The controversy over the relative merits of customary and individual land tenure in Papua New Guinea and other island states of the South Pacific continues unabated. Steven Gosarevski, Helen Hughes and Susan Windybank (2004b) (hereafter cited Hughes as the senior author) stirred up a hornet’s nest by asserting ‘communal ownership has not permitted any country to develop. In Papua New Guinea, wh...

The MARORA model is used to evaluate the economics of investment in on-farm reservoirs in Arkansas under alternative land tenure arrangements. A declining groundwater supply coupled with a high percentage of rice-production area owned by absentee landowners makes investment decision-making on on-farm reservoirs an important issue for the sustainability of rice in Arkansas. The MARORA model is s...

This paper provides an introduction to best practice in land administration systems. It draws on a number of key documents such as the Land Administration Guidelines produced for the United Nations (UN) Economic Commission for Europe (1996), the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) Statement on the Cadastre (1995), the UN-FIG Bogor Declaration on Cadastral Reform (1996), the FIG Cadastre...

This paper was published in June 2003 as a chapter in: Roth, Michael, and Gonese, Francis eds. 2003. Delivering Land and Securing Rural Livelihoods: Post-Independence Land Reform and Resettlement in Zimbabwe. 2 Harare and Madison: Centre for Applied Social Sciences, University of Zimbabwe, and Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison. http://www.wisc.edu/ltc/zimbabwe/zimbooktoc.html ...

In the 1990s, official land policy debates in Southern Africa have become focused on two strategies: promoting freehold land markets to replace so-called customary tenure zones and expanding ‘commercial farming’ through market mechanisms. These two strategies are expected to resolve the escalating land problems. Yet, in the guise of promoting sustainable land use, environmental care, new agricu...

A model is proposed that will allow forest and land use policy options to be explored in a repeatable, objective and quantitative way. Construction and use of the model should lead to a better understanding of spatial and temporal land use patterns. It will provide detailed spatially-explicit data on a range of parameters to enable rigorous testing and offer insights for further development. Th...

Zambia has in the recent years witnessed domestic and international land boundary conflicts as a result of commercialization, urban-rural migration and high demand for customary land and its consequent translation into monetary values due to improper land demarcation system and partial documentation of customary land parcels. In this study we propose the utilization and integration of Informati...

The land tenure reform is the key to sustainable development in rural China. Without challenging the collective ownership of land, the land shareholding cooperative (LSC) system came into being and is being strongly endorsed by the authority: It re-collectivizes the contracted land from peasants and enables better regional planning and large-scale modern agricultural production. This paper stud...