Undertaking land administration reform: Is there a better way?

Governments establish land administration systems to formally acknowledge and protect property rights, restrictions, and responsibilities (RRR). The protection and recording of property rights is implemented under a jurisdiction-specific complex set of policies, laws, systems, and procedures. In recent decades, the World Bank and many other development partners have provided funding to support land administration reform so that governments can formally acknowledge and protect property rights and provide efficient and effective land administration services. The experience and lessons from these projects have been documented. There have been successes but there have also been projects that have failed to realise clearly stated objectives. A recurrent theme in these evaluations is that many projects fail to create effective, transformative change in the delivery of land administration services and gain the critical mass, and the community participation, necessary to ensure the sustainability of land administration reform. The traditional approach for land administration reform projects has been to focus on the economic and technical design of interventions based on a library of best practice, with perhaps too little attention on politics and governance in land administration reform. Many of the issues or problems noted in the literature relate not to economic or technical matters, but to policy and political decisions. The current approach to land administration reform would appear to need reform itself. The sector needs to seriously consider the political economy issues that impact on the provision of efficient and effective land administration services. There have been concerted efforts to develop more politically informed ways of thinking and working in the design of donor-funded interventions using a range of methodologies including ‘Thinking and Working Politically’ (TWP). Adopting a TWP, or similar politically informed approach, has a lot of potential, but may not be the full answer and TWP may complement rather than replace existing approaches to reform assessment, design, and implementation. This paper sets out a broad review of the experience, lessons, and literature on land administration reform and the potential for adopting a new approach for reform.