Bringing Land Rights to Scale through a Market-Driven Legal Aid Model
Tiernan Mennen
National laws to protect land rights are plentiful and often surprisingly robust. Their enforcement is not. A critical challenge to advancing land rights and strengthening tenure at the country level is the effective enforcement of well-written land laws and legal frameworks to property. New and/or well-intentioned laws can often create more harm than good by falling prey to elite capture. Institutions such as surveyors, notaries, land agency officials, and local government officers can be utilized to turn good laws in to bad practice that strips the poor and vulnerable of their land. To combat this elite-capture all internationally supported land reform programs need to contain a strong legal assistance component. Most, however, do not and even fewer are able to develop and support sustainable systems based on indigenous institutions that can accompany the often long, extended land reform processes. This article details recent field work to fill this gap and proposes a model for sustainable land rights legal assistance that can be scaled-up to provide access beyond the means of most internationally supported programs and in support of large scale land tenure regularization programs. By ensuring the wide availability of legal services at low cost to land holders the program addresses issues of scale and sustainability that plague international land projects with limited funding windows. Bringing extensive legal assistance for land rights can counteract the power dynamics that often undermine land titling efforts and can empower local land holders to make economic and family choices based on increased tenure security.
Event: Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2015
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