Translating Community Land Trusts: Institutional Barriers and Stakeholder Sense-Making in Argentina and Chile

This paper investigates the potential for community land trust (CLT) adoption in two Latin American contexts: Bahía Blanca, Argentina, and Temuco, Chile, where housing systems are shaped by neoliberal legacies, legal centralism, and cultural attachments to individual ownership. Drawing on two multi-stakeholder focus groups where participants were largely unfamiliar with the CLT model, the findings capture a crucial early stage of sense-making in which stakeholders interpret, negotiate, and localize the concept of collective landholding. Applying a multi-theoretical framework combining structuration theory, institutional planning, and agency typologies, the paper reveals how institutional constraints, discursive imaginaries, and actor strategies shape the (im)possibility of CLTs. While Argentine stakeholders identified pragmatic opportunities to adapt legal and financial instruments for collective tenure, Chilean participants expressed cultural and institutional skepticism rooted in strong individualist land values. The findings highlight the importance of context-sensitive policy imaginaries and institutional agency in advancing tenure innovation. The paper contributes to housing debates by revealing how cultural norms and actor strategies shape the initial buy-in and translation of CLTs within existing understandings of land, housing, and ownership.