Understanding Land Tenure Systems before Reform: An Interview with Dr. Grenville Barnes
Grenville Barnes grew up and received his early education (BSc and MSc) in South Africa, where he became fascinated by the settlement patterns and distinct land tenure of traditional people in South Africa, mainly the amaXhosa and amaZulu. In spite of the pervasiveness of apartheid, these tenure systems were still clearly based on tradition. Barnes realized that to understand land tenure one had to learn about the fundamental culture and institutions of a community. While reading more generally, he came across the publications of the Land Tenure Center (LTC) at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. At that time the LTC was clearly at the forefront of scholarship on land tenure. So, in 1984 he started his PhD at UW and completed his research through the LTC and worked with professors like John Bruce and David Stanfield. He not only completed his PhD at UW but, perhaps more importantly, developed a professional network that served him throughout his career.
Dr. Barnes is Professor Emeritus, retiring last month from the University of Florida’s Geomatics program in the School of Forest Resources and Conservation. Barnes also serves on the board of Global Land Alliance. GLA sat down with ’Barney’, as he is known in the land sector, to reflect on lessons learned from his career and the land sector.
Prindex data shows us that nearly a billion people today lack tenure security. Why should the world care about that?
Of those billion people, the highest rates of insecurity are in Africa. Not surprisingly, these also tend to correlate with poverty rates and in Sub-Saharan Africa where almost one half of women surveyed in Prindex lack tenure security. Tenure security affects what landholders can do with their property and how they treat the land. For example, making long-term investments, passing property on to their children, repelling property invasions by others all depend on tenure security. More fundamentally it impacts global poverty, sustainable development and climate change.
Looking back throughout your career, where do you feel advances have been made in the land tenure sector? Where have you seen successes? How has the paradigm shifted over the years?
For many years it was commonly believed that tenure security could be simply achieved through acquiring a formal state-issued land title. As a result, many of the earlier land tenure projects focused on land titling where success was measured in terms of the number of titles that were issued. This logic, however, did not hold up in large parts of Africa, for example, where customary systems provided tenure security without a formal title. These projects were also failing to produce long-term tenure security because subsequent transactions (sales, inheritances, subdivisions, etc.) were not formally registered. This meant that within a few years the formal land registry was out of date and had become a historical artifact.
Projects then shifted to including reforms of land institutions that not only issued titles but also maintained tenure information. Land titling projects became land administration projects. One of several of these projects that I helped design in the 1990s was the World Bank-funded National Land Administration Project in Bolivia. In addition to land titling, this project also included redesigning the national land agency, reforming the land law, strengthening land registries at the sub-national level and formulating new methods for surveying and resolving property conflicts (saneamiento in Spanish). While not all aspects of land administration projects like the one in Bolivia have been successful, they do illustrate how these projects have broadened and become more than titling exercises.
How do you see the impact of the role of technology in land tenure and land administration today?
Conventional approaches are often too expensive and too time consuming for boundary surveys. So, for most of my career I have tried to find alternatives to conventional boundary surveying methodologies. In some instances, the cost of conventional surveys can cost more than the value of the land. Not surprisingly this led, inadvisably, to huge backlogs and to approaches that tried to avoid boundary demarcation and survey.
In the early 1990s we began working on a GPS methodology that would be ten times faster and one tenth of the price. We took advantage of the back-pack sub-meter GPS receivers that had just emerged at that time. I believe we used the first Trimble ProXL receiver out of the factory! Although we developed a good methodology for boundary (cadastral) surveying, transferring this technology to countries like Albania, Peru and Belize proved to be extremely challenging. We worked closely with Kevin [Barthel], co-founder of Global Land Alliance, on some of these projects and we have continued to collaborate to this day.
More recently, I have been involved with efforts to use drones to improve the efficiency and cost of mapping property boundaries. Drones are proving to be much less costly than conventional aerial photography and have other advantages, such as higher resolution and providing more local control over the technology and process.
Coming from academia, what are lessons-learned that you try to impress upon rising land specialists or where are you guiding them to focus?
Because I have been a professor within a Geomatics program most of my career, I have taught courses to undergraduates who were moving towards a career in land surveying. In these courses I have tried to expose students to more of an international perspective, illustrating different approaches to surveying and registering land. In my graduate courses, which typically involve students from various disciplines and different geographic focus areas, I have tried to get away from the thinking that all you need to do is to transfer a land administration system that works in western countries. Instead, I have encouraged students to first understand the underlying land tenure system before designing solutions to land tenure issues.
In this context, I continue to be surprised by how many students and professionals still look to private, individual tenure as the solution to all tenure ills. After all the work by Nobelist Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues on common pool resources, you would hope that the “tragedy of the commons” paradigm would have lost credibility. I have tried throughout my career to get away from such paradigms that make sweeping claims.
In your work, can you see any connections between the plight of black-owned/occupied land in post-colonial-commonwealth countries in Africa and black-owned land in the USA?
Almost all my land tenure work has been done in developing countries, so I cannot claim to be an expert on black-owned land in the USA. However, there are some common factors, such as being pushed off the land that they historically occupied to give way to white-owned farms. In the Caribbean there is a form of tenure called family lands, where generations ago, a family member had acquired title to a piece of land. Since that time, the land has passed on intestate to several subsequent generations of the family. Today, the land is still formally in the original titleholder’s name, but now all of the living heirs of that person have a claim to that piece of land. I do not need to point out that this results in tenure insecurity, especially when the land is valuable.
In the part of Florida where I live, a number of African Americans have a similar situation known as “heir’s property”. Because of the unwritten nature of intestate succession, and the number of family members that can claim the land, family land and heir’s property present a significant challenge to the new generation of land tenure specialists.
What is the next frontier in the land tenure sector? Where should donors be targeting their development resources today?
I would like to say something pithy like ‘space’ or ‘mars’, but I think we are still battling with existing frontiers. When I started my PhD at University of Wisconsin, I was interested in urban land tenure, driven mainly by the informal settlements I had observed around the South African city I had lived in. Given the continued rural to urban migration and an inability to accommodate this influx, I still see this as a crucial area for land tenure.
Indigenous tenure also persists as a top priority especially where this overlaps with valuable natural resources like forests.
Women, as I commented earlier, are still not being treated equally. This is particularly important where, as in certain parts of Africa, agriculture is primarily done by women.
Finally, I think we need a new generation of land tenure specialists with the passion shared by the scholars and practitioners who passed through the LTC. I believe this to be an important role now being filled by Global Land Alliance.
