Infrastructure Engineering - Research Publications
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ItemThe United Nations - International Federation of SurveyorsDeclaration on Land Administration for Sustainable Development( 2000)The changing humankind-land relationship and current global and local drivers suchas sustainable development, urbanization, globalization, economic reform and theinformation revolution, demand land administration responses. Of the global drivers,sustainable development may be identified as having overall significance because ofits dynamic economic-political, social, and environmental dimensions. At the heart ofthe challenging opportunity-cost decisions for sustainable development is the pressingneed for land administration systems to evolve speedily and appropriately to supportthe sustainable development imperative.Current land administration systems are the product of 19th century paradigms of landmarkets, which have a narrow cadastral (land parcel) focus. As a result they havefailed to properly support these global and local drivers. The evidence of the failureincludes issues of poverty, access to land, security of tenure, development rights andenvironmental degradation.World opinion on aspects of sustainable development, as represented by UnitedNations (UN) global summits and declarations (for example UN Earth Summit, Riode Janeiro, 1994; UN City Summit, Istanbul, 1998; UN Food Summit, Rome, 1998),have highlighted the importance of land administration to support sustainabledevelopment, but have provided few practical implementation strategies. This ad hocapproach has resulted in rhetoric, rather than reality, in developing land administrationsystems to accommodate sustainable development objectives. Governments, on theother hand, have generally been willing, if not anxious, to reform land administrationfor sustainable objectives, but there are no clear directions or models to adopt.As a preliminary step towards overcoming the uncertain relationship between landadministration and sustainable development, a joint United Nations-InternationalFederation of Surveyors Workshop on Land Tenure and Cadastral Infrastructures forSustainable Development was organised in B
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ItemUnited Nations-FIG Bathurst Declaration on Land Administrationfor Sustainable Development: Development and Impact( 2002)The joint United Nations-FIG Bathurst Declaration on Land Administration forSustainable Development was prepared at an International Workshop on CadastralInfrastructures for Sustainable Development organized jointly by the FIG and theUnited Nations in Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia, on 18-22 October 1999.The Declaration was presented formally together with position papers prepared asbackground for the Workshop at an International Conference in Melbourne, Australia,on 25-27 October 1999. The Workshop and Conference, together with the resultingDeclaration, were part of the Work Plan of Commission 7 (Cadastre and LandManagement) and were three years in the planning.The paper will review the activities leading up to the Workshop, Conference anddevelopment of the Declaration, and will discuss the impact of the Declaration.Following on from the Workshop and Conference, presentations were made at variousUnited Nations conferences as well as the FIG General Assembly. In addition therehave been numerous workshops and conference spawned by the Declaration. Thepaper will also look to the future to consider how the Bathurst Declaration can be builtupon to the benefit of all countries as well as professional surveyors. Importantly thepaper will discuss the impact of the overriding outcome from this initiative in that ithas stated a clear relationship between land administration and sustainabledevelopment.
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ItemSpatially enabling governments: a new direction for land administration systems( 2006)Most decisions involve a spatial component, though few people realize its significance. Technology is about to bring the spatial component to the forefront. A place on earth can be defined with precision on the ground and in computers. Digital data can be attached to a location as never before. Spatial identification and location enablement applications are now available in every significant type of software (word processing, spread sheets, professional applications, Web systems, GIS and databases). Use of appropriate computers with interpretative software capacity now transforms computer language into understandable descriptions of places, Governments, business and communities can potentially use computers to identify “where” their policies and activities are happening. More significantly, the “where” component can be used as an organizing structure for most human activities and information. The challenge of these new technological and organizational opportunities is large. A nation’s ability to reap the benefits of the spatial enablement of information requires the highest level input from its government and private sectors. Land administration systems (LAS) are the traditional means of spatial organisation of information: they are the obvious starting point for assessing new technologies in the context of different demands for land information for modern governments. This potential to transform the ability of LAS to inform governments, business and citizens about their world led to the concept of iLand, a concept of spatially enabled information for modern government.
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ItemIncorporating sustainable development objectives into land administration( 2006)Historically, land administration systems (LAS) were built to support land markets and land taxation systems. In developed countries, these systems constitute substantial infrastructure provided through government for the benefit of overall public administration, citizens and businesses. These systems are expensive to maintain and increasingly reliant on technology. The design of LAS will become even more complex as they are now being used to assist delivery of a broader range of public policy and economic goals, the most important of which is sustainable development. The national and historical methods used to incorporate sustainable development objectives into national LAS were examined in an Expert Group Meeting (EGM) in Melbourne in December, 2006 with leading stakeholders and land policy experts from Australia and Europe. Distinctions between approaches used in modern European democracies and in Australia were identified. The European approach showed more integration between the standard LAS activities and measures of sustainability. Australian policy was more fractured, partly due to federation and the constitutional distribution of powers. In contrast, Australian LAS pioneering lay in incorporating market based instruments (MBI) and complex commodities into LAS and revitalization of land information through inventive Web based initiatives. The EGM developed a vision outlined in this paper for future LAS sufficiently flexible to adapt to this changing world of new technology, novel market demands and sustainable development.