How Can Land Tenure and Cadastral Reform Succeed? An Inter-Regional Comparison of Rural Reforms

Extra-legal land market dynamics on a Guatemalan agricultural frontier: Implications for neoliberal land policies

“…Other authors working in Honduras have shown that, rather than creating efficient land markets and improving tenure security, that new regulations and bureaucratization created by land administration programs create new forms of insecurity for landowners (Jansen and Roquas, 1998). Furthermore, in a review of land administration projects from Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, Ballantyne et al (2000) found that most failed to generate the benefits that economic theory would predict (see also Bruce et al (1994) for a critique of large-scale land administration programs in Africa). These findings are consistent with the concerns of many NGOs and advocacy groups that land administration programs create land markets that ''systematically disenfranchise the poor'' and lead to land concentration in the hands of elites (Rosset, 2001;Deininger et al, 2003Deininger et al, , p. 1386.…”

“…Much scholarly work has been done to evaluate economic incentives that are supposed to be generated by legal property rights in land after statesanctioned land markets have been established (See the section on ''Neoliberal land policy'' above, and Feder and Nishio, 1998;Ballantyne et al, 2000). In this case, we have focused on the economic incentives that exist in an extralegal land market before the establishment of the statesanctioned land market.…”

Land regularization on agricultural frontiers: The case of Northwestern Petén, Guatemala

“…Today advocates of land regularization often cite the results of a World Bank-funded land project implemented in Thailand as evidence that farmers with titles invest more in their land than farmers who lack them (Feder et al, 1988; but see Ballantyne et al, 2000). An important theoretical basis for the work in Thailand, and for rural regularization projects generally, is that increased tenure security produced by land regularization (see above), leads farmers to be more confident of reaping the fruits of their toil, and therefore more likely to make landattached investments (Feder and Nishio, 1998).…”

Indicator scarcity on cadastre and land registration in cross-country information sources

“…As an example, a synthesis of studies in English, Spanish and French, concerning cadastral reforms in Peru, Colombia, Albania, Hungary, Burkina Faso and Senegal assess the degree of success in land tenure and cadastral reforms (Ballantyne et al, 2000). Ballantyne et al analyse design issues and experience with cadastral reforms with the aim of finding some commonalities and draw out lessons that could inform future development planning policy.…”