrats
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acknowledge that, despite fantasies of burning the archive, such a thing would
be impossible because it would actually destroy the properties themselves. One
of the legal consultants involved in the PROCAR put it best. ‘If you lose the
paper,’ he said, ‘you end up with no property, because the paper is all there is.
That’s the wealth of Paraguay, and it’s threatened by humidity, fire and
burglary . . . So the idea is to digitize everything. . .[and to keep the paper] in a
secure location.’10 Since it was impossible (and undesirable) literally to make
the paper disappear, cadastral reform was all about making the paper matter
less by making it as immutable as possible. Once the paper was secure, one
could stop worrying about it and instead deal directly with the relationship
those inscriptions held with the outside world, that elusive thing called
‘information’.
One way to ensure that something more than paper was present was to
conjure the second quality of information, clarity. In Paraguay, the thing that
vexes cadastral reformers most is the difficulty they have interpreting
documents. The most obvious example of this is the actual inscriptions that
have been made in the public registry on old land titles. The titles began as
long narrative declarations about land divisions, and every time they were
divided or sold, the divisions would be recorded as ‘marginal notes’ written at
right angles over the original text, or crammed into the margins, in different
colours. After only a few such extra inscriptions, the pages became literally
illegible. The difficulty in deciphering them was so accepted that it was not
uncommon for legal interpretations to suggest that the paper needed to be
disregarded and a new form of inscription begun again. Inscriptions also
became unclear because of mould, wear, smudges, tears and intentional
disfigurement. After only a few years, even pages which started out clear would
become unclear, causing confusion and mistrust.
Since the representations in question change over time, clarity is both about
the initial form of inscriptions and about constant management, shepherding
documents so as to protect them from nature, error, caprice, chance and
complexity in general. Since the mid-twentieth century reformers have tried to
fix this problem in one of two ways. The first was to change the writing
protocols that produced titles like the one described above, slowly shortening
 8 Economy and Society

the phrases, eventually switching to typed forms, then to grids that could be
filled in on a typewriter and finally to digital records. The second was to
control where these inscriptions went and who was allowed to touch them.
Stories of bad titles in the public registry are often stories of titles that have
meandered, that have encountered unscrupulous people with erasers and
blades or that have disappeared and reappeared later. Explaining the current
attempts to synchronize the registry and cadastre, one reformer told me: ‘the
relationship between the registry and the cadastre is very distant. Physically
and legally, it needs to be much better controlled. There are only twenty blocks
between our buildings, but in that space the documents are adulterated.’ It is
during these misadventures that information can vanish, leaving the bureaucrat
with ‘just paper’ once again, and part of the idea of information reform is to
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protect information from this fate. In statements like these we begin to see
information less as a static relationship than as a narrative one: it is a form of
signal between different actors whose clarity depends on how it travels. The
work of information in this sense is always about control, about protecting a
fleeting ideal from chaotic interference.
Given these two initial qualities, we might say that information is, if
anything, a word describing an unstable representational relationship. This in
itself does not pose any major analytic problems. Following actor-network
theory, one might say that the only problem is that the relationships implied by
the concept are not sufficiently stabilized, and that better techniques and a
more concerted effort to develop consensus around the validity of these
techniques could turn the system into something that approximates the ideal of
information. But none of this would guarantee the information’s most
important promise - that it creates efficiency, and therefore growth. And
this makes the third quality of information, its quantifiability, all the more
important and vexing. Is information sufficiently thing-like that one can count
it, know when one has more or less of it and thereby calculate how and whether
it leads to economic growth?
It has never been difficult to talk about documents in terms of their quantity.
In Paraguay they are often quantified in tons. But in the late twentieth century,
when information means something that lies beyond the document, its
quantity becomes something far more abstract and interesting. In the
interviews, it is clear that it is impossible to count what one has, but, like
Hernando de Soto, these bureaucrats nonetheless know that information is
‘missing’ or ‘lacking’, that they need to produce more of it. Cadastral reformers,
and even those on the outside looking in, often referred to the completion of
the new system as a state in which they would have all the information about
land and therefore be able to correct problems. That is, information is not
counted as a simple quantity, but rather as a ratio between what one has and a
projected state of completeness. Information therefore tends to be quantified as
a deficiency, a fraction of an ideal. But the definition of the ideal is itself
slippery. The way one knows, for instance, that a land title is ‘only paper’ and
not ‘real information’ is when someone contests it. Circularly, contestation is
 Kregg Hetherington: Promising information 9

precisely the thing that ‘having complete information’ is supposed to eliminate

from the system. The quantity of information that one has is therefore a ratio
between the current state of the documents in an archive and an ideal state in
which no one questions the documents. From this way of seeing things,
information becomes a measure of the certainty one has that people will stop
arguing about documents. Once reframed this way, it is clear that there are
many ways to achieve the effect that reformers refer to as ‘more information’.

Information machines

I suspect that most of my interviewees would find this an odd way of

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summarizing what they do, even though it follows from their statements. But,
as anyone familiar with the history of information theory will recognize, this
definition is a core element of a post-Second World War line of thought that, I
would argue, has become so ingrained in the language of development as to
have restructured the way we think (and especially hope) about information.
As Ronald Day (2001, p. 1) points out, it was not until the mid-twentieth
century that information shifted from being an action to a thing, from the act
of imparting to the thing one imparts. The definition emerged during a time of
great intellectual production following the end of the Second World War
during the development of cybernetics, game theory and early computers.
Information theory was based on the ‘conduit model of communication’, in
which information is a kind of signal which moves from A to B along a
channel, such that a condition of A has an effect on the condition of B. As
Gregory Bateson famously put it, ‘information is a difference that makes a
difference’ (Bateson 1972). In such a system, information is defined as
a ratio of actual to possible events, that is, any resolution of probability into a
certain value that affects some part of a system. The specific form or meaning
of the signal is irrelevant to this definition; rather, information describes a
causal relationship in which difference A causes difference B. Moreover, the
described effect does not need to be an effect at all, but a probability. So in
these models information is quantified as a series of stochastic relationships
between elements of a self-contained system. Information assumes a system
with coherent boundaries; otherwise all one has is chaotic signalling. Following
this definition, it is not surprising that a lot of the language of cadastral
reform in Paraguay is about ‘systematizing’, that is, creating a single system
within which signals become quantifiable and predictable, in short, become
‘information’.
This historical relationship is useful to keep in mind because it also reminds
us of where the great promise of information, that it will create democracy and
economic growth, originally comes from.11 For leading figures in the
cybernetics movement, information was always equated with order, a bulwark
against the constant danger of chaos and therefore the harbinger of a new
enlightenment. Decades before the World Bank compared information to light,
 10 Economy and Society

Norbert Wiener, for one, argued that information theory was analogous to
Plato’s story of the cave (1954, ch. 5). In Plato, the realization that the shadows
on the wall are but shadows of reality ushers in a new regime of truth that girds
the republic. For Wiener, information theory would gird a new democratic civil
society in which freedom of speech would triumph over totalitarianism, social
ills would be solved through maximizing the efficiency of new social and
technological systems created. In other words, information promised a new era
of human development, in which the potentially chaotic outpourings of post-
war capitalism could be turned into an ordered system for maximizing human
potential. That these grand social plans of cybernetics soon ran aground and
now seem quaint should lead us to question why such similar language is still
alive and well in development circles.12
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The genealogical relationship between these modes of thought passes

through Friedrich Hayek’s (1945, 1956) anti-communist argument that state
attempts to control information were also liable to be less efficient than those in
which information circulated freely and was available to individual economic
actors. This was later refined to the standing hypothesis of the economics of
information: that markets can achieve optimal efficiency only under conditions
of complete or symmetrical information.13 What the general trend of the
literature suggested, though, was almost too good to be true: that growth could
be generated and distributed equitably only by intervening at the compara-
tively cheap level of information management. Economists could then turn to
understanding informational processes within the economy and ameliorating
them to make them more efficient.14 Even those writers, like Joseph Stiglitz,
whose work was premised on the impossibility of perfect, symmetrical
information, argued that, by better understanding those imperfections and
devising end-runs around them, one could improve economic systems. That is,
perfection was not possible, but something better could be achieved by
producing information about the system’s imperfections and feeding it back
into the system.15 This is, of course, the same Stiglitz who later became chief
economist at the World Bank during the years in which Knowledge for
Development (World Bank, 1998-9) was published.
For a conversation centred on a very clear proposition, that better
distribution of information leads to optimal efficiency, even leading scholars
in the discipline admit that there is very little agreement between proponents
as to what ‘information’ actually means (e.g. Stiglitz, 2000; Arrow, 1996). And
this lack of consensus has important analytic consequences. The fact that
information remains a moving target means the other elements of the
proposition, even the hidden ones, can go unquestioned: that markets have
an optimal state, that actors in markets are rational calculators and so on. All
market failures can in principle be attributed to poorly understood ‘informa-
tion problems’.16 Economics of information is therefore an exceptionally
powerful intellectual resource for the development expert, for it provides a
causal explanation for growth with very open-ended (though seemingly self-
evident, ethically unproblematic and politically liberal) original conditions,
 Kregg Hetherington: Promising information 11

which experts can then tinker with until they produce the results the models
call for.
In Latin American land policy, the rise of information economics could be
detected in the early 1980s, and centred on changes in the way that USAID
structured its land-reform spending. From the 1960s to the 1970s, USAID had
been involved in nationalist land-reform initiatives, which sought to break up
large latifundio landholdings and redistribute them to the poor, a ‘land to the
tiller’ project that addressed both longstanding social inequities and the theory
that household producers would use the land more ‘rationally’.17 In countries
like Paraguay, such projects held enormous promise because the land
distribution was one of the most unequal in the world (Thiesenhusen,
1995). But, by the early 1980s, USAID began to consider redistribution
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programmes a failure, and started promoting cadastral reform projects which

emphasized not redistribution of land itself but institution-building through
taxation and reducing transaction costs through land titling (Fandino, 1993;
Thorpe, 2000). The thinking was that, while redistribution may have helped to
break the highly unequal rural structures of the traditional latifundio system, it
had led to a stagnant bureaucratic system, often relegating land to collective
and inalienable forms of property which created production inefficiencies. By
making land titles easily transferable, USAID hoped to produce new land
markets that would by themselves distribute land to the most efficient
producers (see Carter, 2000).
The new model no longer considered farm size a factor in efficiency. What
was most important was that producers be incorporated into markets which
encouraged them to use the land efficiently or to sell it off to someone who
would. For small producers who had not managed to incorporate themselves
into the market, the new goal of land reform was a new kind of dynamism that
would ‘increase smallholders’ responsiveness to market signals’ (Zoomers &
van der Haar, 2000, p. 4). In other words, smallholders should be encouraged
to produce more or to sell, where the medium of encouragement would be
seemingly non-compulsive availability of information. But what could this
actually mean? USAID reasoned that one of the major blockages to land
transfers was the old property registry systems, and even the partial cadastres
that USAID itself had promoted, which it now saw as garbled and
unsystematic. New, modern cadastres were needed which would turn the
meandering documentary trails of registration systems into systematic parts of
nested wholes. Cadastres would become the central passageway for reliable
signals between rational buyers and sellers of land, allowing the emergence of a
land market newly imagined as self-regulating information machine.

Cadastral fixes

Between 1985 and 2002 this new approach to cadastral land systems led to
three separate reforms by three separate international agencies operating in
 12 Economy and Society

Paraguay. The first two of these failed to produce even the institutional
structures that they were mandated to create (and it is impossible to know what
overall effect they had on land markets). The third is still in progress. But the
point here is not to evaluate these projects. Instead, it is to show how each of
them was structured quite differently around a singular promise. Each of these
‘cadastral fixes’ is an attempt to bring the promise of information to Paraguay’s
rural economy, but, in each, both the concept of information and the
technologies and practices surrounding it are increasingly restrictive and
disciplinary. The last of these projects, in particular, depends on legal and
police measures to restrict how documents are used and interpreted.
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Fix 1: setting boundaries

In the mid-1980s, in an era when the US was putting pressure on Paraguay to

democratize, USAID approached the then dictatorship with a project to help
modernize the administration of land. It is already hard to find out exactly
what reformers hoped to accomplish with this project,18 but its principal
activity was to create a single map, based on aerial photographs, which would
allow the cadastre to imagine land transactions as part of a single totality. Until
then, the Paraguayan cadastre had been incapable of accounting for the
relationship between given parcels of land and the territory as a whole. If the
primary role of cadastres is to create a system (an efficient land market) out of a
non-system, then the first fix that allows them to do this is by deciding what
will be internal or external to that system.
Michel Callon’s (1998b) work is instructive here. For Callon, the calculative
rationality so important to neo-classical economics can in principle be created
under very restricted circumstances in which information related to transac-
tions in a market is scrupulously contained and managed. Drawing on the work
of Marie-France Garcia (1986), Callon uses the example of strawberry auctions
in Sologne, in which strawberry buyers and sellers all met in a single
warehouse and in which standardized data sheets accompanied all strawberry
batches providing all buyers with equal and immediate information about
things they were thinking about buying (Callon, 1998b, p. 20). All of these
rituals and devices amount to ‘enframing’ practices, cutting out representations
deemed irrelevant and isolating and managing those necessary to the market,
delineating supply and demand, which make it possible to imagine the whole of
which any given transaction is a part, and to conceive of something like rational
calculation occurring.
Callon is the first to suggest that conditions like these are rarely possible
outside very unusual market settings like the ones in Sologne. And, at first
blush, a land market would seem like an almost impossibly messy sort of
transactional space even to conceive of this sort of ordering. On the other hand,
the apparent finiteness of supply in a land market provides a temptation that,
given a restricted, compulsory space for transactions with well-managed
 Kregg Hetherington: Promising information 13

symmetrical information about land on offer, one might be able to create the
kind of efficiency Callon thinks holds for Sologne’s strawberry market.19 This
is the promise of the cadastre: that it will standardize and make available in an
efficient and symmetrical way a series of representations which make it
possible for buyers and sellers of land to imagine transactions as part of an
isolated, knowable field of supply and demand.
In Paraguay simply photographing and cataloguing all the land available in
the country was certainly an insufficient condition for the emergence of such a
land market. Why the USAID abandoned the project after making these
pictures is not clear, but the late 1980s was a time of major political upheaval in
Paraguay, and it is probable that the consultants grew frustrated with the
bureaucratic irregularities in the National Cadastre and Public Works.20 In
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1992, however, in the glow of democratic reforms, the World Bank picked up
the project and attempted to improve on it. In their original plans, bank
consultants made reference to the USAID project, but dismissed the maps it
had produced as out-of-date, and in its place launched a much more ambitious,
comprehensive cataloguing project called the ’Land Use Rationalization
Project’ (PRUT), which re-imagined the cadastre as the centre of a huge
new system of documentation.

Fix 2: creating an inventory

As a first iteration, the cadastre seems to simplify and streamline a section of

the economy, bounding off a region of economic choice concurrent with the
boundaries of the nation, which it can then exhaustively describe. One
reformer in Paraguay described the next step to me succinctly.

So when you buy a property in Paraguay, if all of this works, you know where it
is, how much it costs, who your neighbours are, the title, the plan, and if there’s
anything else that affects it, for example, an oil concession or a protected wildlife
area, or if there’s a municipal ordinance that allows you to build to two or three
floors . . . The idea is to know everything that affects the value of all properties.

Here, a standard definition of information taken from game theory is being

invoked: information is all ‘knowledge about values which are relevant to
economic choice’ (Rasmusen, 1994). But such an inventory is both practically
and conceptually a much more complicated thing to achieve, as reformers try
to unpack all the dense keywords in the phrase, from ‘knowledge’ to ‘value’ to
‘relevance’. It is the about that provides the key. Values are assumed to exist in
the world, representations of those values allow economic actors to know them
and thus make decisions about them. In game theoretical models, then,
information can be measured stochastically as both a finite set of possible
signals and a finite set of possible ‘states of the world’ which the signals depict.
Slowly, the world is incorporated into the market, although this is a strange
 14 Economy and Society

world indeed - a world quantified as the probabilistic relation between possible

states.21 The economics of information envisions, therefore, a continuous
labour of incorporation, of rendering as information wider and wider sets of
probabilities to make market optimality possible. Since the world is rendered as
a set of probabilities, uncertainty, and the future itself, can also be calculated,
opening up both insurance markets and futures markets. And, since no aspect
of the world may be considered completely irrelevant to the economy, no
aspect of the world escapes the desire of some information economist to
represent it and translate it into a calculative potential.
As one might expect, then, one of the effects of the age of information on
development regimes is the explosion in the amount of representations out
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there and the number of people employed as creators of such representations.

This effect can be clearly seen by comparing the approach the World Bank took
to agricultural development in the 1980s to the early twenty-first century (see
Hetherington, 2009b). In 1982, and again in 2008, the World Bank produced
reports on agriculture and development which outlined bank strategy in this
field. Not surprisingly, in both cases, the bank advocated investment in
research to improve the capacity of planners and farmers to make informed
decisions about what to plant and where. But in the twenty-six intervening
years, the meaning of information had expanded. Whereas in 1982 the word
‘research’ applied almost exclusively to scientific research on crop varieties and
technologies, by 2008 research was to be conducted on processes of all sorts,
including markets, property relations, social roles and traditions, all of which
would allow the bank to come to ‘more optimal’ decisions about how to invest
capital and labour in rural areas. This is what the World Bank’s Land Use
Rationalization Project in Paraguay was all about. It tried to reform the
Cadastre and the Public Registry again, but also set about mapping soils,
waterways and roads and doing market research, all in the interests of helping
various interests make more rational decisions about how to use the land.
This logic, on its own, leads only to the proliferation of representations and
to the accumulation of documents, and as we have seen, extra documentation
can, in excess, be the opposite of information. The USAID and the World
Bank projects resulted only in the accumulation of maps, glossy books and
reams of reports about environmental conditions, economic arrangements,
bureaucratic histories, market access, future and past development plans.22 By
the time I came looking for them in 2006, they were already scattered through
the bureaucracy, under piles and behind bookcases, like tatters of a Borgesian
map of the empire that blows around on the nation’s frontiers, of interest to no
one but old bureaucrats who had a hand in making them.23 The documents
they produced never acquired any legal standing, merely sitting in excess of the
already monumental piles of paper that, according to the very theory of
efficiency that inspired the documents in the first place, slowed bureaucrats
and market participants down on a day-to-day basis.
 Kregg Hetherington: Promising information 15

Fix 3: reforming grammar

The document-heavy land market that results from the above cadastral
strategies is a chaotic system, a cybernetic nightmare in which the surfeit of
inscriptions leads to inefficiency, because participants spend far too much time
and resources parsing through signals to determine what is information and
what is not before they can make any choices. It is therefore not really a system
at all, because there is no (or very little) information, only paper. It is not
surprising then that, after the failures of the first two cadastral projects, the
IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) entered the game in 2002 with a
project that conceptualized the creation of information as the reduction of
documents rather than as the creation of new ones. The IDB’s project,
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PROCAR, had less to do with the creation of new representations than with
managing how these representations moved around. It envisioned creating
better (digital) channels of communication between the Public Registry and the
Cadastre, which until then operated as more or less independent entities.
Despite how different the activity was from the two previous projects, this was
still considered to be about creating information, and explicitly claimed to be a
refinement of the previous attempts. A wonderful phrase, derived from the
Spanish word for digitization, informatización, captures the dual conception of
information at work here beautifully. The project, I was told repeatedly, was
informatizar nuestra información, literally to ‘informationize our information’.
The digital registry made representations much more secure, helped to limit
access and changes, and allowed bureaucrats to communicate with each other
over a purer medium than the taxicab full of documents. More than anything it
was a battle with the forces (especially corruption and populist politics) which
impeded the emergence of a real land market.
This, then, is the third fix. If the World Bank created papers which were
often ‘just paper’, the IDB turned paper into information by allowing the
paper to move around and change in a more secure way. The technical term for
this is a ‘living cadastre’, and it is here that cadastral reform looks most like
cybernetics. Part of what propelled the cybernetic idea of improvement was a
suspicion that society existed on a razor’s edge between system and chaos.
Norbert Wiener, the godfather of the movement, generalized this anxiety
across all systems, which he referred to as ‘organisms’: ‘Organism is opposed to
chaos,’ he wrote, ‘to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise . . . We have
already seen that certain organisms. . .tend for a time to maintain and often
even increase the level of their organization, as a local enclave in the general
stream of increasing entropy, of increasing chaos and de-differentiation. Life is
an island here and now in a dying world’ (1954, p. 95). Noise, for these mid-
century thinkers, was not merely an impediment to clarity, but the harbinger of
economic stagnation, chaos and death.
If this sounds hyperbolic by today’s standards, consider the echoes in a
musing paper from 1999 entitled ‘Future cadastres’, by geographical
consultant Jurg Kaufmann. He is explaining why legal security backed by
 16 Economy and Society

cadastral registration is so important: ‘Lacking legal security leads to

uncertainty, lack of confidence, disorder, and finally chaos. This means that
citizens lose confidence in their country’s institutions, the land market as an
essential part of the economy ceases to function, business becomes weak, and
the whole system can crash’ (1999, p. 5). His prescription is the perfect
cadastre. ‘Future cadastral systems,’ he says, ‘document all facts in an
indisputable manner [so that] erroneous decisions can be avoided.’ (1999,
pp. 6-7). The future cadastre, imagined here as a producer of indisputable
facts, staves off the entropy that takes hold of the economy as the productive
energies of the market are frittered away in piles of paper.
So how does one produce these indisputable facts? As Ronald Day (2001)
has pointed out, the cybernetic version of liberalism always had a peculiarly
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totalitarian underside. The systems described by cybernetics were indifferent

to the content of signals transferred between parts of a system. What they were
not indifferent to was that the signals always have the same effect on the
receiver. Indeed, information is by definition a measure of certainty that
receivers of signals will do what is expected of them. Information, then, is a
kind of perfect signalling, whose effects can be predicted reliably, even if only
as probabilities. And that entails, even if only as a horizon of analytic
possibility, a kind of perfect language, a language which is free of interpretation
and from the cacophonous noise of all normal languages. This entailment was
pointed out early in the history of this line of thinking. In a canonical work in
information theory, Warren Weaver wrote that ‘Language must be designed (or
developed) with a view to the totality of things that man may wish to say. But
not being able to accomplish everything, it too should do as well as possible as
often as possible. That is to say, it too should deal with its task, statistically’
(Shannon & Weaver, 1949, p. 27). If economic communication is to have
predictable outcomes, then, the ultimate goal of intervention in society is
the creation of a meta-language for all transactions which encompasses all
possible representations, anticipates and thereby formats the grammar of all
possible desires.
This is why in the post-Cold War period the land title was dusted off as the
great technology of rural development. While the cadastre was the systemic
underpinning, the informational pool that allowed reformers to simultaneously
imagine a map of the territory of intervention and the boundaries of a vigorous
land market, it was the land title that would allow them to imagine a perfect
grammar of transactions. Under this solution the land title becomes the only
approved grammar of ownership and transaction, a grammar of clarity,
commensurability and predictable outcomes.24 It creates a land market by
selecting details of the property narrative and folding them into the title,
declaring as irrelevant anything else that might be said about it or another
property down the road and making sure that other details are filled. The
cadastre becomes a channel of communication which decides ahead of time
what anyone else needs to interpret from the signals people might be making to
each other about land.
 Kregg Hetherington: Promising information 17

Digitization (not coincidentally one of the great technological advancements

enabled by information theory) seems like an almost predictable end-game for
cadastral reform. After decades of seeking out the kinds of details which
experts decide are appropriate elements of land valuation and incorporating
them into its system, the IDB project now reduces communication about these
details to unambiguous 1s and 0s so that it can fully re-imagine participants in
that market as rational automatons seeking optimal distribution. And this is
what makes of this nominally libertarian system a form of complete control. By
intervening in communicative form, the grammar of economic speech and
interpretation, managers can still remain uninterested in the content of
people’s messages. Speech, in other words, remains free. But speech that passes
through the cadastre - now a compulsory space of transactions - must conform
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to a controlled grammar which it is impossible for receivers to dispute about.

Bureaucratic control is no longer exercised through total knowledge of what is,
but rather by formatting the totality of that which is possible, in order to elicit
a pre-ordained optimality from participants.

The indisputable facts

The point here is not to question that many of the programmes under the
headings of ‘right to information’ that have been instituted since the end of the
Cold War have made countries more democratic. But the kinds of programmes
we have been looking at, in which the conceptual anchor point for information
is not a right, but rather an effect to which the availability of information is
supposed to lead, are of quite a different nature, and we should not allow
ourselves to be confused by the use of the same word. Information for
development is reconcilable only with the most mechanical, procedural forms
of democracy, themselves drawing on circuit-board model of economic life
which sees different economic actors sending out and responding to signals. In
these contexts information is the name given to an appropriate (i.e. predictable)
relationship between signal and response within a systematic totality called the
market, and cadastral reform is one of those projects which clarifies signals and
turns them into information by describing their totality. Quite the opposite of
the radical democratic uncertainty made possible by giving citizens access to
documents and allowing them to contest the government, or each other, on the
basis of what they find there, this deployment of information is tightly tied to a
dream of certainty, order and efficiency. And this means limiting the range of
interpretation, dissent, political disagreement or creative entanglements which
we might normally associate with democratic transitions.
It is not surprising, then, that after several attempts to improve the way that
landowners send out and respond to signals by creating larger and larger
archives of documents about Paraguayan land, development specialists
eventually turned to restrictive legal measures on who can interpret what.
The final fixers are police. Towards the end of its World Development Report on
 18 Economy and Society

information, the World Bank gives some explicit examples of such fixes, like
speeding up court processes so police can more rapidly repossess collateral
from credit defaulters (1998
9, pp. 151-3). Indeed, for bureaucrats I spoke to
the most promising part of the IDB’s project was the new law that it created
that would make the workings of the database less vulnerable to disagreement.
The law, all 261 articles of it, plus the procedural code that went along with it,
would change how people dealt with documents, would speed their
interpretation and narrow the channels for adjudication. It would increase
the penalties for people who transacted on land outside approved channels (e.g.
without titles). It would reduce the number of recourses they had to appeal
decisions, thus giving judges greater authority to enforce their interpretations
of documents over the interpretations of claimants. In short, far from merely
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serving as a meeting-place for a newly transparent land market, the cadastre

would become a stricter and more unforgiving disciplinary mechanism that
restricted how people talked about land and dealt with documents.
Government documents related to land in Paraguay are definitely messy,
and there may be good reasons to clean them up. But the comforting argument
that this will release information which will in turn lead to growth seems to
invite the imposition of a repressive apparatus. It also invites the belief that
disagreement over the ways in which land is governed is indicative of
malfeasance. I was struck with how easy it was for bureaucrats to equate
disagreements about cadastral reform from political parties, social movements
and NGOs with corruption. For instance, everyone I spoke to was exasperated
with the land institute, which had been cut out of the IDB programme for
insisting that the project to redistribute land to the poor needed room to
differentiate documents and beneficiaries in its own way. ‘Some people,’
admitted the legal consultant, ‘have a different vision of agrarian reform. But
we are not talking about agrarian reform. This is just an instrument so that we
can make a system. And I have to wonder if [our opponents] have false titles, or
they have mortgages on property that doesn’t exist, and they aren’t happy with
a project that makes everything transparent.’ Again, this is probably true in
many cases. But despite grumbling among opposition parties and rural
organizations about why these reforms were being undertaken, I never heard
any of my interviewees suggest that there might be good reasons to contest
what they were doing.25 When all one was doing was managing information,
contestation pointed to nefarious motives and therefore did not require
political engagement.
This is a crucial point, because there is so much confusion in development
discourse about what exactly is being reformed here. In Paraguay it is easy to
point to messy, torn, adulterated piles of documents and say that they are poor
representations of assets, and that they need to be fixed. But from the point of
view of the centuries-old struggle over land in Latin America, diagnosing the
core problem as being about paper management is a peculiar but convenient
way of thinking. As we have seen, the paper problem is always a diagnosis that
emerges in the context of dispute. The problem is not in the papers
 Kregg Hetherington: Promising information 19

themselves - the problem emerges only as people fight over the interpretation
of documents, when they go to court and swarm the archives and set their
notaries against each other. The problem is when political struggles break out
over ownership. Disputes such as these have always occurred in Paraguay, but
they are more or less intense at different moments. The most historically
important wave of land struggle occurred in the 1960s and 1970s when the
liberalization of the Catholic Church led to a massive national movement for
land that was ended only by the brutal police repression of 1976 (see Telesca,
2004). Not surprisingly, the next intense and disorganized wave of protests
over land occurred in the early 1990s, in the years following the fall of the
dictatorship.
So I would venture that there is nothing really missing here at all. The
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problem that the cadastre is supposed to fix is the problem of people fighting
about property, in court, out of court, in the archives and on country roads,
many of them exercising newfound democratic rights. People may disagree
about how to read a document, but in doing so they are also disagreeing about
who owns what, what its value is and what kinds of ownership are even
legitimate to begin with. Recall that at the end of the day, Paraguay’s cadastre is
supposed to stabilize a pattern of landholding that began with a few dozen
important men standing in a room and declaring ownership over swaths of
forest, sometimes millions of hectares in size. In the twenty-first century,
Paraguay’s land distribution is still among the most unequal in the world26; the
country is beset by all sorts of disagreements about land ownership, but most
of them are quite impossible to reduce to interpretative squabbles. The
information problems cadastral reformers wish to reform have little to do with
the quality of documents; they are a measure of the degree to which
participants fail to agree about the distribution of land. And this means that
there is no fundamental difference between creating information and
preventing people from disagreeing about things. If the problem of the
cadastral fact is the degree to which people disagree about things, then the
future cadastre should not be confused with a move toward democratic
openness.

Notes

1 For an influential version of this argument, see Diamond (1992). For an overview of
how this argument came about, see Abrahamsen (2000).
2 Much of the critical historical framing of this essay is taken from Day (2001),
Galison (1994), Hayles (1999), and Mirowski (2002).
3 This is similar to the well-known argument that economics enacts or performs the
economy (e.g. Callon, 1998a; MacKenzie et al., 2007; Slater, 2002). The difference here
is that I remain agnostic about whether economists can in fact create the markets they
model, in part because in Paraguay, no one has yet suggested that any of these projects
was successful. In other words, I am sidestepping the most important controversy
surrounding this literature, provoked by the arguments of Michel Callon (1998a) that,
 20 Economy and Society

given the right practices of enframing, economists are able to create the conditions for
the emergence of calculative rationality. Miller (2002) and Mirowski and Nik-Khah
(2007) have argued strongly against seeing calculative rationality and market efficiency
as anything more than ‘virtualism’ (Miller, 1998) in which the stated hypotheses of
economic reformers make sense only within the confines of their own discourse.
4 I began doing these interviews in 2006 as part of a two-year ethnography of land
politics in Paraguay. During that project I conducted extensive ethnographic research in
the Public Registry and the Land Reform Agency (INDERT), especially into how
peasant activists interacted with filing procedures. I returned in 2009, and with a
research assistant conducted additional interviews with highly placed bureaucrats and
consultants involved in PROCAR. In total, the material for this paper draws directly on
at least fifteen semi-structured interviews, documents and reports related to three
reform projects, but more fundamentally on my long familiarity with filing practices
and bureaucratic discourses (see Hetherington, 2011).
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5 It was a massive managerial undertaking run by professional, competent civil

servants who saw their role as fighting an old guard of intransigent and often corrupt
underlings. Between 2006 and 2010, both the National Cadastre and the Public Registry
were the sites of major police actions against bribery, coordinated with the help of newly
appointed directors. Neither of these sting operations, it should be noted, had anything
to do with the reform of the system - they involved hidden cameras, snitches and new
internal disciplinary policies.
6 The head of the land registry claimed that on the last count they had registered 30
per cent more land surface than fitted in the borders of the country. ‘Once we have
entered everything [in the database] then we’ll really know what the land problem is in
this country. We all know it, but we can’t measure it because [nobody] has the true
information.’
7 Linguistic Anthropology since the 1970s has been strongly influence by the
semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, the 19th century pragmatist, who downplayed the
importance of referential signs in favour of indexical and iconic forms of meaning (e.g.
Hanks 1996). The Peircian approach is particularly useful for appreciating the material
qualities of meaning (e.g. Keane 2003).
8 It often comes as a surprise to anyone steeped in the humanities that entire
disciplines can be modelled on an understanding of language that is both objectified and
purely representational (see Mitchell, 2000; Thrift, 2007). As Foucault (1970) and many
others have argued, post-Enlightenment Western society is one where a lot of emphasis
has been put on this kind of language, as encyclopaedias, atlases, taxonomies merge with
the ever-promising representational powers of science as a technique for describing the
world (Mitchell, 2002; Richards, 1992).
9 From 1865 to 1870 Paraguay was all but destroyed in a foolhardy war against the
‘Triple Alliance’ of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Only colonial economic interests
and disputes between Argentina and Brazil stopped the country from being subsumed
by its neighbours.
10 Legally speaking there are other acts of possession which in the absence of a title
one can claim give one rights to the land. But this is generally seen as a breakdown of
the system rather than its foundation (Hetherington, 2009a).
11 It is also around this time that critics first pointed out the analytic problem of
simultaneously positing teleological black boxes and then opening them up to prove that
the boxes’ outputs were really generated by information and not by some other source
(see Hayles, 1999, pp. 94-6).
12 It is notable that the echoes in reformist thinking are from mid-century
information theory or ‘first wave’ cybernetics. By the late 1960s, cybernetics had
become far more sophisticated, incorporating reflexivity and complex systems theory
which do not fit well with international development goals because they are non-
teleological (see Hayles, 1999, for an overview).
 Kregg Hetherington: Promising information 21

13 The key theoretical proof is Arrow and Debreu (1954), which states that, under
ideal circumstances, free markets tend to produce maximally beneficial distributions of
goods, meaning it is not possible for anyone to gain further advantage without
disadvantaging someone else. Hirschliefer (1973) provides a comprehensive early
history of the literature.
14 Proponents of this approach came in several guises, including a conservative school
of New Institutional Economics led by people like Douglass North (1990) and
Hernando de Soto (2000) as well as many more moderate and even left-leaning
economists like Stiglitz. The premise is quite widespread, even among those who
continue to advocate some sort of redistribution. Examples include Pranab Bardhan
(1991), Thiesenhusen (1995), de Janvry and Sadoulet (2001), Deininger (2003), Carter
(1997), and Zoomers and van der Haar (2000).
15 This is usually referred to as the Greenwald-Stiglitz theorem after the proof
provided by Bruce Greenwald and Joseph Stiglitz (1986).
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16 For example, one of the classic proofs of this period was Stiglitz’ (1974) argument
that peasants who continued to choose share-cropping arrangements over more efficient
rental arrangements were not ‘irrational’ but just had poor (asymmetrical) information
about their choices. The axiom begs a number of questions, primarily what is actually
being produced when one ‘fixes’ this situation - something called ‘information’ or
peasants who act like economic maximizers?
17 These programmes, part of the Alliance for Progress, were forged as the Kennedy
Administration enlisted Latin American economic development formulae as a form of
economic deterrence (see Latham, 2000). For a comprehensive history of Latin
American land reform during its classic phase, and the dependency theory that
underwrote it, see Merilee Grindle’s State and Countryside (1986). For the key critiques
of the shift from redistributive to free-market policies, see Kay (1994), Thiesenhussen
(1995) and Zoomers and van der Haar (2000).
18 The national cadastre had no documents pertaining to the project, only documents
produced by it, and no one I spoke to could remember its full scope. No one at USAID
would speak to me about it, and their website is unhelpful with projects going back this
far.
19 In fact, ever since the creation of the concept of macro-economics in the 1930s, it
has become common to assume that national boundaries act as a self-evident container
for economic activity (see Mitchell, 1998, 2002, ch. 3).
20 These would come to light in the 1990s, as land reformers realized that both of
these agencies were being used to expedite poorly made titles as a form of patronage
(see Hetherington, 2011, p. 195).
21 Moreover, since the interpretation of representations is itself open to variation and
contestation, the act of interpretation becomes itself a set of probabilities; rationality
continues to be assumed and deviance from it is recoded as an (ideological or
psychological) information problem. Game theorists develop further idealized ratios,
such as the ideological predispositions of particular players, to account for these
problems. See Rasmussen (1994) for a good exploration of all of these kinds of logical
filters.
22 What was also left of the World Bank project, of course, was the remainder of a 29-
million-dollar price-tag, to be paid by Paraguayan taxpayers, with interest.
23 The reference here is to Jorge Luis Borges’ (1972) absurdist story about the
emperor who desired a map of his empire, scale 1:1, only to abandon the map as
unusable.
24 During this same period the land institute also set about stamping out the informal
sale of untitled land. These informal sales were aiding the concentration of land in the
hands of large landowners on the frontier, and so many people were in favour of
stopping the practice (Hetherington, 2009a). The new rules served the secondary
 22 Economy and Society

purpose of turning the new cadastral system into an obligatory transit-point for all land
transfers.
25 There is no space to describe such reasons here, but elsewhere I have argued that
peasant groups have good reasons to understand such reforms as the destruction of a
highly valued pioneer way of life, and the best chance they have of ever becoming full
members of Paraguayan society (Hetherington, 2011).
26 The latest agricultural census figures put the land Gini coefficient at 0.94, the most
unequal distribution in Latin America.

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Kregg Hetherington is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology

and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. He is the
author of Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay
(Duke University Press, 2011). His current work is on bureaucratic reform in
environmental and agricultural governance.