Land administration reform in Greece during the sovereign debt crisis 2009 to 2018: A case of competing frames

A policy problem is a social and political construct articulating values and facts. It is usually defined as a gap between an existing and a normatively valued situation to be bridged by government action. Public policy reforms are deliberate government efforts to effect change in a policy domain and deliver public goods to citizens, such as education, healthcare, pension system, or land tenure security. Public policies are typically developed and enacted within policy domain-specific subsystems of many actors. The actors have specific perceptions of the substantive characteristics of a policy problem.
Land administration is a multi-disciplined process to manage spatial and legal data about land to improve tenure security. Current land administration literature needs an in-depth study of how the diverse actors interact in a state-led land administration reform, specifically in times of financial duress and external pressure due to policy conditionality. We contribute to existing research on how actors interact in land policy reform processes by exploring the Hellenic Land Administration Reform (HLAR), which poses a rich empirical setting to observe the interactions of domestic and foreign actors in a large-scale state-led land administration reform, contributing to the relevant scholarly literature on land administration. Greece initiated a state-led land administration reform in the mid-1990s, the HLAR, which aimed to replace the existing land registry systems with the Hellenic Cadastre System (HCS) to increase legal certainty on land tenure. We ask how the main actors understood the problem and what must be done. We adopt a qualitative approach informed by expert interviews with actors involved in the HLAR reform. Preliminary findings show that the actors had competing views about the reform's main policy thrust and the means to implement the reform most effectively and efficiently.