Benefits and costs of rural land titling : the international experience
Bekure, Salomon
Scores of developing countries have embarked upon a program of establishing land administration systems and undertaking systematic rural land titling, involving land rights adjudication, registration, cadastral surveying and titling. Examples are Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Guatemala, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, and others. Such undertakings take a long time to implement and can be expensive as the cost of titling quickly escalates to an enormous expenditure, considering the millions of fragmented rural land holdings in a given region. The planning horizon in Thailand and Indonesia was 20 and 25 years, respectively. It cost about US$300 million in Thailand over a period of five years. Many land administration and land titling projects lose sight of the main purpose of the exercise and concentrate on the technical aspects such as surveying, mapping and preparation of and issuing titles. Land administration and titling are not about the sophistication of these activities nor are the technical aspects ends in themselves. Land administration and titling are about protecting land rights adequately and permitting those rights to be transferable efficiently, i.e., simply, quickly, securely and at low cost and maintaining the integrity of the cadastre by continuous updating of transactions in land rights as they occur (Williamson 2000). The success of a land administration and titling program is, therefore, the extent to which it fulfills these set of purposes - not the number of land titles it issues, notwithstanding that these numbers may be one of the indicators of successful implementation (UN International Federation of Surveyors Bogor Declaration on Cadastral Reform 1996).
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