Source: Lynn Holstein, World Bank Consultant: Towards best practice from World Bank experience in land titling and registration. Paper, presented at International Conference on Land Tenure and Administration, Orlando, Florida, November 1996. 26 p.

Overview

• Development project supporters
• The project view
• World Bank projects, Cost
• Components, Problems addressed
• Institutional issues
• Technical issues

Context

• World Bank
• Asian Development Bank
• European Union,
• Inter-American Development Bank

• USAID
• AusAID

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The project view

• Objectives and scope
• Institutional issues
• Legal issues
• Community land rights, gender
• Transparency and ethics
• Technical issues
• mapping for cadastre
• information technology

World Bank project components

• Improvement of legal framework
• Base mapping (cadastral mapping)
• Adjudication, recording of possessary holdings
• Cadastral surveying and mapping (parcel identification)
• Title issuance and recording
• Information technology support
• Institutional development and project management
• Human resource development, provision of advisors

Scope

• 5-7 years, embedded in longer term programmes
• Rural, urban, or both ?
• Where in the country to start ? Pilot project
• Objectives:
• .. efficient and transparent land administration
• .. access to international credit, increased productivity

Problems motivating projects

• No evidence of title, or unsecure
• Backlog in title processing
• Land disputes without end
• Overlapping claims (neighbour, state lands)

Institutional dimension

• Number of agencies involved
• Allocation of tasks among involved
• Public, private, professionals
• Re-engineering of procedures
• Community involvment (later, sec. 14)

Organisational options (ESt)

• Functional (Descartes, Taylor, Weber)
• Matrix: mixed functional-result
• Project (result) oriented

• ---

• Centralized
• Deconcentrated (Hungary, UNDP)
• Decentralized
• Private, ..ized

Organisational focus (Leavitt)

Staff incentives

• Money (salary, honorariums)
• Clear targets
• Relevant resources (field allowances)
• Responsibility and personal development

Rent seeking (informal payment)

• Wide publicity of procedures
• Land holders encouraged to be present at adjudication
• Village representatives involved
• Routine access to title, etc. information
• Copies stored under other other authority
• Informal practices not supported by project !

Legal aspects

• Law revision is longwinding > 2-3 years
• Provide principles (Henssen)
• Conceptual level (ESt), not models
• Law needs regulations, ordinances

Evidence of property rights

• cadastral documents
• use of land, backed by old maps
• oral statements (previous owner)
• adverse possession accepted

• tax and utility receipts
• testimonies of neighbours, local leaders
• provisional title, later confirmed
• prescriptive rights (= adv. poss.)

Mapping Techniques

Information Technology Problems

• Faulty manual systems
• Poor (technical) infrastructure
• Lack of skilled staff
• Lack of agency-wide IT strategy

Agenda for IT development

• "Think global; act incremental"
• Agency-wide technology architecture
• IT management with direction powers
• Agency-wide user interface
• Education (users, super-users, specialists)
• Data structures; conceptual schemas

Training and educational settings

• Management workshops
• On-the-job training (overseas?)
• Introduction of cadastral topics into overly technical university courses
• 'Train the trainers'-approach