GTZ - Land Tenure in Development Cooperation: Chapter 2.2

Guiding Principles: Land Tenure in Development Cooperation
Orientierungsrahmen: Bodenrecht und Bodenordnung		Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit Abt. 45 / Div. 45

2.2 Models and Concepts around Land

The concepts and guiding principles for land issues have been subject to rapid change in the past years. Land stands for property, it is an object of agricultural and industrial use, i.e. a production factor besides labor and capital. Land embodies many more dimensions such as homeland, place of ancestry, a prerequisite for realizing individual freedom, basis for survival, but it is also an object that is taxed and desired by governments and interest groups; it is a basis of power and dependency and a cause of conflict and war. All these ideas tie the physical object to the human idea of how to monopolize, own, use and secure it.

This "social construction of land" (Bromley 1996) is currently being re-examined and determined by market economy reforms in most of the partner countries, by further reaching transformational processes in the Central and East European countries and the former Soviet Union, by the globalization of national economies, and by the discussion on social responsibility with respect to property in the far-reaching structural changes of industrial societies.

Change in the "social construction of land"

The respective land tenure systems in developing and industrial societies are based on values and norms that can only rarely be taken out of their respective context. The ‘guiding principles’ are based on merely four guidelines that intentionally also accompany the new orientation of German development cooperation. They provide the foundation for evaluation of land tenure systems:

Certainty of the law and reforms,

Rule of law and human rights,

Participation (of the population) in the political process of dealing with the land issue, and

The meaning of property in a market economy system.

Guidelines and evaluation criteria