Land Tenure Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Land tenure (or rural property rights) is generally regarded as a system of rights and obligations about land and property within a society or community. Land tenure can be viewed as a “bundle” of rights, where rights can be added, removed, or divided.

Formal Versus Informal Tenure

There are several broad types of land tenure prevalent in most countries. Private property is a popular form, particularly in developed Western countries. In a private property system a piece of land belongs to a person or corporation, and this person or group has the right to sell it, lend it, use it as collateral, or split it up. Rights in the bundle are usually prescribed, as in zoning for a particular purpose (commercial, residential, agriculture, and so on), and are often specifically delineated, such as surface, mineral, water, or timber rights. With private property there exists a documented title, and a paper trail documenting the steps taken to obtain title.

Socialist tenure in various forms has been common in the past, most typified by the approach pursued by the former Soviet Union and its thensatellite states. With socialist tenure approaches, collective agricultural programs held that property rights and land use decisions are not made by individuals, but by either a group made up of the land resource users, or a state-appointed committee.

Socialist tenure can take a number of forms, but generally an individual household is assigned a portion of a farm or piece of land, but such an allocation might or might not be their first choice about where to farm. Individuals may have shares in the production (farm yield) or in the revenue from sales of the produce. Or, individuals may work as wage laborers on a collectively owned farm. This form of tenure also included villagization programs in Africa and elsewhere, where people were brought together from a more dispersed farming arrangement into a nucleated settlement and given land to farm. The logic here was usually that populations were more easily taxed, educated, provided with health care, and controlled, but in addition, villagization freed up vacated land.

Another form of land tenure currently favored by a number of developing countries is state ownership, whereby the national government declares all land to be property of the state. Usually this arrangement allows large areas to be declared “vacant and ownerless” national property to be subsequently distributed according to the state’s priorities. In this approach there can be considerable confusion over exactly what rights are possessed by individuals, communities, and the state. Land nationalization can be a problem when a country changes from other tenure systems to state ownership. The logic behind such nationalizations can include the state’s attempts to throw off an exploitative system, thus preventing what is thought to be a form of “recolonization” via land purchases by large numbers of foreigners, or preventing the creation of a large landless class. A number of African states currently pursue this approach.

Customary tenure systems are informal, unwritten systems. Also called indigenous or traditional tenure by some, customary rights of access to land can be backed by “law-in-action.” In other words, what establishes itself are the ad hoc arrangements that develop to meet the variety of situations in which people find themselves. Such informal behaviors outline the undocumented rules of land and resource use that are actually in operation.

There exists a pervasive disconnection in land tenure systems in many areas of the world. This occurs where both customary forms of tenure exist alongside formal tenure systems (such as private property, socialist, or state-owned approaches) with little ability for the two to connect as a system. The result includes land disputes, evictions, and tenure insecurity. The problems include the fact that customary systems are already in place, and have often developed over long periods of time. Formal systems, on the other hand, are imposed as peoples, areas, and countries are incorporated into a global system and feel pressure to have a land tenure system that can accommodate foreign investment; or, as they become decolonized, newly independent governments want to have a national land tenure system that they view as more fair than what occurred during the colonial era.

Formal systems are also imposed as governments express the desire for power over land allocation decisions and as governments want to regularize land tenure from many different informal systems belonging to indigenous groups within a country. The imposition of formal tenure systems onto customary systems can be problematic, because they must be enforced by the state, which means state intervention in the activities of communities, tribes, and religious groups, with potentially negative repercussions.

Tenure Security

A primary component of all land tenure systems is tenure security. Tenure security is usually defined by how secure one’s claim to access and use of land resources is. How secure one feels then influences decision making regarding agriculture, investments, resource management, and property transactions and is thought to be important to agricultural productivity and rational use of environmental resources. This is because the more secure the landholder, the more he or she will invest, and become invested in, the long-term viability and productivity of land resources. As a result more care will be given to how land resources are treated. Insecure land tenure, on the other hand, often results in environmental degradation, because affected populations feel there is little incentive to care for land resources they could be easily evicted from.

Much social science research and development work has been focused on the nature of tenure security and how it functions. However, tenure security can be difficult to understand, measure, and provide for in a consistent and predictable way. This is because tenure security is not very tangible, and many variables, processes, and contexts are bound up in it.

Tenure security embodies the idea that a claim to land resources is secure because it is to a significant degree defendable against virtually all other potential claimants. Thus tenure security necessarily resides within (and depends on) some notion of community (or “others”), and one’s position within the community; as well as an ability to access and utilize what others in the community regard as legitimate and workable institutions (rule sets) used in defending claims.

While a community can be a local farmer village in a developing country, such a village can exist within a wider commercial or national community. This is important because a local community can be unable to defend its claim against “others” in a national community-with impacts on tenure security and resource use strategies. Ultimately this becomes a problem for indigenous land rights and environmental degradation.

Bibliography:

T.A. Benjaminsen and Lund, eds., Securing Land Rights in Africa (CASS Publishing, 2003);
W. Bruce and S.E. Migot-Adholla, Searching for Land Tenure Security in Africa (World Bank and Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1994);
H. Demsetz, “Towards a Theory of Property Rights,” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings (v.57/2, 1967);
Durand-Lasserve and L. Royston, eds., Holding Their Ground: Secure Land Tenure for the Urban Poor in Developing Countries (Earthscan, 2002);
C. Ellickson, Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Harvard University Press, 1991);
Gausset, M.A. Whyte, T. Birch-Thomsen, eds., Beyond Territory and Scarcity: Exploring Conflicts over Natural Resource Management (Nordiska Africkainstitutet, 2005);
B. Ghimire, Land Reform and Peasant Livelihoods: The Social Dynamics of Rural Poverty and Agrarian Reforms in Developing Countries (ITDG Publishing, 2001);
E.S. Jordan and A. Gambaro, eds., Land Law in Comparative Perspective (Kluwer Law International; 2002).