Summaries Drawing upon research in the Southeast Asian uplands, especially Sulawesi, this article argues that excessive attention to managerial goals, such as the design of improved institutions, has occluded understandings of agrarian processes that radically reconfigure communities and the relations between people and land. Managerial interventions play a limited role in directing processes of agrarian differentiation, although they do set some of the conditions, often unwittingly. The limits of managerialism notwithstanding, the effort to understand political‐economic processes affecting resource use and allocation is still worthwhile, for there are several possible uses for this kind of knowledge.