Land titles and violent conflict in rural Mexico

Good Practices in Updating Land Information Systems that Used Unconventional Approaches in Systematic Land Registration

“…In Mexico, the ejido (communal lands) members had to agree through a vote that the registration program can start in their area and also to approve the sketch map delimitating the community's outer boundary [36][37][38]. Though the land records were collected by land professionals in Kyrgyzstan, community representatives together with government officials formed a specialized land commission that received objections during public display [39].…”

“…Certification of Ejido (communal land) (1992-2007) [36][37][38] Provide tenure security to land holders in order to increase investment Prior to the registration, a general assembly made of ejido members had to approve it through voting. Once approved, an ejidal commission drafted a map showing the inner and outer boundaries of the ejidos and the map was again approved by the general assembly through a vote.…”

Smooth transitions across latitudes and longitudes: An application of a nonlinear panel regression to the climate—economics nexus

“…India witnessed the deaths of millions of people and the abandonment of thousands of villages. In Mexico, reduced levels of Lake Patzcuaro, a result of a series of droughts, led to agrarian conflicts over water and land property rights (Endfield and O'Hara 1997;Endfield and O'Hara 1999)-a cause that resonates with the present-day Mexico as well (Dower and Pfutze 2020). This same ENSO event resulted in droughts that caused crop failures and famines in Egypt, where the Nile River fell to record lows (Fagan 2009).…”

“…In places where the rules of law are weak, such negotiations may fail, paving the way for illegal and often violent ways of exchanging entitlements. Indeed, conflicts over the allocation or reallocation of resources, including food, have been endemic in developing countries (Endfield and O'Hara 1997;Jones et al 2017;Dower and Pfutze 2020;Grasse 2022).…”

Land Titling and Litigation

“…The first article, Fetzer and Marden (2017), exploits spatial and temporal variation in the availability of forestland protected by natural conservation laws-which are therefore not vulnerable to requests for titles by squatters-in the Brazilian Amazon region, in combination with the constitutionally provided right to occupy unused land, to show that the expansion of territories for which land titles cannot be requested reduces the rate of violent conflicts in a municipality. 5 The second study, Dower and Pfutze (2020), shows that land certification in Mexico reduces violent deaths. The authors provide evidence that the reduction in violence stems from formalized reductions in politicians' discretion in the allocation of land rights and, as a consequence, in the amount of disputes.…”