Guiding Principles:
Land Tenure in Development Cooperation

Orientierungsrahmen:
Bodenrecht und Bodenordnung

Deutsche Gesellschaft
für Technische Zusammenarbeit
Abt. 45 / Div. 45

The development policy debate and the daily press make it very clear: Land tenure problems are in the limelight worldwide. By all indications, the explosive nature of the "land issue" which is often covered up by ethnic conflicts will increase in the future.

The creative power in land tenure systems and a consistent land policy determine not only the future productivity of agriculture for securing the world food supply and the potential of multifaceted environmentally sound use of rural areas, but also coming to terms with the dynamic processes of urbanization and sectoral transformation. The results presented in the ‘guiding principles’ contain basic implications for future guidelines, objectives, measures and instruments of the development cooperation, policy advisory services, education and research in partner countries.

Due to population pressure, economic dynamics and mobility, the patterns of land use will further differentiate. Therefore, land tenure should not be considered exclusively, but as a part of a comprehensive "system of resource tenure" and resource policy. This necessarily requires the concentrated cooperation of various actors for the development and proposal of innovative, future-oriented solutions and instruments.

It is already clear that the issue of water rights, often a complement to land tenure, requires increasing attention by politics, development cooperation and the scientific community for highly productive agriculture and for urban industrial development. This includes an in-depth discussion on water management by private operations and actors by disposing temporary licenses or by creating water markets, wherever the socioeconomic and geoecological conditions do admit it.

There is no question that in the future more and more (agricultural) households will no longer have sufficient land to secure their livelihood. Non-agricultural income sources and employment opportunities are increasingly necessary. An active policy far beyond land tenure problems must create income sources and employment possibilities.

Intensification of agriculture and the creation of non-agricultural employment opportunities alone are not going to be sufficient to limit the competition for land. A consequence will be intensified land conflicts on local and regional levels. Various mechanisms for defusing, limiting and resolving conflicts by "efficient mediators" are especially demanded.

Decentralized systems that increase the responsibility and co-designing of land allocation and land use on the local level can partially help to reduce these conflicts. The point of focus for this topic must not be limited to the "grassroots" approaches of the affected parties or a "bottom-up" approach because land tenure problems do not accommodate us by being regionally limited or limited to a specific group. The establishment of institutions and other political approaches must follow the principle of subsidiarity, i.e. they must consider the different capabilities of local, regional and national as well as international levels and must be based on networking structures.

For the given reasons and the experiences with market economies and transformation, the state still plays a central, but newly defined role. Divestiture requires a new quality of state action plans, for example, for the establishment of a consistent land tenure framework and an efficient land administration. For the reformed state, neither agrarian reforms nor influencing certain aspects of land transfers nor state ownership in the case of market failure or failure of communal land management are any longer taboo.

This new quality of state participation is shown, for example, in the idea of the social responsibility of property. Experiences with the constitutional precept of the social responsibility in Germany can contribute to this idea.

Nations are increasingly subjected to international guidelines according to the UNCED process case that explicitly continues to deal with "land problems." This provides a special opportunity for development cooperation to speed up the implementation process and to act as an attorney for discriminated groups.

The search for a country-specific and adequate framework for state influences is a learning process. This was demonstrated in dealing with autochthonous rights or the future of private property in the former socialist countries. Assistance by the development cooperation can expedite this learning process and cut short the trial and error procedure by comparison with other countries.

An example for the necessity of this assistance is the evaluation of chances and risks of market-led land reforms that cannot possibly solve all land distribution problems on the agenda alone since the amount of land sufficient for this will not be offered on the market. The question arises as to what the appropriate "policy mix" for reforms including redistribution or employment and/or social policy is.

Building bridges between indigenous and scientific knowledge and between traditional institutions for land conflict resolution and judical institutions of the modern state is a further challenge.

Bilateral and multilateral institutions still pursue different objectives and use other instruments. Due to the importance of land tenure objectives and land policy measures, intensified coordination, cooperation and harmonization of the institutions involved in international cooperation must be striven for which far exceed recent practices

These ‘guiding principles’ must remain a work in progress. Their results and suggestions will have to be critically analyzed, revised and updated continuously. However, we hope to have enabled the reader to obtain a wide overview and a deep insight into a multifaceted field of interest and work. By including discussion contributions and experience reports from the project and program work, it is our desire to be able to depict the documented working process vividly.