Land Tenure Center Newsletter
Number 80, Fall 2000, p. 12-13
The relationship between human societies and the land they inhabit is an evolving historical process. The way this relationship is institutionalized has major implications for the creation and distribution of wealth, social and political harmony or disharmony, and the durability and renewability of ecological resources and values.
A transformation of land management and land administration is occurring worldwide, linked to sociopolitical phenomena like the end of the Cold War and globalization, the rise of the environmental movement, skepticism about the efficacy of centralized bureaucracies, and the impact of widely available information and geospatial technology.1 This transformation is visible in three major global trends, which manifest themselves differently in different regions.
The first trend is toward making land rights more marketable, through such efforts as the massive privatization programs of the former socialist countries and the titling and registration programs of nearly all market-oriented countries.2 The development and dynamics of land markets and the administration of the land rights which are traded in such markets have become more important for the achievement of societal goals in economic, political, and ecological development. Even government-led land reform policies now increasingly rely on land market mechanisms to achieve redistributive goals, as in South Africa, Colombia, Brazil and Guatemala.
The second trend is in attempts to institutionalize the bases for the pursuit of societal goals in environmental management, urban services, sustainable development, and social equity through land policy. This has meant new legal restrictions or obligations for landholders, and the creation of regulatory, administrative, and technological apparatus for their implementation.
The third trend is in land policy formulation and implementation being decentralized to local government institutions, which are closer to land issues specific to each place. New groups of institutions and individuals charged with a land administration and management need understanding, judgement, and supervision in these tasks. Society-wide goals in managing the human-land relationship must be managed through these decentralized, and potentially fragmented institutions.
Managing these trends is a global challenge that no region of the world can claim to have met successfully. These trends create economic winners and losers, influence the balance of political power, often are costly to implement, create competing policy agendas, and necessitate the discovery of pathways to negotiate or manage inherent conflicts. Adapting land management and land administration systems to these often conflicting changes poses new legal, institutional, political/economic, and technological problems.
The increasing importance of private control over the land is particularly dramatic in the ex-socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where rapid and far-reaching programs of privatization and restitution have been implemented since 1990.
In Latin America, the state-led agrarian reform policies of the 1960s and 1970s that aimed to increase the medium- and small-scale private holding of agricultural land through state acquisition of large estates and the redistribution of land to the peasant sector have largely been abandoned. In their wake an enormous amount of activity is occurring around tenure regularization, land titling, land finance, and property registry modernization.3 Parallel efforts in Latin America to establish environmental zoning, manage urban expansion, and control deforestation have meshed uncomfortably with the trend toward marketization of individual rights.4 Massive rural-to-urban migration in Latin America has made urban land tenure, particularly the definition of ownership rights and responsibilities in informally settled peri-urban areas, an important political and economic issue which now has achieved a very high profile.
In Africa, decentralization and marketization of land rights are moving ahead together with new legal and institutional perspectives on common property and movements toward redistributive land reform, especially in southern Africa.5
In Asia, marketization and decentralization of land management is proceeding through titling and regularization programs that are being implemented simultaneously with efforts at watershed conservation, forest protection and urban planning.6
In North America, these changes are seen in the rise and impact of the "Wise Use"/private property rights movement and increased conflicts over urban sprawl, establishment of environmental greenbelts around cities, and resource management decisions for public lands.7
As land managers become more subject to land market pressures and opportunities, but also increasingly responsible for planning, regulating and evaluating societal values in land, the institutions of land administration (understood as the processes of recording and disseminating information about the ownership, use and value of land) must therefore also change radically. The institutional transformation of land management calls for the redefinition of the functions of public agencies to respond to the needs of private managers of land, and the creation of new or reconfigured institutions to effectively administer the private and public interests in land in a market economy context. The challenges for land management and administration are thus immense and growing. There is a pressing need for human institutions to administer the land for the health and well-being of present and future human populations and the diverse life forms of our planet. There is also a pressing need for equitable access to land for all people whatever their gender, social stratum or ethnicity. Awareness of these challenges in the context of market-led economies has made land management and land administration a broader and more complex locus of endeavor than ever before, where legal institutions, political agendas, economic development planning, environmental management techniques, and information technology intersect, often uneasily.
The issues of the allocation and management of land rights continue to change in ways that deeply influence the nature of the society that evolves on the earth’s surface. These changing issues are complicated, conflictual, and urgent.
Dr. Childress is a research scientist at the Land Tenure Center. Currently he is Program Manager of LTC’s Albania and Eastern Europe: Land Market Project Cooperative Agreement program.
Copyright © 2000 by Land Tenure Center and Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin. All rights reserved.
Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for noncommercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies.
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