This chapter examines the major extralegal governance institutions employed by participants to secure cooperation and mitigate uncertainties in China’s small property right housing market, where housing is built on collectively owned land without legal title. Although illegal, these large-scale communities often house numerous immigrants and are consequently often tolerated by local governments. However, these governments may intervene in the market if they perceive threats to social order, the local economy, or government revenue. The small property right housing market is illegal but socially legitimate, making it a unique form of illegal market. Participants develop private institutions to facilitate exchanges, protect informal property rights, and avoid government interference. Empirical data shows that builders and buyers use informal documents, contracts, lawyer testimonies, and signing rituals to define ownership and assess the trustworthiness of exchange participants. Sellers utilize WeChat groups for information sharing and reputation management. Village committees perform multiple roles in the market: They act as builders, sellers, and third-party enforcers; they establish ownership and transaction databases to protect informal property rights; and they also organize collective action and seek political patronage to deter government interference.

The transition from an apartheid state to one whose foundation is universal suffrage saw South Africa adopt multiple methods to signify transition from the one form of rule to the other. Such a transition involved, among others, the creation of truth commissions, the amendment of legislation and the promulgation of new legislation – a process collectively referred to as transitional justice. Despite the protections against the arbitrary deprivation of property, provided for in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa and other pieces of legislation born of transitional justice, there continues to exist a disparity in respect of who South African property law caters for and protects. Against this background, the South African Constitution and case law, this chapter engages the principle of transformative justice to interrogate the conceptions of ownership and property under South African property law. This chapter argues that the current conception of property and ownership serve to, inter alia, economically exclude a large number of South Africans whose property custodianship exists outside of the current conceptions of ‘ownership’ and consequently outside of the recognition of private ownership of land or property.