Modernizing Insecurity: The Land Titling Project in Honduras

Abstract

The Honduran land titling project (the Proyecto de TitulacioÂn de Tierra para los PequenÄos Productores), initiated in 1982, was intended to enhance security in land rights, to facilitate credit and to improve agricultural productivity. This study explores how the project has operated in one village, and concludes that it has attained none of its objectives; instead, it has triggered new sources of land con¯icts, thus adding to the existing complex of local rules and laws. The authors argue that the failure of the project is not solely a consequence of the organizational incapacity of the bureaucracy, as some evaluations suggest, but that it is rooted in mistaken assumptions about the social organization of property rights and the causes of insecurity. The land titling project is founded on a contradiction: although based on the ideology of the capitalizing family farm in the context of a withdrawing state, its implementation actually requires strong and repressive state intervention. Rather than reducing insecurity in property rights, the project has merely`modernized' the sources which can be used to contest rights in land.

Land tenure and soil conservation practices on the slopes of Mt Elgon National Park, Eastern Uganda

“…The pronounced soil conservation under private land tenure can be attributed to the transferability, alienability, exclusivity, enforceability rights that secure such land holdings (Lee, 1980;Feeder and Feeny, 1991;Platteau, 1996;Gebremedhin and Swinton, 2003;Todaro and Smith, 2003;Deininger and Jin, 2006;Kaburo-Mariara, 2007;Kahsay, 2011); whilst the reason for tenure insecurity in Bunamulunyi seems to emanate from the separation of ownership from cultivation of the land thereby disincentivizing the farmers to invest in long term soil conservation (Jansen and Roquas, 1998;Maxwell and Wiebe, 1999;Esser et al, 2002;Wannasai and Shrestha, 2008). Feeder and Feeny (1991) further note that if for example, land ownership and user rights can be transferred from the holder at any point in time by forces outside his/her control and without his/her consent; it follows that the landholder would have little incentive to invest in land quality improving structures.…”

Legalising Land Rights : Local Practices, State Responses and Tenure Security in Africa, Asia and Latin America

“…There is some empirical evidence collected in Honduras, Bolivia, and Mexico showing that individual land titling projects have triggered new conflicts, not only because there may be various subjects with superposed agrarian rights or because of inheritance problems but also because of the incapacity of bureaucracies and the mistaken assumptions about social organisations' property rights (De Ita 2003;Hernáiz et al 2001;Jansen and Roquas 1998). Studies of processes of demarcating and titling common-property forestlands in Latin America do not describe the conflicts regarding land regularisation but are rather focused on understanding their history and the forces that come together and underlie the conflict (Offen 2003).…”

Land Tenure Insecurity and Inequality in Nicaragua

“…This new focus recognizes that the inherent social and economic complexities of property rights and tenure security (and the shortcomings of the state) must be included in the conceptual framework for dealing with tenure security. The re-conceptualization brings into the debate the idea that a lack of individual land titles does not necessarily mean that the land tenure is insecure, and that individual, formal titles may not significantly strengthen tenure security (Jansen and Roquas, 1998;Lemel, 1988;Place and Hazell, 1993;Place et al, 1994). This is because other elements, such as social networks, local norms and duration of possession, may actually create a high degree of tenure security, regardless of the possession of formal land titles (Coles-Coghi, 1993;Roquas, 2002).…”

“…1 manzana ¼ 0.7 hectares. power between households, 4 implying that land titles can provide tenure security to some households, but not to others (Jansen and Roquas, 1998). Influential econometric studies of land tenure in the late 1980s treated the possession of legal title as being equal to tenure security (for example , Feder et al, 1988).…”

“…This operational simplification suggested that households which possessed a land title were secure, whereas those households without such a title were not. However, this focus sidestepped the fact that, in many contexts, title possession is not necessarily equated with having a high level of tenure security (Broegaard, 2005;Coles-Coghi, 1993;Jansen and Roquas, 1998;Roquas, 2002;Wachter, 1997). The importance of the complex relationship between titles and security has increasingly been recognized in recent economic studies of land tenure (such as Carter and Olinto, 2003;de Laiglesia, 2004).…”