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According to the National Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic, the mining industry in 2014 had more than 53.9% of the value of all industrial products, while the share of the mining industry in GDP in the same year was more than 10%. Under the former Soviet Union, the mining industry was of great importance in the Kyrgyz Republic. In the last 20 years, discoveries of large gold deposits and other valuable minerals brought Canadian and other international corporations to exploit. These companies operate without clearly detailed land remediation law and regulations. Many unresolved and partially resolved issues on disposal, reclamation of disturbed lands after mining, including radioactive waste, have been dealt in a case-by-case manner. This paper examines the current situation of the post-mining land remediation policy in the Kyrgyz Republic. It focuses on the legal and political frameworks for land remediation after mining works. The topic about remediation has not gained much academic attention in the Kyrgyz Republic and other developing countries, especially as it is related to remediation policies, but this matter is urgent in the country. The Kyrgyz government has updated some strategies to deal with land remediation issues. However, this paper reveals that these recent efforts are still short of securing the health of the environment, which is the bedrock of the national wealth today and tomorrow. The discussion also shows how laws and regulations define and stipulate about remediation issues. This paper reveals that post remediation regulations do not give a well-defined guideline for administering remediation actions. Consequently, the land law that stipulates procedure on remediation activities are not well explained and do not provide detailed information. In establishing this remediation policy, the first step to be taken is to clearly define land remediation. The second step is to identify the types of remediation processes. The third step is to create new guidelines for appropriate remediation works by clarifying responsible agencies and establishing an adequate fund for all the works required, including monitoring and skill training.

Inter-communal land conflict in Benin City has increased owing to informal land subdivision by land owning communities. As development intensifies, boundaries between communities in peri-urban areas become distorted leading to contestations and violent conflicts. However, little is known about the roles of organized groups in these conflicts. The legal pluralism in land ownership in Nigeria and the ineffectiveness of the State’s Land Law have created informal land market in which leaders of land owning communities dominate. This paper explores these issues through a case study of boundary dispute that developed into violent conflict between two communities in Benin City. The findings revealed that at the root of the conflict were material and emotional needs of groups seeking power and wealth which resulted in diverse claims. Other endogenous factors underlying the conflict were the socio-cultural environment of urban land market and local power relations among the actors involved.

Land law contains social, economic, and political values that are obvious to legal and property theorists. Those values are usually known to judges, although the time-pressures of modern justice can limit judges’ ability to explicate those values in their decisions. This can make it hard for practising lawyers to see the underlying social, economic, or political rationale in property case law and doctrine. Further, commercial clients do not pay their lawyers to dwell on finer points of property theory. They pay them for legal work to complete their developments or property sales. While some developers take pride in their communities, few are likely to be driven by a desire to safeguard the traditional values in property law. Finally, while parliamentarians work to create optimal laws for their constituents, property theory is unlikely to be within their area of expertise. It might be tempting to think a lack of understanding of the underlying values of property law is a theoretical concern, but it has become a problem for countries that allowed developers and parliamentarians - two groups unlikely to understand the underlying values of property law - to create the law on which most modern development depends. That is, countries that rely on legislation, driven by developers and made by legislatures, to support their strata developments, rather than countries that rely on common law and equity, made by judges. Australia, and the many countries that copied Australia’s original Conveyancing (Strata Titles Act) 1961 (NSW), fall into the former category, while the United States (U.S.), most notably, falls into the latter. This chapter examines the underlying values of property law. It then considers whether those values are incorporated into strata legislation, in contrast to the common law. The final section of the chapter identifies real problems that residents and owners of legislatively-based strata buildings face as a result of an absence of the traditional values of property law in modern strata title Acts.

Many innovation enthusiasts bask the virtues of the idea of applying Blockchain to create an autonomous decentralized land registration system. I argue that this idea appears to run counter to the basic characteristics of real estate market and therefore is undesirable. Though Blockchain has several other technological advantages, most of them can be achieved through existing alternatives that challenge the logic of adopting a riskier technology with many drawbacks and unknowns.

Land means those parts of the surface of the earth that are capable in law of being owned and are within the court jurisdiction. Generally, ownership of the lands includer the airspace above it and the subsoil below (a coelo usque and centrum; from the heaven to the centre of the earth). For the purposes of the land law, Land Act(Act no. 4 of 1999) defines land as including mines, and minerals(whether or not owned seperately from the surface), buildings, and most interest in land. Chattels fixed to the land so that they become part of it are also treated in law as land, under the maxim quicquid plantatur solo, solo

The land is one of the most coveted assets in India, which also makes it the most disputed. And fragmented laws and lack of awareness of existing regulations do not help in any way. In the context of land law, the states have their own unique set of laws pertaining to the acquisition, possession, and sale of land. The land has an interesting history in India. Beginning with purely commercial interests, India’s land laws have evolved over time, albeit slowly, to include the interests of individual owners. But we still have a ways to go. It was in 1894, that the first Land Acquisition Act enacted by the British Government of India, which forms the basis for all land laws today came into being. It applied to all states in India except for Mysore, Hyderabad, and Travancore, the princely states that had the right to exercise their own land laws. In 1947, India adopted the Land Acquisition Act and enforced it across “all the provinces of India” without exception. After languishing in the Parliament for many years, passing through multiple referrals and calls for amendments, the Land Acquisition Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, (LARR) 2011 was introduced again by the UPA government. In 2013, it was passed and became effective from 2014. The bill focused on bringing in more transparency by underlining the rights of the people who stood to lose land during the process of acquisition.

The study identifies and analyzes factors causing women to procure fewer land titles than men in Cameroon. It employs a qualitative approach, and an analytical framework grounded in feminist thought. The identified factors are analyzed under five broad categories as follows: institutional impediments, indigenous culture, received culture, productive and reproductive roles of women, and economic constraints. The analysis ends with a number of policy recommendations prominent among which are the following: drastically reducing the cost, number of agencies and steps involved in the land title application process; employing informal channels of communication to disseminate information on land; and maintaining office hours that take into account the tight schedules of women. The study holds lessons for land reform initiatives not only in Cameroon but other developing countries in general.

Inefficient land use and management is rampant in developing countries. The most patent manifestation of this is the chaotic state of land use practices in cities. It’s also demonstrated that the success of public policies and strategies in land use, urban planning, protection of natural resources, housing, agriculture, industry, transport and tourism, depends largely on the land resource management by the State and the Local Communities. Unfortunately, in the Republic of Benin, the land management is characterized by the lack of land mastership and the growing of land insecurity which did not promote sustained policy of investments and increased the failure of many peoples in Benin population, both in rural and in urban areas at the benefit of a minority. With the increasing competition for it access due to the rapid urbanization occurred in the last two decades, the land issue has become a major concern for the population and for the political and administrative authorities. To regulate the land access all over the country, in the National Assembly in May 2013, the Benin government introduced a Land Law project which was adopted by the National Assembly of Benin on the 14th of August, 2013. The law is a common framework regarding all lands; it integrates land acquisition procedures, expropriation procedures, public utility land management, environment and natural resources preservation, land property rights, conflict management, and the administrative structure for land management. But after four years of the Land Law 2013-01 being implemented, land use in Benin remains a huge challenge for the government. Indigenous settlements can often be found in wetlands and flood-prone areas along the city where communities established many years ago are exposed to urban risks and a degraded living environment in Cotonou, a major city and economic pole of Benin. The situation is worsened by the many conflicts occurring among communities due to unsecured land transactions. This study examines Land Law 2013-01 and its impact on land use and land ownership across Benin Republic. More specifically, it discusses the effectiveness and limitations of the law since its implementation. The structure of this paper is organized into five sections as follows. Section 1 introduces the context and objectives of the study. Section 2 presents a chronological evolution of land policies and the major changes in the land use from the colonial period to the post-colonial period. Section 3 introduces Land Law 2013-01. Section 4 discusses effectiveness and limitations of the law. Section 5 gives conclusions and recommendations. The key shortcomings include: a clear understanding of the multiple land access modes which is a necessary tool for sustainable land development, the legal dualism created by the coexistence of customary laws and the modern registration system, the vulnerability of legal land security and the inadequate land information management system.

The structure of ownership is recognized as a key factor for economic and social development. The traditional approach suggests that new property rights emerge when it becomes profitable to invest in their production. I extend this idea by arguing that simply defining new property rules is not enough for new rights to develop effectively, and that enforcement of those rules is just as important. Identifying and implementing an optimal combination of definition and enforcement activities then becomes the central issue in the development of property rights. I illustrate the application of this theory with a detailed study of the evolution of water rights in pre-modern Bohemia.

The land is not only a vital livelihood asset but also indispensable for the enjoyment of several human rights including the right to life, the right to food, the right to housing, the right to property, the right to development, and the right to self-determination. However, smallholder farmers and pastoralists do not have an adequate legislative protection as laws and practices facilitate arbitrary expropriations and land grabbing, which induce an economic marginalisation of most ethnic groups in Ethiopia. The Imperial regime (1930–1974) had imposed an oppressive land tenure system on the Oromo and other peoples of Ethiopia until the Derg regime (1974–1991) had introduced a public land tenure system. Land laws currently in force also do not sufficiently protect rights of rural land users. The Ethiopian Constitution of 1995 restricts the legislative power of the regional States on the utilisation of land and other natural resources and it excludes a right of economic self-determination of ethnic groups. Forced evictions occur based on flawed expropriation laws, which do not entitle farmers and pastoralists to a right to just compensation. In addition, the government of Ethiopia promotes urbanisation and private investments at the expense of the poor and vulnerable smallholders. This paper examines the Ethiopia’s law and practice pertinent to land rights with a particular emphasis on the Oromia Regional State. It explores seven ways in which the law and the practice legalise and institutionalise dispossession and economic marginalisation of the poor without a sufficient due process of law.

The issue of land ownership is central to any discussion on planning and land use policies. What is surprising is that, in the contemporary debate, there are those who argue that property rights are the solution, while others maintain that they are the problem. For some commentators, property rights are indispensable for protecting the most vulnerable sections of society; for others, they are the main cause of the marginalization of the disadvantaged. Some see them as natural rights; others as socially created ones. This probably depends on the fact that the right to property is one of the most misunderstood of basic rights. One aspect in particular seems to have created confusion also in the debate on land use policies and planning practices: the overlap between the ‘general right to hold private property’ and ‘specific property titles’ (in part this is due to the fact that the term ‘rights’ is often used interchangeably in both cases). This article dwells on this aspect in particular. It considers the main theoretical and practical implications of clearer recognition of the difference between the right to hold private property and specific property titles.

The Vietnamese Land Law of 2013 imposed an upper threshold on how much land a farmer may possess. This is a policy that has been found to constrain agricultural development in other countries. Although this restriction of land accumulation is now under review among policy decision makers, there is limited empirical evidence to assess the impacts of landholding on land productivity. To evaluate the impacts of land accumulation on both the technical and environmental performances of farms, this study employed latent class stochastic frontier analysis using data gathered through face-to-face interviews rice farmers in two Mekong Delta rice-producing regions: An Giang province and Can Tho city. We then used multiple linear regression and the ordered logit model to estimate impacts of land accumulation on these performances. The results suggest that land accumulation is more common in An Giang than in Can Tho, yet rice farmers were unable to consolidate separate parcels of rice production land to take advantage of economies of scale. We also found that land accumulation was also positively associated with both technical and environmental efficiencies.

The study aims to assess land complaints and determine the extent of urbanization’s impact on land complaints and propose some solutions to resolve land complaints in Vinh city. Secondary data were collected in Vinh city. Primary data was collected through a 2-step survey of 100 staff members. The data were analyzed and evaluated by using SPSS20.0 software. There were 20 factors belonging to 6 groups of factors that affect land complaints. The group of urbanization factors affecting land complaints with an impact rate of 17.91%, ranks third among the 06 groups of impact factors. Proposed solutions include improving legal regulations; developing, updating and managing cadastral records; forecasting the correct rate and speed of urbanization to determine the possibility of land complaints; strengthening propaganda and dissemination of land law; strengthening coordination among agencies in settling land complaints; regularly inspecting and examining the observance of the land law; ensuring the sufficient quantity and quality of human resources for settling land complaints.

Urban development in China is based on two types of land ownership, namely, state land owned by states and collective land owned by village collectives. Legally speaking, urban development must be based on state land. In practice, informal development based on collective land has played important roles in the rapid urbanization process over the past decades. Nonetheless, the vague property rights over collective land have led to inferior and suboptimal development outcomes in expansive urban areas. The redevelopment of collective land has become an important means to sustain urban development in an ongoing urbanization process. By adopting theoretical perspectives from New Institutional Economics, this study presents an integrated conceptual framework on the institutional arrangements of land property rights and transaction costs to understand the changes in land policies and their institutional implications for the redevelopment of collective land in Shenzhen, China. The findings reveal that the new policies have redefined the relationship among the government, village collectives, and real estate developers as well as their property rights over collective land. The change of institutional arrangements in land property rights has significantly reduced the transaction costs in the redevelopment process and effectively promoted land redevelopment activities.

Summary This article examines the effect of customary institutions on smallholder land titling in Sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that the individual’s status within the customary institution conditions his or her demand for land titles. Individuals with greater customary privilege gain advantages from maintaining customary property rights, including stronger tenure security. For households with lower privilege within the customary institution, the benefits of adopting state land titles are higher. Analysis of an original survey of smallholder farmers in Senegal and an existing survey in Zambia demonstrates that households with greater customary privilege are less likely to adopt state land titles, independent of ethnicity, wealth, and land values. I find additional support for the argument in measures of increased tenure security for those with greater customary privilege. Qualitative interviews with customary authorities and smallholder farmers help establish the mechanism. These findings update the dominant wisdom that land values and material transaction costs drive smallholder land titling, demonstrating the important effect of status within the customary institution on demand for land titles. By examining the political underpinnings of customary property rights, this article contributes to our understandings of which farmers benefit most from land titling. This has implications for the improved design of land governance programs.

Land consolidation is argued as a tool for increasing food security. However, past attempts to consolidate Sub-Saharan Africa's rural customary lands disregarded the existing land tenure system, and actually undermined food security: land fragmentation, which supported the traditional farming system, was not considered a problem, and more importantly, the projects merely attempted to transfer Western European land consolidation without taking local conditions into account. In response, this study aims to identify the factors that need to be understood when developing a land consolidation strategy for the specific case of Ghana's rural customary lands. The determining factors when selecting a land consolidation strategy are identified for three countries with existing land consolidation strategies: The Netherlands, Lithuania, and Rwanda. Subsequently, these are set against Ghana, which has no land consolidation strategy, but has customary lands. It is found that certain determining factors in Ghana - such as the state of the economy, and the farming technology - matched with the strategies of other countries. However, other factors including: the government support; the prior existence of conventional land markets; an individual land tenure system; and the coverage of a functioning land information system – were all absent in Ghana. The study concludes that the factors that differ require ways to be addressed and adapted in order to develop a responsible land consolidation strategy for Ghana's customary areas.

The ‘global land rush’ or ‘global land grabbing’ phenomena has prompted concerns over the potential of large-scale land acquisitions to displace rural populations and impact food security in lesser-developed countries. State actors often assert that lands being leased to investors are ‘marginal’, ‘wasteland’, ‘barren’, or ‘unused’ without explicitly stating the criteria that are used to classify those spaces. Using Ethiopia as a case study, this paper synthesizes semi-structured interviews and geospatial land-use data to unpack the federal government’s notion of ‘marginal land’ to investigate how land qualifies for deposition into a federal land bank set aside for future investment and the agro-ecological characteristics and human-environment interactions endemic to these areas. We find that government officials conceive land bank areas to be generally fertile but currently ‘unused’. In reality, we find land bank areas: (1) are used by pastoralists or rural people practicing land extensive forms of cultivation that are only loosely integrated into the Ethiopian state, (2) overlap with protected areas such as National Parks, and (3) are located in places that have surface water resources the government intends to use for large-scale development such as irrigation or hydropower projects. We argue that the intended land uses of banked lands serve not only to fulfill larger development objectives but also increase state-accessible product produced in these areas strengthening the link between ‘othering’ labels, development, and state-making in the context of the global land rush.

This article explores the relevance of spatial global legal pluralism—an emerging field at the interstices of geography, anthropology, and socio-legal studies—for research on the global land rush, and the study of land law and investment in particular. I argue that a focus on the spatial dimensions of law—coupled with attention to the interlegality, scalar politics, and spatio-temporalities of semi-autonomous law—offers important insights into the dynamic forces, actors, and stakes in the global land rush. In Myanmar, the prospects for peace—however tenuous—have led to an acceleration of land law development including the creation of ‘semi-autonomous land law’ by ethnic armed groups and activists in its borderlands. I discuss the ways in which such policies not only anticipate peace but seek to shape its political-economy over multiple spatio-temporalities. By recognizing both international human rights law and customary law, such ‘non-state’ laws bring these two scales into an intermediary legal jurisdiction, contributing to the sedimentation of Kawthoolei and Kachinland as political scales in their own right.

The present study seeks to discuss and advance the understanding of land fragmentation and land grabbing within Romania's economic historiography landmarks, depicting how the origins of the land property issues are deeply embedded politically, socially, and culturally in history and still strongly exist in today's collective mind. Scientific evidence on the perceptions and behaviors of land owners regarding land grabbing was obtained through a non-probabilistic survey. The data collection instrument was a structured questionnaire, which was applied through face-to-face interviews to a sample of 52 Romanian land owners from various regions of the country. The results show that in the land owners’ perception, if land is sold to foreigners, national security is the most vulnerable aspect. Regarding the preference for the nationality of the land buyer, the majority of the people investigated prefer to sell to a Romanian buyer, thus making a clear statement in favor of the Romanian ownership of the land. The empirical results are placed in the context of a bottom-up approach—negotiation, with a high potential, unexplored in Romania, for implementing win–win agricultural solutions. Negotiation is valued as part of the answer to land fragmentation–land grabbing, a “back and forth” matter. The study recommends several measures for land use policy, tailored according to specific Romanian conditions, such as using an open access electronic registry of foreign land acquisitions, establishing a threshold for these acquisitions, and securing the preservation of the agricultural destination of land. In a political and economic context where land fragmentation and grabbing are two realities that are hard to deny and separate, a significant implication of the research is the enrichment of knowledge related to the sources of the “chronical” nature of fragmentation and to land owners’ attitude toward land grabbing, thus contributing to the design and implementation of future integrative land use solutions.

It is generally believed that tenure security has improved due to the programme of land certification. In this paper I argue the opposite. Tenure security concerns three different rights: possession, renting and latent rights. Rights of possession are believed to have improved, but the evidence is weak and conflicting. Land rentals are expanding and farmers face high tenure insecurity. The main problem, though, is latent rights, with great insecurity and increased conflict levels. Despite rapid economic development there is considerable social malaise, an unfortunate agricultural structure, and considerable pressure for land redistribution due to unresolved land tenure issues. The paper is based on the certification literature and primary material from North Shawa.

Extant research on guerilla gardening, defined as the unauthorized cultivation of land belonging to another, has hitherto focused on public space in urban areas, neglecting those that occur in rural settings. This rural land policy study examines a form of guerilla gardening in the countryside in Hong Kong, carried out by specific walker communities who routinely do early morning walks. Most of the gardens they have cultivated have become part of country park protected areas. This study identifies five phases of land use status evolution undergone by these morning walkers’ gardens (MWG), from the time the phenomenon of guerilla gardening in the countryside began in the 1960s to recent times, illustrating the role of land use change in enabling squatters with a degree of property rights by way of informal land resource co-management. Through the three case studies presented in this article, it is argued that MWGs can represent the emergence of incipient forms of natural resource co-management in Hong Kong. This study emphasizes the important role of resource user leadership in enhancing the land use value of land in itself and for the wider community. Some recommendations are provided to enhance resource user participation in land resource management.

Individualization of tenure through title registration programmes introduced in many African countries after independence with the promise of security of tenure and increased agricultural productivity has, instead, had the opposite effect. Informal land arrangements continue to emerge as a result of the slow pace of land adjudication (formalization) and updating of land information systems. The trend towards computerization of land information systems has only put focus on already existing formal land tenure arrangements, leaving out the informal social tenure arrangements. As a result, there are now many efforts worldwide motivated by the introduction of the Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM), and freely-available and easy-to-use technology tools to identify, document and map land in support of informal land administration arrangements. Actions are made towards the use of community-generated information to support land administration. Using theories from the interplay between formal and informal institutions, this paper discusses the potential outcomes in adopting Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in land administration in Kenya. Two case studies are presented that demonstrate the complementary-accommodating, versus the substitutive-competing approaches. These are then compared with the formal land adjudication process in Kenya. It is established that because of the direct involvement of the national mapping agency in land adjudication where VGI is utilized, the outcome is a case of formal adoption of VGI, while in the other case, where there is little or no involvement by the national mapping agency, the outcome is more of competition and substitution. The latter is an example in which the VGI is used just like any other information to inform policy making, rather than taking it as the authoritative source. We argue that since informality is – and will always be – part and parcel of land administration in many African countries as a result of ingrained social relations and power structures, adopting crowdsourced land information into existing formal land administration systems should consider the particular land administration process, satisfying innate demands and requirements, thus re-engineered to accommodate VGI.

Land grabbing represents a fundamental problem in the transitional and post-transitional economies. The transfer of land property rights impose a dramatically change of agricultural production structure, including affecting the food safety and security. The main aim of this article is the analysis of the possible effects and transformation imposed by the transfer of land property in a post-transitional agricultural economy and to identify possible solution in valuing the lands as main production factors. Also in the study are taking into consideration the effects of Common Agricultural Policy financing mechanism in supporting land transfers.

Land held under customary tenure has proven difficult to register and release for private enterprise globally. This is because the costs of developing secure rights to land held under communal ownership is high given that such ownership rules out a ‘pay-to-use-the-property’ system while punitive negotiation and policing costs make a ‘pay-him-not-to-use-the-property’ system ineffective (Demsetz, 1967, p. 355). Here I document reforms to institutions governing access to land held under customary title in Papua New Guinea that has imbedded collective ownership whilst allowing for a ‘pay-to-use-the-land’ for private enterprise. Reforms put in place over the past decade have allowed for voluntary incorporation of landowning clans, the registration of their land, and the leasing of this land for up to 99 years. The ongoing reforms provide lessons both for Papua New Guinea and for others wrestling with the challenges of making available land held by customary groups for individual enterprise.

Commodification of land is at the forefront of the re-casting of rural China by the spread of capitalism. This study examines a market-based program of land development rights trading in Chengdu, China. The program was made possible by a change in the central government’s land-use regulation that shifted the policy goal from ‘no net loss’ of farmland to ‘no net gain’ of construction land. We detail how local governments at multiple levels work together to construct land development rights as a commodity and build market institutions to foster its trading, illustrating land commodification as an inherently political process. A unique combination of innovative local policies and central political concessions created an outcome of ‘commodification without dispossession’ in Chengdu. Land commodification was used to finance rural reconstruction and brought profound changes to rural space, including re-configuring land-use patterns, transforming physical conditions in residential communities, and changing the representation of space.

Summary Contradicting policies and overlapping property arrangements are common in many countries, opening doors for diverse interpretations by different actors. This requires better knowledge on how competing interests and actors interact and what determines the practical competition outcomes as demand for land intensifies and international actors get increasingly involved in regulating natural resources. Land use planning in Laos provides a case in point as it aims at strengthening tenure security, intensifying agriculture and sparing forest areas while other policies simultaneously promote agricultural development and agri-business investment that reconfigure land use and land access. Through national, provincial, district, village and household interviews, we examine how different land- and forest-related policies interact, and whether ongoing land use planning processes and land rights formalization increase tenure security. We show how government policies supported by international donors, and introduced to strengthen tenure rights for the rural population actually reduce villagers’ legally permitted agricultural areas. Even if district-level land use regulations do not currently exclude local communities from their land, land use plans lay the groundwork for potentially excluding villagers from large land areas. We find that plural, contradictory regulations and policies, combined with existing power inequalities result in a “filter mechanism” that reduces the practical impact of legal instruments and safeguards aimed at strengthening the least powerful actors’ rights. Our results add to other authors’ arguments that political and legal changes are mediated by power relations, cultural norms and economic incentives, by highlighting that the duel-edged rights sword may actually end up paving the way for greater state control over future benefits derived from community areas classified as forest lands. This is especially relevant when preparing REDD+, which we show is likely to weaken rather than strengthen tenure security for rural populations.

The reflection of the land question in the Constitution of Georgia has excited the people of the country. The citizens believe that they should not sell their land to foreigners (stateless physical and legal persons). In order to resolve this problem, it is necessary to achieve a general national consensus.The Georgian nation is self-determined in the land question, so the new edition of the constitution should rely on the historic and legal heritage of the country, and in terms of modern conditions and challenges, it should establish the basic principles of land ownership and land use. In particular:1. The value principle - land is not only natural resource and economic category, but also the value that defines the identity of the Georgians - national treasure and eternal inheritance;2. The obligatory principle of a landowner - property is not only a right, but it entails obligation: its use must be at the same time for the benefit of society; this principle is the historical heritage of Article 116 of the 1921 Constitution;3. Apart from these fundamental principles, the Constitution shall strengthen the forms of land ownership –the State, municipal (community) and private property;4. Constitutional Principle determining land law- The text of the Constitution must clearly indicate that land ownership and land use are regulated by the Organic Law –the Land Code. Keywords: Land ownership, Land use, Constitution, Organic law, Land code, National consensus

With one stroke of a pen and a simple rule-change, landless agricultural workers on military-operated farms in Pakistan have found themselves facing eviction from lands their families have worked for generations. While exploring the dynamics of this legal change of status from share-croppers to cash renters I explore whether a rule of classical Islamic Hanafi land law that gave tillers responsibility for paying a tax to the state for lands they worked, creating a common interest between lessors and tillers, can be a legal mechanism for vesting land ownership. In the process I examine the broader dynamics of the pressures for norm change as well as evaluate the roles and capacities of classical jurists and judges in the modern era. The historical protections in the pre-classical and classical periods of Hanafi law flowed from a complex set of interconnected assumptions about the needs of different social classes and the particular need to integrate the least powerful into society by giving them a stake in its functioning and future outcomes. At a time of increasing social pressures and rising resource inequality the process is proof of the great power of the law to shape the legal, social and economic conceptualization of particular groups and to be able to change the way that particular groups are viewed in society.

Potential issues and challanges face the Scot's land regsiter should it seek to automate and then privatise its operation. Recent developments in Canadian and Australian land registries are used to iillustrate some of the issues that may arise. Given the nature of Scot's land law, it is suggested it may be better able to cope with both issues than other jurisdictions of a comparable nature.

With the promulgation of the Land Use Act came the introduction of certificate of occupancy as a proof of title, a quick search in the land registry to confirm the certificate of occupancy concludes the due diligent exercise on the part of lot of buyers. The court has been flooded with lots of case revolving around declaration of title based on the misconception of the title of a certificate of occupancy. It is a well-established position of the law that any person claiming a declaration of title to land must prove by evidence that he is entitled to the declaration he seeks. In some cases, the court has upheld the certificate of occupancy as a valid title while in some other cases declared it invalid. This paper intends to clarify the position of the law and critically examine the provision of the Land Use Act with respect to the title of a certificate of occupancy. The methodology adopted is qualitative, using the provision of the statues and interpreting primary material such as case laws. This article traces the trajectory of land tenure system in Nigeria; it succinctly compares the land tenure system before 1978 with the tenure system introduced by the Land Use Act. At its core, it examines the nature of right of occupancy and addresses issues surrounding certificate of occupancy as a conclusive proof of title.

תקציר בעברית: אחת מבעיות הזהות המרכזיות והיסודיות של מדינת ישראל היא יומרתה לפעול כמדינת לאום של העם היהודי, מצד אחד, וכמדינה המקיימת שוויון מלא כלפי כל אזרחיה, מצד שני. הבטחה כפולה זו מלווה את המפעל הציוני מאז כתב המנדט, דרך הכרזת העצמאות וכלה בחוק-יסוד: ישראל – מדינת הלאום של העם היהודי. מימושה של ההבטחה הכפולה הוא אתגר רציני נוכח מערכת היחסים המורכבת בין הרוב היהודי לבין המיעוט הערבי ונוכח הקושי לגשר בין שתי שאיפות לאומיות סותרות. זה הוא פרדוקס קיומי העומד ביסוד זהותה הייחודית של מדינת ישראל ושל כל אחד מאזרחיה. מדיניות המקרקעין של מדינת ישראל היא אחד התחומים שבו יש לפרדוקס זה ביטוי ממשי. המאמר יבחן את המורכבות שבהגשמת ההבטחה הכפולה בתחום מדיניות המקרקעין. תחילה ינתח המאמר את הרקע לבעיית הזהות היהודית דמוקרטית של מדינת ישראל. לאחר מכן יבחן שני היבטים חשובים ושנויים במחלוקת של מדיניות המקרקעין בישראל כלפי המיעוט הערבי: הטיפול בתוצאות מלחמת העצמאות והקצאת משאבי מקרקעין למיעוט הערבי בישראל. המאמר מצביע על האופן שבו בעיית הזהות היהודית-דמוקרטית משתקפת בכל אחד מתחומים אלה גם כיום, שבעים שנה לאחר הקמתה של מדינת ישראל. English Abstract: One of the fundamental identity problems of the State of Israel is its desire to act as a nation-state of the Jewish people, on the one hand, and as a state that maintains full equality for all its citizens, on the other. This double promise has been accompanied by the Zionist enterprise since the British Mandate, through the Declaration of Independence and the Basic Law: Israel - the Nation-State of the Jewish People. The realization of the double promise is a serious challenge given the complex relationship between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority and the difficulty of bridging two conflicting national aspirations. This is an existential paradox that underlies the unique identity of the State of Israel and each of its citizens. Israel's land policy is one of the areas in which this paradox has an actual expression. The article will examine the complexity of fulfilling the double promise in land policy. First, the article will analyze the background to the problem of the Jewish democratic identity of the State of Israel. Next, it will examine two important and controversial aspects of Israel's land policy toward the Arab minority: the treatment of the results of the War of Independence and the allocation of real estate resources to the Arab minority in Israel. The article points to how the problem of Jewish-democratic identity is reflected in each of these areas even today, seventy years after the establishment of the State of Israel.

The study aims to identify the influencing factors and their impact level on the public agricultural land management. The results show that the policy group is the most influential with an impact level of 38.06 %, followed by the financial group with an impact level of 36.17 %, the management factor with an impact level of 25.77 %. In order to improve the efficiency of the management of public agricultural land fund, it is necessary to amend and supplement a number of policies and laws, such as setting the maximum lease time of public agricultural land fund to be equal to the duration of district-level land use planning; strengthening the propagation and dissemination of land law; rational use of fragmented and scattered land parcels; settling encroached or occupied land plots through conversion of land use purposes into residential or public purposes of the commune.

Summary Improving women’s access to land is high on the agricultural policy agenda of both governmental and non-governmental agencies. Yet, the determinants and rationale of gendered access to land are not well understood. This paper argues that gender relations are more than the outcomes of negotiations within households. It explains the importance of social norms, perceptions, and formal and informal rules shaping access to land for male and female farmers at four levels: (1) the household/family, (2) the community, (3) the state, and (4) the market. The framework is applied to Ghana, using the results from qualitative field work. Norms on household and family organization and on men’s and women’s responsibilities and capabilities play a key role in gendered allocation of resources. However, these norms and perceptions are dynamic and evolve jointly with the development of markets and changes in values of inputs such as labor and land. Theoretical models that represent the gendered distribution of assets as the result of intrahousehold bargaining should be revised, and extrahousehold factors should be included. From a policy perspective, laws that ensure gender equality in terms of inheritance and a more gender-equitable distribution of property upon divorce can play a key role in improving women’s property rights. Yet, their impact may be limited where customary rights dominate and social norms and rules continue to discriminate according to gender.

Recent developments in GIS mapping have shown there are significant overlaps between mining concessions and pre-existing forms of land tenure. Yet, there is limited research that analyses the impact of these overlaps on relevant developmental issues – particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. In an effort to remedy this situation, this article pieces together existing research on the sub-Saharan African region to argue that these overlaps can push pre-existing land users to the margins of land access, which when combined with the indirect forms of environmental degradation unleashed by overlapping land rights can spark community-company conflict in turn increasing risk for investors. Therefore, greater attention needs to be paid to exploring the social, economic and environmental transformation of land in the context of mining concessions, while concessionary contracts need to incorporate an improved understanding of pre-existing land use patterns through community-led mapping and discussion.

In recent years, the Chinese central government has become increasingly concerned about the loss of agricultural land and future grain security and regulation over land utilization has been tightened. Amidst the official rhetoric of a “New Socialist Countryside”, local administrations across China came up with a novel form of land utilization involving the transfer of peasants into high rise apartments. The beauty of the scheme is that the supply of new land in the rural area (released by the peasants who have abandoned their traditional village houses) enables the municipal administration to initiate development and construction in other locations within its jurisdiction where the land value is higher. Chongqing introduced a further innovation in the form of a “land bill system” that greatly facilitates and securitizes land transactions. The conversion of construction land rights into a marketable financial document enhances the transparency of the transactions and reduces the cost of land deals. The paper provides an account of the genesis, implementation and evaluation of this new scheme. This institutional innovation seems to provide a win–win situation for all stakeholders. Nevertheless, peasants may suffer in the long run and the impact on rural governance may also be damaging.

Unlike in many developing contexts, land title regularization and registration projects in Afghanistan have for the most part eschewed judicial adjudication and recording of title for those landholders with customary tenures or otherwise without legally recognized rights to land. Rather, the pilot land titling and registration projects in the country have been community-based, the defining feature of which is recording of community consensus regarding who in the community holds what rights to what land, buildings, water, trees, and commons, with some recognition by a governmental entity such as a municipal or government agency, but not as a result of judicial adjudication and registration processes. We call these initiatives Community-Based Land Adjudication and Registration, or CBLAR. We show that CBLAR is more appropriate than legal titling in the Afghan context but that the success of these initiatives in improving household land tenure security depends on the quality of customary governance and on investment in public goods such as roads, schools, lending institutions, administrative capacity of local governments, and forums to resolve disputes that overwhelm communities. More generally, CBLAR promises to improve household land tenure security in post-conflict settings when it is implemented in the appropriate context and with the appropriate support from the state and international donors.

Drawing on firsthand observations, Party and government documents, and survey data, this study examines the causes and processes of the land for welfare policy in China. The implementation of the land for welfare program cannot be understood in isolation from the profound urban–rural gap in the land property rights regime and social welfare provision in China. The dual land tenure system allows local officials to generate revenue by expropriating rural land, which, to rural households, functions as a social insurance as well as an income-generating property. In the process of land requisition, land-losing villagers are provided with social welfare benefits to compensate for their loss of their land's insurance function. Such provision, however, is not developed out of the local governments’ benign intention, but their strategic reaction to the central government's development program that combines rural social welfare provision with a land rewarding system, which provides an opportunity for local officials to gain more land, a valuable asset for local governments. The provision of social welfare benefits is selective: affected rural households are provided with welfare benefits that are less costly to the local government, typically in the form of a pension insurance.

Large-scale land tenure reforms in post-conflict environments present significant challenges to and unique opportunities for peace processes. Fundamental to reconciliation, economic rehabilitation, and rural livelihood security, land and land tenure are essential components of post-conflict development. The importance of land to large-scale returns and sustainable peace is especially relevant in Cote d’Ivoire, where multiple waves of displacement linked to the 2002 civil war and 2010 post-election crisis exacerbated socio-economic and political relations between self-identified indigenous and migrant groups. Despite notable improvements in physical security, protracted land disputes throughout the cacao-producing region of the centre-West present a key obstacle to sustainable returns and long-term peace. Given a lack of institutional and financial capital, the current Government of Cote d’Ivoire has fallen back on a pre-war suite of tenure reforms designed to formalize customary land rights through mandatory certification and registration. Differing from previous critiques of the theoretical framework guiding the 1998 Rural Land Law, this paper uses field data to provide an overview of the main causes of land-related disputes, local mechanisms of dispute resolution, and current status of the 1998 Rural Land Law as it is being applied throughout the centre-West region of the country. Specifically, I argue that the prevalence of land-related disputes and unnecessarily complex nature of statutory reformsdissociated from the socio-political and economic foundation of the ‘tutorat’ system areundermining the tenure security of rural households.

Inspired by Ostrom’s concept of polycentric governance, this article aims to refine the analytical framework through which contemporary access to land is analysed. By drawing on extensive fieldwork and conducting a review of the existing literature on the making and implementation of Tanzania’s 1999 land reform, it challenges some of the main assumptions behind the land access and land grabbing literatures about the level at which agency is placed. Processes governing access to land are more contingent than they are most often depicted, involving actors at the local, national and international levels. National and local level actors are often more important than, in particular, the land grab literature tends to suggest. This implies that the state should be seen not merely as a site of ‘legitimate theft’, but also as one in which rights may be upheld. Based on the experience of Tanzania, the article suggests that analytical a priori assumptions about where agency is placed should be abandoned and replaced with empirical research into the relations between actors at all levels.

Enticing economic benefits for host nations and the notion of large areas of land considered available are often put forward as the main reasons for large-scale land acquisition in many areas of sub-Saharan Africa. However, country-level datasets of land acquisitions seem to indicate a clear divide between a majority of countries engaged in land acquisitions as investors and those involved as targets. We posit that there are socio-economic and governance factors that make the engagement between targets of land acquisitions and investors both unequal and attractive to large-scale investments. We then ask the question: what are the factors that make communities vulnerable to an unequal engagement with large-scale land-investing interests in Sierra Leone? We explore this question using local-level socio-economic data of households and communities in two settings where land acquisitions have occurred in Sierra Leone. We find that socio-economic characteristics of local populations, such as levels of education, the powerful role of traditional chiefs and corruption, make these areas easier targets for such land investments. Investors also exploit the poor economic situation of local areas by making alluring promises of development opportunities. The vulnerability of local people to land investors is further undermined by poor governance at the national level and external politico-financial interest in favor of such investments. Local populations are vulnerable to organized campaigns of land acquisitions by multi-national companies. Proper legal and institutional frameworks are required to protect local interests in these land deals.

In Ghana, Chiefs and families have over the years controlled access and managed customary lands based on the rules of custom in their respective jurisdictions. The Land Administration Project (LAP) sought to strengthen customary land management by establishing Customary Land Secretariats (CLSs) for recognized and organized land owning communities to promote good local land governance. The analyses show that the Wa Central Customary Land Secretariat (WCCLS) has done considerably well in land documentation and disputes resolution. However, inadequate cooperation and collaboration between the customary and formal land management systems in the area; rising number of individual landowners due to changes in the social structure; and lack of accountability are hampering good land governance.

This paper studies the legal effects of land allocation papers in today's land administration system by focusing on stool lands in Kumasi. Using key informant interviews and review of relevant land legislations, court proceedings and seminar papers, we found out that, land allocation papers in their current form and substance are incapable of conveying title to purported grantees, but may only serve as evidence that an individual or corporate body has purportedly acquired land. The allocation paper is only a step towards acquiring full legal rights over land under customary tenure. This study recommends that grantees of stool lands should make every effort towards completing the other legally required processes such as formalisation and registration of the transaction at the Lands Commission for valid legal title. It is further recommended that preparation of allocation papers by chiefs should be enhanced by incorporating terms of the grant, identities of the transaction parties, consideration and proper description of the land. These enhancements will facilitate the formalisation and registration process, and potentially reduce the cost and time of registering land in Ghana. Particularly, it will challenge state institutions and land administrators to introduce stringent measures or security features that would make land title registrations using allocation papers legally binding.

Although previous studies have shown the importance to agricultural investments of awareness about land tenure security (LTS), to date, little quantitative evidence has been published regarding the effects of awareness about LTS. This study contributes to the current research by showing the causal effect on agricultural investments of awareness about LTS. In detail, we examine whether awareness about the increase in the duration of agricultural land-use rights improves farmers’ investments in agriculture. Under the new land law passed in November 2013 in Vietnam, the usage duration of annual cropland and aquaculture land increased significantly from 20 years to 50 years, which makes Vietnam a compelling case study for testing this hypothesis. We use panel data from the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) collected in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. The balanced panel data include 1834 households. Difference-in-difference with fixed effects (DID-FE) is employed to estimate the causal impacts. We find that awareness about the increase in the duration of agricultural land-use rights increases investments in irrigation/soil conservation/water conservation and the adoption of organic fertilizer, which supports the positive impacts of awareness about LTS on sustainable investments.

In Vietnam, all lands belong to the state, which assigns usufruct rights to those lands to individuals and households. In 1993, the state gave 20-year usufruct rights to growers of annual crops, and 50-year usufruct rights to growers of perennial crops. In 2013, as the usufruct rights of growers of annual crops were about to expire, the Vietnamese government passed a law—the Land Law of 2013—that extended the usufruct rights of all landowners by 50 years. We exploit this largely unanticipated shock to study the effect of tenurial security on agricultural investment. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that the Land Law of 2013 is associated with a higher likelihood of investment by growers of annual crops in irrigation technology or soil and water conservation, but not other types of investment. Our results are robust to controlling for endogenous switching from annual to perennial crops, and our data support the parallel trends assumption.

In China, the planning quota, i.e., the binding target of construction land (BTCL) in land use planning for 15 years (2006–2020), was exhausted within only 7 years, which represents a very serious problem. This result not only nullifies the meaning of the plan itself but also threatens China's food and ecological security and poses great challenges to sustainable development. Here, we develop an analysis framework for local governments that break the BTCL in view of the strategic interactions of transferring newly increased construction land (NCL) among local governments and perform an empirical analysis of data on 262 prefecture-level cities from 2007 to 2016. The two main conclusions are as follows. First, adjacent local governments engage in positive strategic interactions regarding the quantity of NCL transferred. Second, positive strategic interactions regarding the quantity of NCL transferred are important reasons why local governments break the planning quota. In addition, we find that better economic development corresponds to more obvious positive strategic interactions. We also find that fiscal incentives and land misallocation play a significant role in promoting the increase in NCL, while strengthening land law enforcement can effectively constrain the increase in NCL. This paper enriches the literature on the reasons for planning failures, extending the research perspective to the level of interaction effects among local governments, and this paper provides new evidence regarding the strategic interaction among Chinese local governments. Moreover, this paper provides an important new path for the central government to constrain urban land expansion and to control the behavior of local governments that break the planning quota.

The doctrine of tenure and estates is, of course, the theoretical starting point (Indigenous issues aside) for our understanding of land law built from the English common law system. Occasionally, the skeletons of this past do come back to bite, as evident in New Zealand with the recent proliferation of encumbrance instruments, as a device to ensure the performance of collateral and personal obligations by landowners. The end result, accompanied by the ignored advice of the New Zealand Law Commission, has resulted in a mess, creating conceptual confusion for the next generation of legal practitioners as well as law students.

This paper looks at the concept of law and urban development with a focus on property rights and land, exploring the potential collective rights in the public domain to underpin a more equitable approach to the management of public space and challenge inappropriate regulation that criminalizes the lives of the poor. The focus is on street trade and the informal economy. The hypotheses are that: collective use rights extend to public land and are crucial to the livelihoods of the urban poor; such use provides public good as well as private profit, and legal traditions in sub-Saharan Africa can often accommodate the broad definition of rights entailed. The literature review interrogates debates on property rights, legal empowerment, and public space, to suggest that urban public space should be considered as a common resource where open access remains. Fieldwork draws on comparative studies of Dakar, Senegal, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, based on in-depth interviews with street traders and key informants, and a legal review in each city. The findings suggest very different trajectories in each city. In Dakar collective action with political support has created space for dialog, while in Dar es Salaam lack of solidarity among traders meant that evictions were uncontested. In both cities the balance between public and private gain was moderated through complex social processes to create the hybrid space of the street, defined here as a ‘collective pool resource’. Finally the paper explores bundles of rights that might include access and beneficial use but with collective management to establish such a ‘collective pool resource’. Thus the paper challenges the usual conception of the public domain as state land, to recognize the collective claim for the street that is core to the operation of urban informal economies.

This paper discusses the transfer of property rights as an active strategic tool that defines space (re) production, development, protection, and management processes and presents a creative approach and a perspective for urban resilience by an alternative land management model proposal. The discussion in this paper largely differs from the understanding of the concept both by the planning institution and the majority of academic studies. While the planning institution approaches the transfer of property rights as a passive ingredient, academic studies focus mainly on the outcomes of this transfer in economic terms and they fail in defining the necessary strategies, policies, and regulatory tools to decrease risk and negative impacts. The alternative approach presented in this paper suggests that property rights as a creative approach and policy tool for urban resilience should be examined on the basis of the relationship between partial interests in property; relative to value, land use, the location and the amount and type of real property transactions. A coastal region in Turkey where all types of historical, cultural, and natural resources are concentrated, but rapidly destroyed with the pressure of tourism, energy investments, and secondary housing is selected as a case for the analysis of the effects of the property market with the planning/urbanization problems in the region. The case study takes into account the internet data of transfer values by property types in the year 2008. The case study is used for presenting an administrative model that is implemented through and understanding for spatial planning to achieve urban resilience. This understanding is based on the concepts of integrated coastal zone and protection area management that are realized by controlling and directing transfers in order to limit the impact of the market and planning institutions.

With the level of urbanization in China now exceeding 50%, its collective rural land system is under increasing pressure, creating conditions in which there is increasing conflict between the efficient use of land for agricultural purposes and its retention as security for the rural population. This paper first examines the fundamental nature of China's collective land system by analyzing the collectivization history of China, then provides a comprehensive appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of the collective land system's role in history and the challenges it faces in modern times. The main changes needed for the current collective system are identified as (1) the establishment of a new transfer mechanism for potential collective construction land, (2) the completion of land rights verification and consolidation work, and (3) the endowment of villagers with more rights to enjoy the distribution of land incremental value. The paper's main contribution is to question the relevance of collective rural land system in contemporary China, where a shift is now taking place from one of pure economic development to one involving more social concerns, and propose potential viable amendments to integrate the need for both perspectives.