Reimagining blockchain in a pluriversal world:Digital land governance in the Global South and the metaverse

Blockchain technologies are increasingly live-tested in experiments aimed at improving governance in a growing range of activities. A key question often lost amongst these efforts is whether such projects re-distribute wealth and power, and in which ways. Examining the case of blockchain-based land governance, this contribution explores the tensions between ambitious visions and their actual scales of implementation around the re-distributional promises of distributed ledger technologies. Bringing together the two concepts of ‘imaginaries’ and ‘infrastructures’, we analyze land governance blockchainization emerging in the Global South and the metaverse. Identifying a contrast between imaginaries ‘scaling up’ re-distributive promises yet tending to materialize in ‘scaled down’ manners, we argue for more sustained attention to pluriversal perspectives that foreground local concerns and diverse voices.