Land registration and titling in Africa are often advocated as a pro-poor legal empowerment strategy. Advocates have put forth different visions of the substantive goals this is to achieve. Some see registration and titling as a way to protect smallholdersrights of access to land. Others frame land registration as part of community-protection or ethno-justice agendas. Still others see legal empowerment in the market-enhancing commodification of property rights. This paper contrasts these different visions;showing that each entails tensions and trade-offs.

This article argues that while we know that the demand for land and natural resources has significantly accelerated in the last decade;it remains very difficult to gauge the exact size of the land rush. Many studies that look into how much land is affected give vastly diverging numbers. Local elites and diaspora investors are known for controlling large areas in their home countries and their activities tend to be even less transparent than those of international investors. Many studies choose not to include domestic investors.

The land crises and large-scale land grabs affecting many African countries today stem from historical and colonial mistakes whose problems remain. The systems;policies and laws that are being pushed to “register” and “formalise” land ownership do not put into consideration the cultural and historical aspects that govern land in many countries on the continent. Professor Sam Lwanga Lunyiigo asks pertinent questions about this push and about implications of customary land registration in Uganda.

Introduction of geoinformation technologies for building up a modern land management system in Georgia goes back to mid-1990s. This has been stimulated by start of land reform resulting in privatization of over 3 million agricultural land plots in whole in the entire country. These new properties were to be properly surveyed, registered and recorded in a newly established cadastral system with the aim of launching free market transactions.

The Global Programme 'Responsible Land Policy' (GPRLP) is part of the Special Initiative 'One World, No Hunger' of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), which aims to reduce extreme poverty and hunger.

At its sixty-first session in September 2000, the ECE Committee on Human Settlements accepted the proposal of the Bureau of the Working Party on Land Administration to provide expert assistance to Armenia on land administration issues (ECE/HBP/119, annex I, programme element “Land registration and land markets”). Security of tenure is one of the most important factors in fighting poverty and stabilizing communities by improving housing conditions through housing investments, reducing social exclusion, improving access to urban services, environment and safety in urban areas.

La présente ordonnance porte orientation de l'urbanisme en République Gabonaise. A cet effet, elle fixe la planification urbaine. Il s’agit notamment documents de planification urbaine (le Schéma Directeur d'Aménagement et d'Urbanisme (SDAU); le Plan d'Occupation des Sols (POS); Plan Directeur d'Urbanisme (PDU); Plan de Secteur (SMART CODE); Plan d’Aménagement de Zone (PAZ); Règlement National d’urbanisme (RNU).

The Thailand Land Titling Project is an outstanding success story of inter-agency cooperation and received the World Bank Award for Excellence in 1997. It was designed as a four-phase project over 20 years and will finish in 2004. The project partners the Royal Thai Government, the Bank, and the government of Australia provided funds and personnel, with the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) supplying technical assistance and training programs to the Department of Lands (Thailand).

To properly govern people-to-land relationships, there is a need to formally recognize land rights, and for this to bring recognizable societal change, the established Land Information System (LIS) has to be updated continuously. Though existing literature suggests different parameters to consider when updating an LIS, little is said on how countries are doing this, especially when unconventional approaches through systematic land registration were initially used. This paper comes up with recommendable good practices where the suggested needs for updating land records were made workable.

Mozambique started a massive land registration program to register five million parcels and delimitate four thousand communities. The results of the first two years of this program illustrated that the conventional methods utilized for the land tenure registration were too expensive and time-consuming and faced several data quality problems.

Land administration is established to manage the people-to-land relationship. However, it is believed that 70% of the land in developing countries is unregistered. In the case of Ecuador, the government has an ambitious strategy to implement a national cadaster on the full territory in a short time period. Therefore, the objective of this study was the assessment of land administration in Ecuador based on the fit-for-purpose approach as an assessment framework.