Land policy and tenure in Southeast Asia, 1995-2005

Abstract

Land administration systems are now businesses. At one end of a wide spectrum land administration systems are being re-engineered engaging in business strategies, competition policies and formal professional standards. Examples include LINZ Landonline and Victoria’s Land Channel; and modern, technically enabled infrastructures for use, storage and dissemination of spatial information. At the other end, developing countries in Asia Pacific are being advised on large internationally funded projects about the building blocks required to establish some of the basic operations of a land administration system. This paper focuses on the issues confronting countries at this formative stage and identifies major policy shifts affecting project designs and solutions.

Business in modern western society operates within tightly controlled formal systems to ensure equity, efficiency and effectiveness of performance. Land administration activities are engineered no differently. Land administration designs and conventional tenure typologies manufactured land arrangements for assimilation into formal property markets. However, in developing countries, the majority of the poor rely on systems of access to land sourced in social practice not law or government infrastructure. Formalisation of these socially derived access modes is proving problematic in many different jurisdictions in the developing world including the rural poor in Southeast Asia.