Toward responsible land administration

The motivation of the coeditors of this book came from several observations and experiences in land administration throughout the world. The first is the recognition that many titling programs do not seem to generate the anticipated results, either because the speed with which titles or some form of land rights are delivered is far from sufficient or, perhaps more so, because many of the conventional approaches seem to fail in providing a minimum form of tenure security for the most vulnerable (Zevenbergen et al. 2013). Estimates suggest that less than a quarter of the countries in the world maintain complete land administration systems. This would translate into an estimate of 4 billion of the world’s 6 billion land tenures remaining outside formal governance arrangements. In these cases, information about people and the land they use remains unrecorded and obscure to governments, firms, or citizens, and reversely, citizens, firms, or governments cannot legally claim their rights to land. The situation prolongs the conditions of the already 1 billion people who live in slums with insecure tenure and of rural migrants entering these informal settlement areas every day, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.