SCHERMERHORN LECTURE Key issues for the future that support or prohibit a more pro-poor approach and why such an approach is needed Dr Clarissa Augustinus Chief, Land and Tenure Section, Shelter Branch, Global Division UN-HABITAT 1
Sensing Geo-Information International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) Hengelosestraat 99, PO Box 6, 7500 AA Enschede, The Netherlands 2005 ISBN 90 6164 241 8 2
GIS and Geography: A new language for society Dr Augustinus presenting the Schermerhorn Lecture in the Jacobus Church, Enschede, the Netherlands, 29 September 2005 Dr Clarissa Augustinus is chief of the Land and Tenure Section, Shelter Branch, Global Division, UN-HABITAT, in Nairobi, Kenya. She is the focal point for urban land within the UN system, and also a special advisor to FIG, Commission 7 Cadastre and Land Management. She has a PhD in social anthropology and has worked extensively in the land administration industry over the last decade, both as an academic and as a consultant. She is the author of several key publications on land management and land administration. 1
GIS and Geography: A new language for society Key issues for the future that support or prohibit a more pro-poor approach and why such an approach is needed Honourable Rector Martien Molenaar, your Excellencies distinguished ambassadors, distinguished guests, dear course participants, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Opening of the Academic Year 2005-2006. I welcome especially: the members of the ITC Board of Supervisors Professor Zijm, Rector Magnificus of the University of Twente, ITC s intermediary with the Netherlands Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the members of the Scientific Council. And a special welcome to your Excellencies the ambassadors and representative of Costa Rica and Zambia the mayor of Enschede, Mr den Oudsten Mr Dijkema, representative of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science council members and other officials of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Mr Dorji Wangda, director of the Department of Geology and Mines, Bhutan and Mr Blokland of UNESCO-IHE. But most of all I welcome ITC s new course participants. It is a great honour to be invited to present the Schermerhorn Lecture on the occasion of the Opening of the Academic Year in the very year that ITC is celebrating its 55th anniversary. I have fond memories of ITC for a number of reasons, the most important being that I was a visiting scientist here. In this lecture I would like to start with a brief overview of the history of my organisation, UN-HABITAT. Then I will give you an impression of the magnitude of the urban problem, particularly in relation to slums. Innovations in land tenure systems are required, as colonial approaches have not proved to be effective. There are some promising innovations in this respect in Africa. Interdisciplinary approaches are required since there are at least two very different sets of people. Furthermore, post-conflict areas need a specific type of attention. I would like to finish with some other key issues and with the development of a global network of pro-poor land developers. 2
A quick history of UN-HABITAT The agency known as the United Nations Centre for Human Settlement (UNCHS) was initiated after the United Nations Human Settlements Conference held in Vancouver, Canada, in 1976. Land was a key tenet of the Vancouver Action Plan (agenda item 10(d) on land). The next major milestone was the Istanbul Declaration and the passing of the Habitat Agenda in 1996. The Habitat Agenda gives UN-HABITAT its global mandate in regard to urban land, land policies, land management and land administration. Article 75 of the Habitat Agenda spells out clearly the link between poverty and land. It states that legal access to land is a strategic prerequisite for the provision of adequate shelter for all and for the development of sustainable human settlement affecting both urban and rural areas. The failure to adopt, at all levels, appropriate rural and urban land policies and land management practices remains a primary cause of inequity and poverty. All of us in the business know that it is not possible to have good land management without sound land administration and land information management systems. In 2000, UN-HABITAT became the focal point for Millennium Development Goal 7, Target 11, which aims to improve significantly the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by the year 2020. The next major milestone was Istanbul + 5, where the Declaration on Cities and Other Human Settlements in the New Millennium was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2001. This involved the General Assembly recognising the new strategic vision of the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements [as UN-HABITAT was previously known], and its emphasis on the two global campaigns on secure tenure and urban governance as strategic points of entry for the effective implementation of the Habitat Agenda, especially for guiding international cooperation on adequate shelter for all and sustainable human settlements development (Article 16). The date 1 January 2002 marked another key milestone, when the agency s mandate was strengthened and its status elevated to that of a fully-fledged programme within the UN system in General Assembly Resolution A/56/206. In 2003, UN-HABITAT s Governing Council strengthened this vision, particularly in regard to the role of women and their rights in human settlement development and slum upgrading (Resolution 19/16). 3
The General Assembly pushed back the boundaries of the land focus in December 2004 when it passed a resolution that encourages governments to support UN- HABITAT s Global Campaign for Secure Tenure and Global Campaign for Urban Governance as important tools for, inter alia, promoting administration of land and property rights in accordance with national circumstances, and enhancing access to affordable credit by the urban poor (Resolution A/59/484: Implementation of the outcome of the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) and of the twenty-fifth special session of the General Assembly). The size of the problem It is also good to know the size of the problem you are dealing with. In 2003, the world s population was 6.3 billion (UN Population Division); 924 million of these people (i.e. 32% of the world s total urban population) live in slums (UN-HABITAT: 2001). Figure 1 presents an overview of the total number of the world s slum dwellers per continent (UN Population Division). Slum dwellers increased by 36% during the 1990s, and by 2020, which is the MDG slum target year, there will be somewhere between 1.4 and 1.8 billion slum dwellers. By 2030, the world s population will be 8.3 billion, with 2 billion people living in slums, and as of 2007 the global population will be more urban than rural. Figure 1 Total number (distribution by region) of the world s slum dwellers (UN Population Division) 4
In Figure 2 you can see an overview of slum dwellers as a percentage of the urban population, again by region. It is clear that, from this perspective, the problem in Sub- Saharan Africa and South-Central Asia is enormous. Figure 2 Slum dwellers as a percentage of the urban population (by region) Only a limited number of developed countries have complete, well-functioning and accepted tenure security. If we look at the tenure security coverage in South America and North Africa, the best estimates are 30% and 15% respectively. A country such as Kenya has achieved a coverage of 15% after 100 years of effort on land titling. Thailand is doing relatively well: in 20 years 50% of the country has been completed. But don t forget that 60 million people in the Indonesian forests still have no land rights. There is a big challenge to implement a secure system of land tenure for the majority - which means the poor! We have to look for new ways of capacity building and doing business. Land innovations in Sub-Saharan Africa Most developing countries and many transitional countries have to deal with multiple land systems because of their history, particularly colonial history. I will take one region, Africa, to illustrate why innovation is important and what impact innovation should have on capacity building, research, the way we think, and the way we should do business in the future especially if we are to deal with global poverty issues. 5
In Sub-Saharan Africa, most countries are dealing simultaneously with both customary and so-called modern or statutory systems of land tenure. The so-called modern systems are generally based on individual land titles. To deal with the colonial legacy of the land tenure system in Africa, we need to alter the laws and regulatory frameworks of countries so that families and groups, rather than just individuals, can also acquire secure tenure. Given that African land administration systems have tended to focus on individual land titles for the middle and commercial classes, new innovative and affordable approaches need to be developed. Many African countries are at the forefront of new innovations in land tenure and administration, and these are addressed below. The transformation of a land administration system is a large undertaking and normally involves a number of separate agencies. Transformation also involves alterations in power and patronage, and requires extensive civil society debate at national and local levels. An additional complexity is that land is cross-sectoral and is of course considered key to poverty alleviation. In five case studies of innovating countries (Ghana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Uganda), it took at least eight years, and often 11 or more, for a country to get from discussing land policy to implementing it at scale. So tenure issues are extremely complex. No single tenure option can solve all the problems. Policy on land tenure and property rights can best reconcile social and economic needs by encouraging a diverse range of options rather than putting emphasis on one option, such as land titling. This will involve adapting and expanding existing tenure and land administration systems where possible, and introducing new ones selectively. UN-HABITAT advocates a continuum of land rights and legal instruments, with land titling only one of the legal instruments. UN-HABITAT encourages member states to develop affordable land tenure and land administration systems that can be used by the poor. It held an Expert Group Meeting in 2004, co-organised by the International Federation of Surveyors and the Commonwealth Association of Surveyors and Land Economists, on the issue of innovative pro-poor affordable systems in the Africa region. It is clear that many member states are already pioneering new forms and opting for an approach of incremental upgrading, as the examples given below go to show. 6
In Tanzania residential licences in urban areas can be converted to full titles later on. In Rwanda the law (still to be implemented) is based on formal registration at national level only where plots are larger than 5 ha, otherwise local registration methods are to be used. In Namibia a flexible land tenure system is under consideration where there will be individual starter titles that are group-based and capable of being upgraded later to individual titles. In Ethiopia certification in two phases, with a less complex form and a more comprehensive form, is under consideration. In Uganda there are two options: ownership title and a certificate of occupancy, also concerning the same parcel of land. In Lesotho three forms of lease are under consideration, with different technical levels: primary, demarcated and registrable. Also under consideration is the creation of land records prior to land registration. Another country that has made a lot of progress towards innovative forms of tenure and land administration is Mozambique. In 1997 the Land Law was passed whereby occupancy rights were accepted as full rights equivalent to registered land rights. Oral evidence too equates to title evidence. In Mozambique, an investor obtains a land title only after thorough adjudication to check that the rights of occupants have not been overridden and/or that occupants have reached agreement with the investor. This is a pro-poor approach, but it has not yet been applied to urban areas as the regulations for these areas have not yet been passed. The common characteristics in the new laws being passed in Africa are based on a number of themes. The first relates to the characteristics associated with the Poverty Reduction Strategic Plans (PRSPs), which have become cross-cutting issues affecting land too, namely, poverty alleviation, decentralisation, governance and transparency, service delivery, protection of women. When applied to land administration and land information management, the PRSP characteristics take the form of: decentralised local land administration offices cheap and/or free titles or rights and/or tenure protection for the poor information campaigns at national and/or local levels on people s land rights adjudication procedures that protect not only those being titled or holding registered titles but also the land occupants shifting land professionals from routine operations to management incrementally upgrading rights over time 7
adapting the conventional land registration system to accommodate both the poor and the forms of legal evidence used by the poor to protect their assets protecting women s land rights (e.g. prioritised allocation, co-ownership) no systematic titling no rigid boundaries in customary areas avoiding and/or delaying adjudication of individual rights developing spatial information systems as a public good for delivering economic and social services. The second set of characteristics found in innovations in Africa relates to dispute resolution. This aspect has been central to many of the discussions associated with the laws and their designs, even if not always explicit in the law. It became a significant cost factor for Uganda, leading to an inability to implement. And an earlier draft of one of South Africa s land laws was considered too expensive in terms of the institutional structure required to deal with this issue. The third set of characteristics relates to the technical design of the land administration system, and includes: accuracy of parcels types of rights allocated adaptation of the conventional system to the new law and a range of cost-avoidance characteristics, several of which can be found in the designs, such as using technicians rather than highly qualified professionals for routine operations, removing lawyers from routine operations, no full-scale upgrading of the conventional system and no systematic titling. One of the most critical issues to be addressed in the land administration designs relates to the fact that the design has to have national applications, be affordable to the poor, and yet not override customary and informal (local) tenure where it is the tenure of choice. Different countries have taken different approaches: Uganda has opted for systematic demarcation for spatial information and dispute resolution, with voluntary titling only. Mozambique has opted for sporadic titling of investors, and has decided not to title the poor but to carefully adjudicate investor titling to ensure that it does not infringe the rights of the poor. Namibia has opted for starter titles, unsurveyed within outside cleaned-up boundaries for informal settlements. 8
In general, African countries have found that the conventional systematic titling approaches of the rest of the world are unaffordable and not relevant to local requirements. Consequently, innovative non-conventional approaches to land administration have been introduced. A fourth set of characteristics is found in the new approaches that seek to eliminate gender-based discrimination regarding land, housing and property rights. Owing to colonial influences, the individualisation of land tenure, land market pressure and other factors, many customary laws and practices have been eroded over time. In many areas, the forms of solidarity which used to exist and that protected women from exclusion have now disappeared. The HIV/Aids crisis has further worsened this situation. Land grabbing, combined with discriminatory rules and/or practices against women, has resulted in the increasing eviction of women by their in-laws or their husbands. In addition, we know that HIV/Aids affects more women than men. Secure tenure would be a mitigating factor for women in dealing with HIV/Aids, whereas the lack of secure tenure increases women s vulnerability in this respect. In times of conflict and postconflict, discrimination against women proves to be a major stumbling block to reconstruction and rehabilitation. Many women find themselves widows after a conflict, and unable to access land because of legal or customary discrimination against widows inheriting land. Innovative approaches that seek to remedy and improve these urgent problems include: the adoption of the African Union Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa in July 2003 in Maputo, Mozambique, and its ratification by countries such as Senegal, Lesotho and Guinea explicit recognition of the equal rights of men and women and the explicit prohibition (without exception) of gender-based discrimination; these are laid down in the Constitution (e.g. in Rwanda, Senegal, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Tanzania), together with declarations that any other law or custom inconsistent with the Constitution (e.g. in Uganda and Mozambique) is void explicit recognition of women s equal right to land, combined with a prohibition in regard to discriminating against women in their access to land; these are laid down in land legislation (e.g. in Tanzania) recognition of a form of co-ownership or co-occupancy of land or a house occupied by a family or household, and joint registration of such land or house (e.g. in Tanzania and in a weaker form in Uganda) 9
affirmative action policies such as land allocation to women-headed households (e.g. in Zambia, Tanzania, Eritrea), combined with credit assistance for developing land legislation dealing with property and inheritance rights of HIV/Aids orphans (in Kenya) and equal inheritance rights for widows/widowers countrywide. UN-HABITAT is assisting member states, wherever it can, to develop new approaches for supplying security of tenure to the urban poor. For example, it has been working with the Ministry of Water, Lands and Environment in Uganda, in partnership with the World Bank, to assess the land innovations that have been introduced in that country. As development partners, we at UN-HABITAT are calculating the cost to state and citizen of the innovative designs for tenure security, as well as their impact on poverty and women s land rights, and we are finding out how the new land law can also be applied to urban areas. We intend to maintain our partnership with the World Bank, to assist other member states as well, and to enable them to upscale their land innovations. I have taken the region of Africa as one example of innovation. We know that appropriate innovation is required throughout the world. One of the key reasons why Sub-Saharan Africa can be used as an indicator of future trends is because there is a general acceptance that non-conventional approaches are also required. This was stated in the declaration from the African Ministerial Conference on Housing and Urban Development held in 2003 in Durban, South Africa, which was co-organised by the African Union, UN-HABITAT and the South African government. Some countries in other regions, such as Brazil and the Philippines, have also been introducing innovations, but in general Africa is the only region introducing land innovations at scale. However, the implementation of these innovations is not running smoothly. There are problems with scaling up, with the involvement of vested interests, with the lack of political will, with the lack of capacity, and so on. There is work to be done to move these innovations forward, and part of the role of the Global Network of Pro-Poor Land Tool Developers is to do this work. Furthermore, these innovations have raised additional technical and institutional challenges in regard to land tenure, land administration, land information management, land tax, planning, servicing and cost recovery, which must be addressed. I will speak about some of these new challenges in the rest of my speech. Meeting these challenges is critical as people try to address the issues of our times, such as poverty, managing cities, environmental sustainability and supplying adequate housing for all. 10
Education, training and capacity-building institutions need to prepare their students to work in a world where innovation is crucial to addressing global problems. The lessons we can learn from these innovations, and a key challenge to an educational institution such as ITC - a challenge which it has risen to - is to create education, training and capacity-building approaches that keep evolving and are applicable to local situations in the countries where the students will work. These institutions need to ensure that first, when the students leave, they are capable of contributing to the world as it evolves and do not simply follow the pattern developed for yesterday, particularly if it stems from the colonial past and has not even been adapted to modern times. This means they have to be continuously aware of new best practices and innovations in the different fields. Moreover, institutions such as ITC have to keep broadening their curricula. They must not only teach problem solving but also embed in their students the ability and desire to re-think and adapt the systems they will work with, thus enabling them to better meet the demands of users and of the world as it changes. This means that new subjects have to be continually introduced and that new attitudes must be developed in both teachers and students. All this is necessary to produce professionals who are innovators and comfortable with change, not simply competent technical managers. Interdisciplinery challenge Land and information innovations that draw on global best practice for poverty alleviation, that are useful in local contexts and to the poor, and/or that are shaped to the demands of a changing world, also in terms of new technological developments, need to be created by multidisciplinary/transdisciplinary teams. Generally, scalable innovations cannot be developed by working within one land discipline, especially since land and the spatial information linked to it are highly complex subjects with extensive vested interests. Multidisciplinary teams need to share knowledge about the substance of the matter and they also have to change their usual ways of approaching their work. As a social scientist, I have worked in the land titling field for years and have observed the behaviour of role players. There are at least two very different sets of people: on the one hand, those with a background in social sciences, economics, political science, geography or social forestry and, on the other, those with a background in land surveying, computer science, forestry, geology, planning, valuation or engineering. Lawyers fall into both categories. Many forums indicate that these different role players are still talking mostly past each other - although this situation is slowly improving. Creating pro-poor innovative land tools, where land policy programmes are translated 11
into specific steps to be taken in individual countries, will require integrated work by the whole range of role players. Many of us are becoming increasingly aware that it is not possible to change land administration systems by working optimally within each silo; instead we have to work out optimal solutions across the whole land sector within the socio-political context. As individuals, we also need to be open to criticism across the disciplines as we search for optimal solutions across the silos. I am going to outline some very broad trends in regard to the history of land tool development. Here I define a tool as a resource for understanding how to carry out and perform actions. Up until the 1970s and 1980s, most of the land tools focused on land titling, and their implementation was the preserve of lawyers and surveyors. In the 1980s, however, and with growing strength in the 1990s, many well-respected social science researchers in both the urban and rural sectors argued that individualised land titling was not working and that alternative forms of delivering security of tenure had to be found. It was not working for several reasons: it benefited the middle class only; it was not affordable; it did not take into account that the social land tenures in place were often based on group and family rights; and, most importantly, a lack of human and financial resources meant countries were battling to scale up to cover the majority of their populations. Although these social scientists focused extensively on land issues, for them the spatial information linked to land was not a key area. The 1990s were dominated by social scientists working on land policy and law, often without any strong links with the technical people who would have to implement the policy and law through land administration and land information management approaches. These technical and legal people were often isolated because of their lack of pro-poor tools and because of their focus on delivering land titles to the middle class. In Africa, the result of this lack of linkage was land policies/laws that could not be implemented and/or were too costly to implement. In Asia, this lack of linkage led to the creation of projects that did not lead to any systemic change in the land tenure types, the land administration system, the planning system, and so on. Uganda learnt a very hard lesson through not linking policy and technical people together, and found that the cost of implementing the policy was way beyond what the government could afford. This lesson has taught other people in the region to be far more careful in this respect and to approach policy development differently. 12
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a move towards a more practical approach in a few countries such as Brazil, the Philippines, Mozambique, Uganda (after a re-think) and Namibia, starting with the development of innovative land tools that fitted the new policy frameworks and could be used for implementation purposes. However, these innovative approaches still pose a challenge as we need to find out whether they can be scaled up to give national coverage, and this is one of the reasons why UN- HABITAT is working with the World Bank on this issue. For years, I have been arguing that it is necessary to increase our global understanding, description and analysis of issues related to land and spatial information - necessary but not sufficient if we are to be able to deliver land-related changes in countries and regions and at global level. Instead, we have to link the description and analysis of these issues with implementation, drawing from the types of approach found in surveying, valuation, forestry, registration and planning that put an emphasis on delivering land, information and other services. In other words, to be able to create viable innovations that can change people s lives at scale, we need to alter the way we go about our business. We need to (1) describe, (2) analyse, (3) set the agenda for research into the creation of tools, (4) develop the tools that will allow us to implement large-scale changes in the land-related arena, and (5) implement at scale with evaluation. Generally, given the nature of land, this can only be done in a country, with the involvement of the country and multi-stakeholders. Often, however, global and particularly regional best practices can also be adapted. UN-HABITAT is developing a Global Network of Pro-Poor Land Tool Developers, where of course spatial information will be an integral part. Through this network, we are promoting the development of innovative tools that adopt this more multidisciplinary approach. I will return to this global network at the end of my speech. A multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary approach to education, training, and capacity building is a major challenge. ITC has been carrying the flag in this respect for many years. One of the key problem areas for educationists in the technical disciplines is that the more multidisciplinary the approach, the more educated the student has to be in the first place. So at the lower levels in the technical disciplines, there generally has be a massive emphasis on the technical discipline, exclusive of the wider context. And as the developed world market buys specialists, there is a major emphasis on the discipline itself at the top levels too. Technical people who work in the developing world need to have a more holistic education because of the requirements of the users there. 13
Therefore, educational institutions that cater for the developing world in regard to land and spatial information have to be very careful how they position their training, in order to be able to meet the present and future requirements of the countries they serve. Referring again to the multidisciplinary approach, sometimes within this framework the subject can be taught at too shallow a level to enable the student to use it. Once more, institutions have to be very careful when deciding at what level different subjects should be taught. Post-conflict Conflict occurs in most regions of the world, and unfortunately there seems to be no end in sight. Therefore, we need to cater for land administration and other related issues in post-conflict societies. Issues in regard to land administration and land information management after disaster and conflict are becoming more prominent and, hopefully, better researched and structured. UN-HABITAT already has an extensive track record in this area. The agency is a member of the Executive Committee for Humanitarian Affairs, which is the key committee overseeing the operations of all UN humanitarian agencies. The agency is actively involved in a range of post-crisis recovery situations relating to land in such places as Afghanistan, Kosovo, Somalia, Rwanda, the occupied Palestinian territories, and areas in Sri Lanka and Indonesia that were hit by the tsunami. This is done within the context of its policy on sustainable relief and reconstruction. UN-HABITAT is also starting to play a key role in monitoring peace and development accords, in particular within the Balkans states. Furthermore, UN- HABITAT is taking the lead within the UN system in regard to creating guidelines on housing, land and property in post-crisis situations. This is an enormous task - precisely because land is so complex, and both land and conflict have specific national and local characteristics. These guidelines are being developed in cooperation with UNHCR and FAO, and the first draft is under review, with a specific component dealing with postconflict, land administration and gender. In addition, UN-HABITAT and the International Federation of Surveyors co-organised a conference in May 2004 on postconflict and land administration. To be able to operate in a post-conflict society, technical people need to have more than technical knowledge. They need to be able to undertake strategic action planning in a fluid and politicised environment. Very often land is a critical part of the conflict situation. Developing a sustainable strategic action plan for land management and administration is difficult in a stable situation; it is much more so in post-conflict societies. 14
In a paper by Augustinus and Barry soon to be published, it is suggested that it is not feasible to use conventional conceptual frameworks based on a hierarchy of land policy, land administration and land tenure to underpin strategic action planning in post-conflict environments; in fact, to do so might prove both inefficient and biased. Instead, it is suggested that soft systems thinking should be used for analysing post-conflict societies. This is because, when applied to the cadastral field, the principles underlying soft systems thinking (but not necessarily soft systems methods) make it possible to move away from conventional, simplistic, strict interventionist design exercises. Instead, by integrating cadastral and soft systems theory, it is possible to undertake holistic analyses of complex situations that include human behaviour and a range of non-static land management systems all of which are hardwired into post-conflict situations. It is also possible to analyse technical processes from different points of view or within different contexts over time. This is critical in post-conflict situations where power relations often change on a daily basis and where it is important to include the interests of all groups involved in the conflict. This, in turn, facilitates more robust and sustainable design and management of land administration systems. A number of characteristics found in post-conflict societies show why a conventional hierarchical analysis should not be used, and a few examples are given below: There is a lack of land policy at national level, written or unwritten and/or broadly agreed on by policy makers (Afghanistan, Uganda). The land management and land administration system is largely dysfunctional, either because it has been wholly or partially destroyed and/or because it does not extend to the majority of the population. Land administration personnel are likely to have been replaced, and so institutional knowledge and effectiveness are lost. Under these circumstances, ordinary people conduct their land dealings outside the formal system (Mozambique, Uganda, Afghanistan, Kosovo). The breakdown in the land management/administration and justice system allows powerful actors, including elites, criminal elements and municipalities, to grab public and private land with impunity (Afghanistan, Kosovo). The land planning system has not been updated for decades because of conflict, and there is also a great need for land for refugees, internally displaced people and returnees. This leads to large-scale infringement of the land plan. Parallel land record systems evolve, where different groups in the conflict create their own forms of land records and dispute the legitimacy of the land records and land dealings of other groups and the state (Afghanistan, Kosovo). 15
There is a breakdown in law and order and/or the central state is weak in extending its functions to local level throughout the country (Mozambique, Uganda, Afghanistan, Kosovo). Land has been invaded by the poor, homeless, internally displaced people, returnees and refugees (Afghanistan). A situation has arisen where there are overlapping rights and claims to the same parcel or house. This can be due to various reasons: previous owners have returned after the conflict; the government has allocated the house or land to someone else; different groups at different times in the conflict have allocated land and housing; or women s rights (especially widow s rights) have been infringed (Afghanistan, Kosovo). Large-scale destruction of buildings has led to the need for rapid redevelopment of houses, often outside the formal processes (Afghanistan, Kosovo). Large-scale ambiguity and gaps exist in the regulatory framework for land tenure and land planning (Afghanistan, Kosovo, Mozambique). In the situations just described, the land policy of the country has often been swept aside and replaced by an alternative local settlement-level land policy dominated by, for example, warlords. Furthermore, politically motivated land invasions on a large scale might occur. If the state cannot act swiftly, this will create a new dimension to a number of land management systems, especially systems that give legal effect to land rights, such as the cadastre. In a conventional conceptualisation of the system, land policy is at the top of the hierarchy, followed by land administration, and then land tenure at the bottom (see Figure 3). In a changing environment, land administration, land tenure and land policy may be continually changing, thus altering their positions in the system hierarchy (see Figure 4). Figure 3 Land management system in a stable situation 16
Figure 4 Land management system in an unstable situation Augustinus and Barry argue that it is advisable to move away from a technically focused approach that advocates a technical fix the land administration system approach only. By using a soft systems approach, land administrators will be able to make better strategic action planning decisions as history unfolds in a post-conflict environment. This approach should improve national reconciliation, as well as the efficiency of the land market. As already indicated, in general the land industry in a stable situation is often characterised by institutional silos, with each silo attempting to obtain optimal solutions for itself. Post-conflict situations are extremely fluid, with a range of new institutions being developed, a lack of clarity as to where land functions are placed in government (between departments and at different levels of government), gaps and ambiguities regarding the law and policy, and large-scale opportunistic behaviour. Strategic action planning in this environment means that it is not possible to take a purely technical perspective. Instead, it is necessary to position the land administration functions within this fluid environment, which in turn makes it necessary to understand the interrelationships between systems. This would mean, for example, that the strategic action plan would not simply encompass activities and budgets for hard core surveying, but would also include activities and budgets associated with process. These would include, for example, stakeholder workshops, capacity building, human resources for gathering information and negotiating with other systems, and reformulating technical system mandates and the objectives relating to their processes and outputs. 17
The soft systems approach advocates attempts to move away from silo thinking, and makes it possible to analyse different points of view within the same conceptual framework. The designer of the land administration system and/or the authors of the strategic action plan should not take sides in the conflict (as they may well do when adopting a hard systems approach). Instead, they should use the land administration design to bring about reconciliation over time. For example, if each side is creating its own land administration system and registering land over the same parcels, the strategic action plan should not focus on one system only but should address both systems. This might mean that a land record would not simply record the rights of one group, but would also show the rights/claims of the other group to the same parcel. This should be part of the phasing and sequencing envisaged in the strategic action plans, and would facilitate attempts to merge these parallel structures in the medium to long term. Essentially, what Augustinus and Barry are arguing is that it is unlikely that problems in the cadastral system in unstable situations will be correctly diagnosed and addressed without using something similar to a soft systems approach. The challenge to education institutions is therefore to produce technically competent graduates who are able to work usefully in post-conflict environments - not simply addressing technical solutions but ensuring that national and local reconciliation is embedded. To be able to do this requires the ability to do one s political sums correctly. Or in other words, to work in these environments requires a fair degree of political understanding, not only of the wider political environment but also of the international conventions applying to land, property, housing, internally displaced people, and so on in these environments. It also requires managers who are very comfortable with changing institutional and government environments and who are able to work with a range of stakeholders, including civil society and local and international NGOs. In addition, people must be able to work under what are known as hardship conditions - although I do not think institutions can train people for this type of environment. Innovative tools are also needed for post-conflict environments. For example, most of these environments, particularly in urban areas, consist of overlapping rights and claims to land, property and housing. Generally, the land records, which are manual if they exist at all, give information about only one right holder or claimant. What is needed is an information system that shows all the claimants and rights holders. Such a system 18
would make it possible for the authorities to assess the size of the problem and the best method of dealing with the individual conflicts, because often in these situations individuals claim more than one parcel of land or one house. Such an information system would improve transparency and the rule of law because the affected individuals, and the organisations assisting them, both government and nongovernment, would be able to have clarity instead of the ongoing ambiguity that is the normal situation in these countries. Moreover, it would be easier to record women s land rights and claims. Often their rights are nested within those of families and therefore they are not always protected by conventional land information systems. However, this means that the land information system would have to cater for different types of claims and rights, different accuracies and different legal evidence. Different accuracies and legal evidence are produced routinely by NGOs working in the field of post-conflict or post-crisis situations - as, for example, in post-tsunami Indonesia, where they are currently involved in rebuilding houses destroyed by the tsunami. A path has to be worked out whereby this NGO information can ultimately become part of the land registry records. The land information system would also have to be able to deal with overlapping rights, parcels and non-parcels, multiple users (including ordinary people), and women, many of whom in these situations are illiterate. It would have to do this virtually in real time, as emergencies that arise in post-conflict environments are often a matter of life and death. Such a system should be used to find land for locating internally displaced people and refugees, and it should assist in the allocation of building permits when houses have been destroyed. In most situations, the allocation of such permits cannot be based on land records alone; other non-conventional evidence needs to be used as well. The information on the system must be secure and have integrity, so that it can be trusted by all parties. All this would be a major challenge not only to the system design - and I will pick up on this point later - but also to rapid information acquisition and to integrated institutional management. In this environment, technical managers would definitely have to be a problem solvers and know the capability and boundaries of the information in their systems. They would also need to be comfortable working with a range of different accuracies and legal evidence. So, while it is important for education to focus on conventional and highly technical issues, it also has to give students a wider technical and institutional education to enable them to deal with the kinds of challenges found in post-conflict environments. 19
Example of an innovative tool On the basis of the challenges described, we urgently need to have a land information system that works very differently from the conventional land information system. I have already discussed the post-conflict environment and the type of land information system needed. I have indicated that it is likely that in most countries in the developing world less than 30% of cadastral coverage actually conforms to the situation on the ground. Instead, we have vast slum developments of up to 70% in some cities, as well as customary and/or rural areas that remain untitled. Given that the cadastral parcel is conventionally the core data set in the land information system to which other attributes are linked, this means that at micro level all those areas outside the cadastre are outside the land information system. Where there is little or no land information with linked attributes, there is insufficient or no management of the land and the like in these areas. I have known accountants request the cadastral survey of all the households in a small poor urban town just so that the municipality can recover the cost of services. We have known that conventional land information systems cannot adequately service non-cadastral areas for any length of time. The problem surfaced for me in 1998. People such as Paul van der Molen, Richard Groot (key figures at ITC) and I applied our minds to this issue in 2000 when I was a visiting scientist here at ITC. While we did not come up with any solutions at that time, at least we started to outline the problem. Later Christian Lemmen, Paul van der Molen, and Peter van Oosterom started writing papers and debating this issue within the framework of core cadastral data modelling. At this point, the issue has not yet been addressed by the writing of software, let alone experimentation with such software in a pilot project in a country with slums, customary communities, and overlapping and non-polygon rights and claims, or in a post-conflict society. So, there is still a long path to tread to get to the point of implementation. I have picked this example because ITC has shown that it is prepared to lead the way in developing innovative land tools for the poor. The key issue here is that, in the technical field, there is often an insufficient focus on pro-poor technical and legal tools. This is the reason why UN-HABITAT is launching a global network with this particular focus. Training and capacity building aimed at people from the developing world should not only focus on training people who can deliver conventional approaches to the middle and commercial classes on their return home; it should also encourage people 20
to adapt, innovate, and develop pro-poor approaches - as the poor are generally the majority in the developing world. Other key issues for the future What are the issues for the future, particularly in regard to spatial information? When I consider this, many issues come to mind: Land reform, also known as land distribution, is still a critical issue, especially in many cities where the poor, who often account for more than 70% of the city, live on merely 5% of the land. The World Bank has shown that equitable land distribution has a major positive impact on the gross domestic product of countries in the medium to long term. Proper land information management will be critical to stable and planned land redistribution. There have been too many projects for project s sake, especially regarding attempts to improve and upgrade the slums. The only way forward is to focus on systemic change at city or national level, and this includes planning, land administration, land tax, cost recovery, land information management systems and regulatory frameworks. Projects or pilots should be for demonstration purposes and to encourage change in the systems. Appropriate land information management is critical for moving from project-based to systems-based approaches. Appropriate information management cannot be done at scale until we solve technical issues such as the one discussed above in regard to the parcel- and non-parcel-based land information system. Whereas previously there was a major emphasis on projects by donors and governments, emphasis has now shifted to sector-wide approaches (SWAPS). This is in line with the Paris Declaration by bilateral and multilateral donors on harmonisation and alignment (of aid). Increasingly, operations people have to organise themselves into such sectors, as well as lobby for the creation of appropriate sectors. UN-HABITAT is presently coordinating the land sector (urban and rural) in Kenya, which means we are coordinating the (British, USA, Swedish, Irish, Japanese) donors and working with the Kenyan Ministry of Lands and Housing. We have a subcommittee on GIS in this land sector, and that is where all the problems arise in trying to coordinate the different GIS programmes and approaches of the different donors. The Millennium Development Goals present a major challenge. In regard to security of tenure, if we move away from titling as the only indicator of security of tenure, we do not currently have a robust methodology for measuring security of tenure at global level. We can do it at country level but not globally, because of the specificity 21
of land tenure in each country and the need to have a comparative basis. The challenge is to create a global methodology for measuring security of tenure to see whether we can supply the information for the Millennium Development Goal indicator 32: Proportion of households with secure tenure. We are seeing an increase in land rights evidenced by a range of documentation and not just full registered titles. These rights are being sold on the open market, even though they are not full rights. A number of African countries are also introducing rights that are not full registered land rights. We are likely to see an increase in a range or continuum of rights, as well as incremental upgrading of these rights over time. Again, without appropriate land information systems it will not be possible to undertake this work at scale. The creation of an innovative approach for spatial information that covers parcels and non-parcels and includes spaghetti boundaries, fuzzy boundaries and the like (Lemmen et. al.) could well have an impact on improving coverage of land tax systems, and implementing and recovering the cost of services, as well as implementing land use planning and zoning. It could also affect the type of legal evidence that is needed when making claims to land. All this in turn would improve the management and governance of our cities and rural areas. In addition, such an innovative approach may well impact on forest management in regard to forest people s rights. It is likely that there will be an increased pro-poor focus on cities, not just on rural areas, because of the global demographic shift that is taking place, and what is known as the urbanisation of poverty. All these trends challenge education institutions to train students who will remain constantly relevant to the society they work in. Global Network of Pro-Poor Land Tool Developers UN-HABITAT is developing a Global Network of Pro-Poor Land Tool Developers, where spatial information will of course be an integral part. Through this network, we are promoting the development of innovative tools that adopt a more multidisciplinary approach. ITC is obviously invited to participate. Why tools are needed The current situation is one of socio-spatial exclusion, which includes: segregation informality 22