Re-inventing Land Readjustment: Implications for Eminent Domain, Public-Private Partnership and Land Governance
Mansha Chen & Yu-Hung Hong
Land readjustment has been conventionally perceived as merely a tool to assemble adjacent land plots from different owners for efficient land redevelopment. Surprisingly recent applications of this land tool in developing countries have, to certain extent, shown its potential for minimizing the use of eminent domain or government compulsory purchase, facilitating public-private partnership, and encouraging good land governance. Based on actual cases from the developing world and emerging economies including Angola, Bhutan, China, Colombia, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam, we will discuss how supporting legislation, organized community, collaboration between the public and private sectors, and trust relationship among stakeholders were gradually institutionalized in accordance with experiences learned from land readjustment experiments. These phenomena are quite different from the traditional argument that the above-mentioned institutional environments must exist prior to adopting this land tool. Although the cases that we examined are neither exhaustive nor randomly selected, they help raise important questions about whether or not land readjustment could be used to build viable institutions and governance for managing land development. The rethinking of the possibilities and limitations of land readjustment could open the door for more application of this approach in developing countries than it has been deployed in the past.
Event: Symposium on Land Consolidation and Readjustment for Sustainable Development
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