Réforme agraire et administration des terres dans le cadre de partenariats secteur public/secteur privé: l'expérience de la région de la mer Noire
Au cours de l'histoire récente, la notion de terre en tant que bien a évolué d'une manière inconnue jusque-là, notamment dans les pays de l'Europe centrale et orientale (PECO). Au début du siècle, le régime foncier auquel étaient assujetties la plupart des populations de ces pays restait imprégné de féodalité. Les grandes réformes agraires du XIXe siècle n'ont touché que quelque 40 pour cent des populations rurales. Au XXe siècle, le système a fait l'objet pendant plusieurs dizaines d'années d'expérimentations de type socialiste. Les PECO abordent aujourd'hui le nouveau millénaire en étant de nouveau confrontés à la nécessité de redéfinir les liens de propriété qui unissent les hommes à la terre. Le document met en lumière l'expérience acquise par les pays ayant participé aux séminaires de la FAO sur les partenariats établis entre le secteur privé et le secteur public en matière de réforme des régimes fonciers et des structures administratives, tenus à Bertinoro. Bertinoro est un petit village de montagne du nord de l'Italie offrant une vue panoramique sur des exploitations agricoles anciennes, des coopératives vinicoles modernes et leurs vignobles, ainsi que des petites exploitations, qui sont de plus en plus assujetties à la réglementation de l'Union européenne. C'est face à ces différents types d'exploitation qui représentent autant de modes de faire-valoir que des représentants des PECO et de la Communauté des États indépendants (CEI) ont engagé une réflexion sur l'évolution en cours dans leurs pays d'origine. En 1998, les séminaires de Bertinoro ont porté plus particulièrement sur la région de la mer Noire. Des représentants de cette région, avec des participants venus d'Amérique du Nord, d'Australie et d'Europe occidentale, ont pu confronter leurs expériences en ce qui concerne la mise en place de services de gestion des terres dans leurs pays.
Reforma y administración agrarias con la colaboración de los sectores público y privado: enseñanzas extraídas de la región del mar Negro
La noción de tierra como propiedad ha atravesado por cambios sin precedentes en la historia reciente, especialmente en los países de Europa central y oriental. A comienzos del siglo, la mayoría de la población de estos países seguía viviendo bajo alguna forma residual de tenencia feudal de la tierra. Las grandes reformas agrarias del siglo XIX afectaron solamente a un 40 por ciento de la población rural. En el siglo XX la experimentación socialista duró décadas. Ahora estos países entran en el nuevo milenio con el reto de tener que volver a definir una vez más las relaciones de propiedad entre personas y tierras. En este artículo se ponen de relieve las experiencias vividas en países que han participado en los seminarios de la FAO sobre colaboración pública y privada en materia de reforma de la tenencia y administración agraria que se realizaron en Bertinoro, pequeña aldea de montaña del norte de Italia cercana a antiguas explotaciones agrícolas, modernos viñedos en régimen de cooperativa y explotaciones individuales, que actualmente están cada vez más reglamentadas por la Unión Europea. Con estas relaciones múltiples en materia de tenencia de tierras como telón de fondo, representantes de los países de Europa central y oriental y de la Comunidad de Estados Independientes acudieron a Bertinoro para reflexionar sobre los cambios que se están verificando en sus propios países. En 1998, en los seminarios se estudió la región del mar Negro. Junto con representantes de Australia, América del Norte y Europa occidental, los participantes procedentes de aquella región compartieron sus experiencias sobre el desarrollo de la administración agraria en sus respectivos países.
S. Nichols, J. Riddell and P.
Toselli
Sue Nichols is at the Department of Geodesy and Geomatics
Engineering, University of New Brunswick, PO Box 4400, Fredericton, New
Brunswick, Canada. Jim Riddell is Chief of the Land Tenure Service in FAO's
Rural Development Division. Paolo Toselli is a Land Tenure Consultant in the
same service
The concept of land as property has gone through unprecedented changes in recent history, especially in Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC). At the beginning of the twentieth century, most people in these countries still lived under some residual form of feudal land tenure; the great land reforms of the nineteenth century had only affected about 40 percent of the rural population. These were followed by decades of socialist experimentation in the twentieth century. Now the CEEC are entering the new millennium with the challenge of, once again, redefining the property relationships between people and the land. This article highlights experiences in countries that have participated in the FAO seminars on private and public partnerships in land tenure and administrative reform, held at Bertinoro1. Bertinoro is a small mountain village in northern Italy with a panoramic view of ancient agricultural holdings, modern cooperative vineyards and
individual farms which are now increasingly subject to European Union regulation. With these multiple tenure relationships as a backdrop, representatives from the CEEC and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) have come to Bertinoro to reflect upon the changes occurring in their own countries. In 1998, the focus of the Bertinoro seminars was the Black Sea region. Together with representatives from Australia, North America and Western Europe, participants from the region shared experiences on the development of land administration in their countries. The main objective of this article is to summarize and expand upon the seminar discussions relating to private sector participation in land administration. In order to put the Black Sea region into context, the article first considers the objectives of the seminars and then briefly explores the enormity of the land tenure challenges and current developments in land administration.
Between the First and Second World Wars, land tenure
reform was the engine for remarkable agricultural development in almost all of
the countries that have participated in the Bertinoro seminars. This process was
still being developed when Europe was swept into the maelstrom of the Second
World War, so it is not surprising that the rhetoric, as well as the policy
initiatives, of post-war reconstruction both discussed and tried to finish the
land reform begun in the pre-war period (Riddell, 1995)2.
Almost all
vestiges of feudalism in Europe had been swept away by war, and a new society
emerged from indescribable suffering. National Socialism was also defeated. This
basically left two models for completing the interrupted land reform: liberal
democracy or Soviet-led socialization of landed property.
When the Soviet
experiment ended with remarkable suddenness in the late 1980s, the world saw for
the first time a community faced with transforming, immediately, the land tenure
systems of millions of well-educated people living in industrialized societies.
Land registry and property inventories had to be re-created rapidly to meet the
new needs of people who were securing and making transactions on their
restituted property. Such a situation demanded a highly technical solution, and
it is not surprising that the same technological innovations in geomatics and
space sciences that had served the cold war so well should find such a ready
application in creating new cadastral systems.
Why then has it proved so
difficult to make the transition from social property models to those of a
market economy? This question was raised in 1996 by a group of experts who met
informally at FAO. They observed that, in many western countries, while
technology was recognized as a driving force in cadastral reform, the ultimate
challenge was actually getting the appropriate policy and institutional
arrangements in place. In particular, they noted that there has been a growing
trend among countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) to decentralize and to outsource formerly public sector
functions to the private sector in order to improve efficiency and
effectiveness. Increasingly, it is the specialized private firms in these
countries that are responsible for the rapid developments taking place in
cadastral, land registry and land information system (LIS) reform. Yet, despite
these trends, almost all official aid for land tenure reform in the former
socialist countries has been flowing to the centralized governmental structures.
As a result of this informal meeting, FAO and Italeco (the LIS unit of the
Italian Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale [IRI] Group) organized a
high-level technical seminar for heads of lands departments in the CEEC and CIS
to discuss the potential role of the private sector in the projected land
transformations. The first Bertinoro seminar took place in April 1997, and
focused on the Baltic states. Western experts discussed examples of "best
practice" outsourcing of land administration tasks to the private sector.
Another important focus of the seminars has been the impact of land reform on
local government initiatives, in particular the need to provide land
administration services at the local level3. This proved to be very important, because it forced a shift of discussion from state-of-the-art technology to overcoming the constraints that people have in using the land tenure institutions on a daily basis (Riddell, 1997). The 1998 Bertinoro II seminar, which is described in greater detail in this article, focused on nations surrounding the Black Sea. Bertinoro III in November 1999, addressed particular problems in southeastern Europe, including the Balkans.
The Black Sea region has always played a pivotal role in world history. It is the meeting point of Europe, Eurasia and the Near East. Great empires met there to trade goods and ideas, great contributions to world culture were born on its shores and great wars have contested its control. This section reviews some of the impacts of four priority issues which were raised at Bertinoro II: restitution; decollectivization; privatization; and consolidation.
Restitution is the process of restoring property rights
to those defined as legitimate owners, after such owners have been deprived of
their rights. In the case of the Russian Federation, for example, restitution
would mean determining who the original owners of the land were before the 1917
revolution and recognizing these persons as the legitimate owners today. Since
this process would be nearly impossible and would cause great social disruption
with claims dating back 60 or 70 years, countries such as the Russia Federation
and Ukraine have not recognized pre-existing claims to land or buildings
(Ivashchenko, 1998).
In Central Europe, restitution is a very large part of
the land reform process. Owing to inheritance patterns and laws that divide
property among multiple heirs, the number of claims has often been higher than
expected4. The large number of parcels required to be restituted has therefore
resulted in relatively small, and sometimes fragmented, landholdings.
Physical and economic changes over the last four or more decades complicate
both the land assets that may be claimed during restitution and the amount of
compensation to be paid. Plots that had little infrastructure may now have
drainage and irrigation facilities or perhaps new buildings. Collectivization
often resulted in consolidation of fields, construction of new facilities such as roads and destruction or construction of buildings. The economic value may also have changed because plots previously located close to villages may now be far away, while parcels that were once remote may be adjacent to thriving communities (Swinnen, 1997). The process of determining the changes in economic value and, thus, the actual amount of compensation can, therefore, be complex. The situation is further complicated because the information needed to evaluate claims is often incomplete, diverse and inconsistent, leaving grounds for counterclaims and disputes5.
An important aspect of the move to a market-based land
economy in the CEEC and CIS is the break-up of large collective and state farms.
In the past, some of these farms, organized as either cooperatives or state
enterprises, supported 4 000 to 5 000 people, including teachers, doctors and
other special service people. One goal of land reform has been to create smaller
farms as autonomous production units independent of the government (Rabinowicz
and Swinnen, 1997).
Decollectivization generally includes the following processes:
In the Russia Federation, among other countries, shares in the farms have by now been allocated to most farm members (Alakoz and Overchuk, 1998). However, owing to a lack of individual capital and a long tradition of shared labour, many members have not alienated their farm shares in terms of individual (or family) land parcels. In some cases, individuals have grouped shares together to form smaller cooperative units. Even then, decollectivization and privatization have had mixed results. In the Kaliningrad region of the Russian Federation, for example, approximately one-third of the decollectivized farm units have succeeded, one-third have failed and the remaining third are economically marginal (Ford et al., 1998).
Privatization with the goal of developing land markets
has been the major thrust of land reform in the CEEC and CIS since the early
1990s. Many advisers at that time believed that the process would be as simple
as the privatization of companies, industrial complexes and other formerly
state-owned enterprises. However, the sheer magnitude of privatizing all
apartments, buildings, garden plots, dachas and farms, together with the need to
build administrative systems to support and secure private ownership and
transactions, have led to a much slower and ever-evolving privatization process.
Property markets depend on certainty of identity. If there are ambiguities
(e.g. as to who is the owner of the rights, the quality and security of the
rights or the location of the land), the value of the property is lessened
(Riddell, 1997). Another factor affecting the development of land markets is the
level of trust people have in the institutions that govern the markets. While
the markets for apartments and smaller properties such as garden plots have
begun to develop in the CEEC and CIS, the land market is limited by many
factors.
Some of the major problems encountered in privatization and in developing property markets include the following (which are discussed in more detail in the section on Land administration with private-public sector partnerships on p. 27):
Another critical issue in the Black Sea region is, and
will be increasingly, consolidation of the excessively fragmented land parcels.
Fragmentation is often created by inheritance patterns (e.g. Western Europe and
Turkey), but it is now also occurring during the restitution process (too many
claims) and in decollectivization and privatization (including claims to land
made by non-farm workers and urban citizens). The result is that individual farm
units are generally too small to be economically viable or to use technology
efficiently. A related problem occurs when small scattered tracts of land are
distributed, to ensure that each landholder receives a share of vineyards,
pasture and cropland, for example. Excessive fragmentation is already very
evident in the Russian Federation, Ukraine and other Black Sea countries.
Consolidation is the process of combining two or more parcels of land to
form a more economic and geographically cohesive unit. It also often involves
reordering of the land parcels and development of new infrastructure. One form
of consolidation is through market processes in which, over time, more efficient
farmers succeed in purchasing or leasing neighbouring land. Other consolidation
processes are government-directed programmes where land rights in an area are
purchased, new parcel structures are designed, rights are allocated to some
former landholders and others are compensated. Experience has shown that
consolidation is a very long process, requiring long-term political support and
a high degree of community awareness of the problems created by fragmentation
and the benefits of consolidation.
At the Bertinoro II seminar, representatives from Turkey explained their land consolidation projects in depth. These programmes are striving to improve working conditions and incomes for farmers by increasing crop production per unit area. Land consolidation activities in Turkey are generally implemented as a component of farm development works, but they may also be integrated with major development projects, such as dams, roads or railways. Land consolidation is also applied in areas that require agricultural irrigation techniques and soil conservation measures (Dursun, 1998). The Turkish representatives stressed the need for close cooperation between government organizations and the private sector in order to complete the massive programmes under way7 . Private-public sector partnership activities may include cadastral surveys, remote sensing, establishment of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and/or LIS, irrigation and socio-economic studies (Basaran, 1998).
The theme of Bertinoro II was private-public sector partnerships. While private sector arrangements are emerging in the Black Sea region, discussion on this issue was largely centred on some of the obstacles encountered and examples of options and lessons learned from Australia, Europe and North America. This section of the article builds on the conference discussions to highlight the potential role of private-public sector partnerships in developing appropriate and sustainable land administration solutions.
During the last decade, changes in land policy and administration in the CEEC and CIS have been of an intensity that is almost unprecedented. Some of the problems that need to be solved are a direct consequence of previous policies, such as expropriation and collectivization. Others stem from the need to reconstruct institutional and administrative arrangements in order to implement the new land policies. Still others will eventually be viewed as arising from the transition process itself, for example, from:
With such a rapid change, it is understandable that
solutions have been implemented before the breadth and depth of the real
problems have been well understood. For instance, land reform (redistribution of
property rights) has been confused with agrarian reform (which focuses more on
means of production). Restitution, decollectivization and privatization have
sometimes been viewed as the solution to rural development. This has been at the
expense of providing more substantial security of tenure and agricultural
production through financing, transportation and other agricultural
infrastructure. Privatization alone cannot solve the problems of agrarian
production and, in fact, privatization and restitution policies may create new
problems such as extreme parcel fragmentation, as discussed in the previous
section (Swinnen, 1997).
Similarly, on the land market side, some of the
underlying property problems have yet to be tackled adequately. These include
methodologies for determining market values and implementation of appropriate
lending legislation. The rush to create market-based property structures has
left unresolved such issues as social security, lack of housing, environmental
degradation and access to sufficient financial resources to make a property unit
economically viable.
How does an understanding of the real problems relate to
private-public sector partnerships? One of the key arguments is that only
through mobilization of the private sector will countries have the necessary
capacity to carry out broad reforms and be able to take steps to resolve the underlying issues. A second factor is that the private sector is critical to decentralization, and this implies relatively low staffing levels in local offices. Decentralization is essential if government officers are to understand what is happening on the ground and be able to develop the flexible interagency relationships required for integrated land policies. In addition, the private sector can generally adapt more efficiently to changing conditions than can governments which are controlled by annual budgets and long-term planning. Furthermore, the private sector can help bridge the communication gap between government and citizens, lobbying governments to address problems as they arise and to make complicated procedures transparent to the citizens.
The 1990s will be remembered, among other things, for the
institutional re-engineering in the CEEC and CIS. Organizational restructuring
has occurred from the national to local and farm levels with a general, albeit
not uniform, trend towards decentralization of authority. The structures that
have evolved sometimes differ within a country, as well as between countries,
depending on politics, capacity and opportunities. The creation of land
committees and national centres for geodesy, cartography and cadastre is common.
New roles have sometimes been designed for municipal housing offices (within
bureaus of technical inventory) and city architects. A major gap still to be
filled is the provision of services by the ministries of justice at the regional
and local levels.
In all the CIS and CEEC, the responsibility for land administration (registration, surveying, mapping, valuation, land regulation) is split among several agencies. During the summer of 1998, the Russian Federation had begun to amalgamate most of these functions under one government ministry, coordinating with the Ministry of Justice and other agencies at both national and local levels (Ford et al., 1998). However, the
original structure was reinstated by a new prime minister at the time of the
Bertinoro II seminar. Other countries (e.g. Georgia and Ukraine) have formed
national bodies to facilitate interagency coordination in land administration.
Despite the organizational problems at the national level, as a general rule,
agencies at the local level have developed effective working relationships.
Integration of the private sector in these relationships has been sporadic. The major difficulties encountered have included:
A major issue cited by participants at Bertinoro was the
need to establish an appropriate legal basis for the reforms. Some countries,
such as Romania and Bulgaria, managed to get critical legislation in place
relatively soon after reforms began. Others, such as the Russian Federation and
Ukraine, are still operating without an effective legal basis to guide the
nature and extent of privatization, land transfer and/or taxation. This has not
prevented land redistribution, privatization and, in some cases, land transfers
from occurring, but it has led to some uncertainty on the part of public
authorities (and private developers) as to their roles and responsibilities.
This situation is further complicated where municipal or regional governments
have passed laws that conflict with the prevailing national policy.
In
addition to land codes and basic legislation related to land privatization,
registration and transfer, auxiliary legislation is required on issues such as
mortgaging, inheritance, condominiums and the valuation and taxation of land and
buildings (UN, 1996). In draft and, sometimes, adopted legislation, there have
been conflicts among proposed laws, for example in terms of jurisdictional
authority, definition of property units and property rights, and the legal
effects of documentation and registration. The situation is further complicated
by the fact that most regulations pursuant to the legislation are still being
drafted. At the local level, systems have been implemented on the basis of
national norms, local and regional adaptations and even regulations drafted by
foreign consultants in pilot projects.
A fledgling private sector has
developed to some degree, despite these legal uncertainties. Legislation that
privatizes notaries has created new opportunities for conveyancing specialists.
Surveyors and real estate companies have thrived, especially in areas where a
viable property market has developed (e.g. in cities) or where large surveying
and mapping projects have encouraged private sector participation (e.g. in the
Republic of Moldova). Courses in market valuation techniques were among the
first land administration projects supported by the World Bank and others and,
in Bulgaria for instance, this valuation expertise has spawned a new private
sector activity.
In the future, the following will be critical to private sector development:
The effectiveness of land administration in meeting
specific objectives depends directly on how well property information is managed
(Nichols, 1993). One of the greatest changes in the CEEC and CIS is that the
objectives have changed from land use control to supporting more open land
markets. These countries have a long tradition of collecting and storing
detailed information about the quality of rural land and about land use and
buildings in urban areas. While this information is an invaluable resource for
planning and land use monitoring, government organizations must now ensure that
information management also supports land administration in a market economy.
There is therefore a need to redefine both the kinds of information that is
collected and the ways in which it is managed.
A land information management strategy to support land administration in the CEEC and CIS should have the following objectives:
The private sector has an important role to play in the management of the information resource. It is in the various data collection, storage and updating activities that governments in other countries have found their partnerships with the private sector to be, not only beneficial but, as government budgets have been slashed, also essential (Lanphier, 1998; Nichols, 1998; Hayward, 1997). The opportunities range from contracting out aerial photography and field surveying to outsourcing the management of land registration information and quality control.
Traditionally, governments provided the necessary
infrastructure for achieving basic social, economic and environmental goals.
Today, however, economic conditions have caused governments to look for ways to
provide the necessary products and services more efficiently. At the same time,
the private sector is looking for opportunities to increase its economic gains.
When arrangements can be made to satisfy both needs, some form of partnership
can be created.
A partnership is an agreement to share resources for mutual
benefit in order to meet some of the objectives of each stakeholder. Each
stakeholder provides something that the other(s) need or can benefit from. As
noted in the previous section, partnerships may vary from short-term contracts
to carry out a specific activity (e.g. technology implementation) to outsourcing
entire operations such as maintaining the land register or the valuation of
land.
Involving the private sector in public affairs also creates risks, and
partnership arrangements should be designed to minimize the risks to government
and society. If the cost of risks is less than the benefits achieved, a
partnership may be appropriate. The positive externalities in the general
economy of having a strong private sector (e.g. employment, corporate taxes and
investment) should be included among the benefits.
To minimize the risks, some of the issues that need to be clarified in such partnership arrangements are:
A priority issue in land administration in any country is system and programme financing. In the CEEC and CIS this issue is even more critical because financing from national budgets is more uncertain. The Bertinoro II participants therefore raised important questions such as:
Achieving revenues that can offset part or all of the operating costs has become a driving force for changes in how organizations view their activities and roles. For example, Westerbeek (1998) points out that the Dutch Kadastre has been able to finance rural cadastre activities from those in urban areas. Partnerships can also provide financial advantages in other ways. For example, municipalities and utility firms can often provide some of the up-front financing for mapping programmes in return for downstream benefits such as receiving updates at nominal costs (Sousa et al.,
1994).
Land administration organizations worldwide have also begun to shift
from being production-oriented to becoming client-oriented. This shift has a
number of implications for increasing revenues and reducing costs,
including:
One of the advantages of outsourcing is the fact that the
private sector becomes responsible for much of the capital investment (Lanphier,
1998). This is especially advantageous when activities involve information
technologies (photogrammetric processing, GIS, computers) that are rapidly
changing. Outsourcing puts the burden of keeping technologically up-to-date (and
therefore cost-efficient) on the private sector. The private sector has an
incentive to keep costs down and can respond to technological change much more
rapidly.
Outsourcing also enables governments to reduce the burden of having large staffs. As in the case of technology, staff often need expensive retraining as technology, procedures and even roles change. The private sector has more freedom to hire appropriately trained people as needed.
At Bertinoro II, many other issues related to land administration and land reform policy were discussed and, in some cases, hotly debated. Key points are reviewed briefly here to reflect what Bertinoro participants believe will be important if the reforms are to succeed.
Implementation of significantly new land administration arrangements, including land
registration and valuation systems, is an activity that can span decades. It may
also be years before real benefits are realized from complex agrarian reforms.
Thus, an important consideration for land administration organizations is: how
can the necessary political support be maintained over the life of the
reforms?
Experience in other countries, such as Canada, Sweden, Australia and
New Zealand, has shown that land administration reforms are very sensitive to
changes in governments and government policies. Reorganization and budget cuts have the most obvious impacts on long-term reforms, but even relatively minor policy shifts can result in the need to modify priorities and systems. To endure and succeed, land administrators may draw on some of the strategies used with success in other countries (McLaughlin and Nichols, 1987). These strategies include the needs to:
Many of the pilot projects conducted in the CEEC and CIS
have had communications components. Some of the strategies adopted have included
mass media broadcasts on the value of privatization and on project
accomplishments, public seminars for stakeholders, short courses for employees
and public meetings to explain the scope and benefits of a proposed project.
Countries can also draw on experiences in other countries, for example the
broad-based public awareness campaign in Peru which contributed to community
participation in grassroots registry reform (McLaughlin and Palmer,
1996).
The benefits of land administration reform are not readily apparent to
the public. Sometimes reforms are even viewed negatively, especially when people
see them as just another taxation strategy, when there are security and
confidentiality risks or when there is concern over potential loss of jobs owing
to computerization or reorganization. Land administrators should therefore be
prepared to address such concerns adequately.
One of the key challenges in
any public awareness campaign is to relate the programme or project to the needs, fears and expectations of the particular audience. Overcoming resistance to change may also be necessary when communicating with employees within the organization, especially in regional and district offices, and with government offices and the private sector, who may be affected by the reforms. Providing special assistance in using the system can often belay fears the public or employees may have; demonstrations are usually helpful. Once again, the private sector and professional organizations can also play a role, especially at the local level.
As organizations begin to struggle with issues such as
long-term financing and political support, there is an increasing need to
interact with other agencies to share data. Thus, while the funding for a pilot
project may, in theory, allow one agency to collect and manage information
independently, in the real world of fiscal restraints, this is a non-sustainable
luxury.
A prime impediment to data sharing is lack of cooperation and
coordination among government departments. One strategy to overcome this
obstacle is the development of a government-wide information policy that
explicitly recognizes land-related information as a shared corporate resource.
However, much of the necessary cooperation will still depend on
intergovernmental relations, and this is one reason why local-level coordination
is usually much easier to establish than a general policy.
Other strategies that can increase the ability to share data include:
Duplication of data management will probably never be eliminated completely. However, the excessive costs of duplication can be reduced, and in the long term the benefits are shared by all users.
It is recognized that the development of radical land administration and property reforms in the evolving institutional environments found in some CEEC and CIS states is a challenge that few land administrators in other countries would envy. Given this, there is still a need to develop guidelines for minimizing the negative impacts of institutional change. In addition to the points noted above, some of the strategies to respond to change that have been used in the Black Sea countries and elsewhere include:
Re-engineering land administration in the CEEC and CIS has begun to meet such
objectives as economic development, creation of market economies, equitable land
distribution and efficient land use. Within a decade, governments have been able
to modify legal foundations and organizational structures radically. A majority
of urban and rural citizens have received land share certificates, certificates
of title and other evidence of their property rights. This rapid and notable
success must be appreciated in the context of the larger economic, political and
social changes that these countries have absorbed.
The tasks ahead are still
daunting. The Bertinoro seminars have provided a forum for discussing how the
role of the private sector can be strengthened to assist the public sector in
carrying out these tasks. Examples from other continents have shown that this is
an evolutionary process with a variety of partnership arrangements in which both
partners must be open to new ideas and opportunities.
Governments need to
foster capacity building in the private sector, through education, licensing and
provision of work. In turn, the private sector needs to earn the trust of
governments and the general public, and this is a long-term incremental process.
To minimize the risks to themselves and to the public they serve, governments
need to have clear objectives and standards against which the quality of private
sector products and services can be measured. In return, the private sector must
be innovative in its approaches to finding solutions to the real problems of
land administration.
Private-public partnerships are relationships that
change over time to meet reciprocal needs. The private sector is already playing
a greater role in land administration in the CEEC and CIS than it did in many
western nations several decades ago. Bertinoro III will therefore continue in
the role of providing a forum for sharing experiences and finding
solutions.
1 The Bertinoro seminars were sponsored by FAO, Italeco SpA Gruppo IRI Iritecna, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Emilia Romagna regional government, with additional support and participation from the University of Bologna and from Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands and the United States.
2 It is also not surprising, therefore, that FAO, having been founded in 1945, should have as its mandate the provision of assistance to its member countries in completing their land reform processes.
3The choice of Emilia Romagna and the provinces of Bologna and Forli to assist in the Bertinoro seminars was no accident. Not only does Emilia Romagna have one of the most successful regional governments in Italy, in terms of stimulating balanced, ecologically sustainable economic growth, but it is also a model of decentralized governance and democracy that is well recognized in the literature (Putnam, 1993; Carmagnani and Gordillo, 1997). Part of this success is attributed to the important role of enlisting the cooperation of high-quality professional services from the private sector. The provincial governments of Bologna and Forli also joined in the enterprise with major civic and professional contributions.
4"By the enactment and implementation of the Land Law, we are facing the danger of deepening the process of land fragmentation. This is being caused by the inheritance laws and by the need to restitute land back to its old and new owners. So far it is not clear how many inheritors of land there are in Bulgaria, but it is clear that their number will be much higher than that of the original owners." (Trendafilov, 1998).
5For example, collective farmers have claimed compensation for improvements to the land, including infrastructure and buildings, when collective farmland is returned to original owners. Trendafilov (1998) also notes that in Bulgaria: "conflicts resulting from the imposition of excessive government-imposed compensation fees (about 20 000 Leva per ha) for irrigation infrastructure or tree plantations have, in some cases, brought about destruction of these assets in an attempt to avoid payment."
6In some countries, attempts have been made to amalgamate the various organizations, but these have been constrained by budgets, political will and competition among the agencies. In Georgia, for instance, the Georgian State Department of Land Management has been designated as responsible for the creation of the civil land market, including coordinating the projects and programmes of international donor organizations, local government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the private sector (Eigiashvili and Gotsiridze, 1998).
7For example, the Southern Anatolia Region Project (GAP) consolidation initiative involved 20 000 ha of the Sanliurfa plains and 43 744 ha of the Harran plains. Bidding preparations for work to be contracted out on the remaining 60 000 ha are under way (Basaran, 1998).
8For example, in the mid-1980s in South Australia, land administrators were able to produce a composite digital map showing property holdings and fire hazards, which politicians could use in the legislature days after a major bush fire near the city of Adelaide. This helped to ensure political support for the computerized mapping project.
9In Sweden, the Central Bank for Real Estate Data focused on computerizing textual, rather than graphic, property data, in the knowledge that these were the data that many users wanted daily and were willing to pay for. When a change of government occurred in the early 1980s, users (e.g. banks and real estate firms) who had become dependent on the service demanded that the programme be completed.
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