In 1996, at the Habitat II Conference, many countries committed themselves to “Promoting optimal use of productive land in urban and rural areas and protecting fragile ecosystems and environmentally vulnerable areas from the negative impacts of human settlements, inter alia, through developing and supporting the implementation of improved land management practices. (UNCHS 1996).

Access to land and security for credit are vital components of sustainable development and good land management practice; every State needs to ensure that efficient and effective land administration mechanisms are in place.

Land is a physical thing that encompasses the surface of the earth and all things attached to it both above and below. It is also an abstract thing that is manifest as a set of rights to its use with a value that can be traded even though the physical object cannot be moved.

The term “land administration” is used here to refer to those public sector activities required to support the alienation, development, use, valuation, and transfer of land.

The relationship between human beings and the land is of fundamental importance in every society and is evident in the form of property rights.

This relationship has evolved in many different ways, from full state control, through communal forms of tenure, to the individual property rights.

In the land reform programmes of the 1960s, especially in Africa, new land tenure arrangements such as the granting of individual freehold rights were introduced, often contrary to traditional custom and practice.

In the reforms of today; especially in east and central Europe, the land restitution programmes have reprivatize land previously owned by individuals.

They have also granted first-time rights of private ownership to what was formerly state-owned land, on the basis of the traditions of the past, thus reinforcing old land tenure arrangements.

At one time it was a common practice to equate land with soil.

One of the first points made in the 1976 FAO Framework for land evaluation was that land, regarded as a basis for agriculture and other rural land use activities, includes also the climate, vegetation, slope conditions, and other natural resources.

Hence the Framework defined land as an area of the earth's surface, the characteristics of which embrace all reasonably stable, or predictably cyclic, attributes of the biosphere vertically above and below this area, including those of the atmosphere, the soil and underlying geology, the hydrology, the plant and animal populations, and the results of past and present human activity, to the extent that these attributes exert a significant influence on present and future uses of the land by humans.

This view of land and land resources takes into account the physio-biotic and socio-economic resources of the physical entity.

The UN definition (UN 1995) places more explicit emphasis on environmental aspects.

The UN defines land as a delineable area of the earth’s terrestrial surface, encompassing all attributes of the biosphere immediately above or below this surface including those of the near-surface climate, the soil and terrain forms, the surface hydrology (including shallow lakes, rivers, marshes and swamps), the near-surface sedimentary layers and associated groundwater reserve, the plant and animal populations, the human settlement pattern and physical results of past and present human activity (terracing, water storage or drainage structures, infrastructure, buildings, etc.).

According to Sombroek and Sims (1995), the above definition conforms to land system units, landscape-ecological units or “unités de terror”, as building blocks of a catchment or a biome.

This is distinct from the administrative unit of land (“territoires”), which is intrinsically linked to an ownership or political unit, and may encompass a number of natural units or parts of them.

The components of the natural land unit (e.g. physical, biotic, environmental, infrastructural, socio-economic) are termed land resources.

Included in the land resources are surface and near-surface freshwater resources for reasons of management.

Major freshwater bodies, underground geological resources and deeper geohydrological resources are excluded and considered a separate resource.

Land, together with its associated buildings and construction, is one of the most important financial assets in any country.

Every investment is in some way or another dependent on land and property.

Without land no shop or factory can be built, no road or railway constructed, there can be no schools or hospitals, and there can be no government or private sector buildings.

Without the security of title to land or buildings it is difficult to obtain investment funds and venture capital.

Poor land administration is an impediment to the growth of an economy-banks for example are hesitant to meet the needs for financing without security of title, because of the higher costs and more significant risks.

Legal security of land tenure facilitates mortgage-based investment financing for small and middle-scale businesses and underpins the physical infrastructure of almost all commercial operations.

Good land administration contributes to economic development in a number of ways.

It provides security to investors and permits real estate to be traded in the market place.

It also allows governments to raise taxes on the basis of the value of land and property, either at the time of land transfer (in the form of Stamp Duty or a transfer tax) or directly and annually on the estimated worth of the land or property.

This is tantamount to a tax on wealth and has the further advantage that unlike personal income, buildings and the land on which they stand cannot easily be hidden from the tax collector.

With good land administration, land and property taxes are easier to administer and can lead to the collection of substantial revenue.

Land and property are financial assets and can attract significant amounts of inward investment.

A study by the Economist Intelligence Unit into global direct investment noted the importance of real estate and the property sector in foreign direct investment (FDI).

It suggested that:

While there is no doubt as to the importance of FDI in the world economy, the importance of real estate in FDI is difficult to gauge …

Statistics on foreign direct investment flows into real estate are not standardized.

Sectoral breakdowns of FDI flows largely ignore the property market, as most statistical agencies regard real estate as a special case…

However, a rough estimate on the basis of existing data would imply that the real estate component of FDI could be anywhere between 5%-20% of the total.

One of the conclusions of the report was that:

There is a danger of a mismatch between a liberalized global economy with strong free capital flows and a heavily restricted real estate sector burdened by country-specific restrictions.

The results will be barriers to FDI and trade.

Global harmonization of property markets and standardization of rules and regulations governing real estate are necessary steps to boosting investor confidence.

The Function of Land Administration

A land administration system provides a mechanism that supports the management of real property.

The processes of land administration include the regulating of land and property development, the use and conversation of the land, the gathering of revenues from the land through sales, leasing, and taxation; and the resolving of conflicts concerning the ownership and use of the land.

The basic building block in any land administration system is the cadastral parcel.

The cadastral parcel is a uniquely delimited tract of land within which a coherent set of definable property interests is recognized.

In theory the parcel envelops a continuous volume of land and a continuous set of interests, although there are many exceptions to this rule.

Land administration functions may be divided into four components: juridical, regulatory, fiscal, and information management.

These functions of land administration are traditionally organized around three sets of agencies responsible for surveying and mapping, land registration, and land valuation.

Each of these agencies collects data and makes them available to the public.