Latin America

1
Latin America Caribbean
Land Administration Mini-Retreat

• Grenville Barnes

2
Land Administration Projects and Funding Agency
CARIBBEAN Jamaica (IDB) Trinidad Tobago
(IDB) Bahamas (IDB) Dominican Republic
(IDB) Antigua OECS Countries (OAS) Turks and
Caicos (DFID)
MEXICO (WB IDB)
SOUTH AMERICA Guyana (IDB, DFID) Colombia
(IDB) Ecuador (IDB, WB) Peru (IDB, WB,
USAID) Brazil (IDB) Bolivia (WB, USAID, Neth,
Nordic) Paraguay (IDB) Suriname (Neth. IDB)
CENTRAL AMERICA Belize (IDB) Guatemala
(WB) Honduras (WB, EU, IDB) El Salvador (USAID,
WB) Nicaragua (WB, MCC) Costa Rica (IDB) Panama
(WB, IDB)
http//www.property-registration.org/Project-list
.html
3
Increasing Specialization

• Titling/Cadastral
• Land Administration
• Land Access
• Vulnerable
• Indigenous/traditional

4
Cost/Benefit

• No systematic understanding of costs
• Benefits
• credit
• market distribution
• natural resource management
• access by poor
• infrastructure
• Empirical data is not convincing
• .. Getting it right?

5
Technical Focus

• Why does the country with one of the most dynamic
  land markets not have
• legal cadastre
• integrated cadastre/registry
• geo-referenced land parcels
• compulsory registration
• registration of title
• ?

6
Barriers to GPS Technology Adoption
Adoption and Diffusion of GPS technology
Scarcity of Capital
Need to define property parcels in a rapid and
cost-effective manner
Unstable Economy
Political Unrest
Inaccessibility of Knowledge
Retention Problems
Lack of Training
Operational Problems
Technological Discontinuity
(adapted from Niemann, Ventura et al 1988)
7
What is Happening to Community-based Property in
LAC

• Neo-liberal land policies beginning in 1990s
• favors individual marketable property
• How have community tenure responded to these
  policies and globalization forces?
• Evolution related to
• governance
• culture (e.g. Maya, Kuna)
• external factors tourism, community forestry

Indigenous Traditional (rubber-tappers,
chicleros)
8
RESOURCE TENURE VERSUS LAND TENURE (Pando,
Bolivia)
Source Cronkleton and Albornoz 2007
9
Informality

• Following titling many subsequent transactions
  are not formalized
• Inheritance
• sales
• affordable?
• Difficult to develop integrated
  registry/cadastre institutions
• single window approach
• integrated database (separate institutions)

10
Searching for Resilient Land Systems

• Resilience ability of a system to absorb shocks
  and still maintain its fundamental structure and
  function
• Factors affecting resilience
• connectivity
• livelihood strategies (migratory labor)
• generational transformations
• Resilience assumes change and tries to explain
  stability, instead of assuming stability and
  explaining change (Folke et al 2003)

11
Local Governance

• Transparency
• Accountability
• Polycentric Institutions
• Vertical integration (scale)

Is there a linkage between national level
measurement of Governance and community-level
Governance ? SCALE MATTERS!