Stefan Dorondel Boeken

Exploring the implications of property ownership, this book examines how various governments have transformed natural elements into commodities through ownership titles. Focusing on postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania, and Vietnam, it reveals the complex and often problematic outcomes of these reforms. The analysis suggests that property rights are not the panacea for economic, political, or environmental issues that governments once believed them to be, challenging the notion of property as a universal solution.

The transformative impact of the Soviet Union's collapse is explored through the lens of postsocialist Romania, highlighting the shift from collectivization to privatization. This detailed study examines how these changes affected the nation’s natural resources, including forests, farmlands, and rivers. It delves into the roles of bureaucrats in illegal deforestation and the resistance of peasants against government agricultural policies, illustrating the social and political dynamics that facilitated the introduction of neoliberalism into Romania's landscape.

The fall of the Soviet Union was a transformative event for the national political economies of Eastern Europe, leading not only to new regimes of ownership and development but to dramatic changes in the natural world itself. This painstakingly researched volume focuses on the emblematic case of postsocialist Romania, in which the transition from collectivization to privatization profoundly reshaped the nation’s forests, farmlands, and rivers. From bureaucrats abetting illegal deforestation to peasants opposing government agricultural policies, it reveals the social and political mechanisms by which neoliberalism was introduced into the Romanian landscape.

Governments have conferred ownership titles to many citizens throughout the world in an effort to turn things into property. Almost all elements of nature have become the target of property laws, from the classic preoccupation with land to more ephemeral material, such as air and genetic resources. When Things Become Property interrogates the mixed outcomes of conferring ownership by examining postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam, and finds that property reforms are no longer, if they ever were, miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments.