Land Reform: Land Settlement and Cooperatives 2009/1
Almost all societies acknowledge the concept of state or public landownership in which property rights are vested in a public body on a national, regional or community level. State and public land tenure arrangements define rules for the distribution, use and protection of publicly vested lands. State lands may be used to deliver public services. Authorities or customary rulers may act as custodians of common property resources or of environmentally or culturally sensitive sites on behalf of society. Many forms of public tenure arrangements have been introduced. They commonly differ from private arrangements by limiting access, use and alienation of public lands.
Despite the growing recognition of the importance of state lands and their proper management, public land and property assets are generally weakly managed. Considered as “free” and available, state lands are commonly encroached upon, overutilized and acquired for personal gain. Undefined tenure arrangements and poor recording of land rights contribute to the poor and ineffective management of public lands, providing fertile ground for corrupt practices. The situation is made more serious by weak governance, which is common in land administration institutions. There are no simple solutions for improvement. However, progress has been made by improving transparency, consistency, impartiality and equity in land administration institutions and by enhancing their technical competences and clarifying their management objectives, i.e. by improving the governance of state and public lands.
Through its ongoing normative work on state/public-sector land management, FAO’s Land Tenure and Management Unit aims to support governments and other parties in addressing current challenges by providing guidelines, policy recommendations and examples of good practice. The objective is to raise global awareness of persisting problems and of their impacts on the efficient use of and equitable access to land. FAO will publish a new Land Tenure Series guide on state and public land management later this year.
The articles in this issue complement an international seminar on state and public sector land management organized by the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) and FAO in Verona, Italy, in September 2008. This issue opens with a scene-setting paper by Jennifer Franco expressing the need for a pro-poor policy on public lands. The following articles consist of case studies from various geographical settings. They present different initiatives aimed at improving and strengthening public land management and the governance of public properties. In Ghana, past military rulers expropriated private land without paying compensation and Odame Larbi’s paper discusses how this could be rectified. Babu Ram Acharya stresses the importance of appropriate legal, policy and governance frameworks to preserving and managing public land resources in Nepal. Daniel Roberge presents the new public land cadastre developed for Quebec, Canada. Exploring the context of privatization and restitution, Simon Keith, Kiril Georgievski and Kristina Mlitic identify options for more effective state land management in the rural areas of The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Finally, Richard Grover looks at how public management and the introduction of accruals accounting are changing the delivery of public services and the management of operational property in the United Kingdom.
