Land Tenure

Tenure Security

Tenure security plays a primary role in the functioning of land tenure. Essentially, it is a “feeling” regarding how secure one is with regard to continued access to and use of one's land. Such security influences decision making involving investment in and use of lands. Thus, such decisions, along with transactions (buying, selling, renting, loaning, and inheriting), are made based on how secure one's rights to land are. The logic is that secure tenure leads to making investments (involving time, effort, and money) that are viable over the long term. Thus, there is a connection between tenure security and the rational use and management of resources. Although the concept of land tenure is seemingly straightforward, much research has been undertaken on the nature of tenure security and how it functions, particularly in the developing world, due to the issue's connections to agricultural productivity and the use of land as collateral for loans. However, tenure security can be difficult to understand, measure, and enhance in a consistent and predictable [Page 1724]way. This is because tenure security is not very tangible, and a wide variety of variables, processes, and contexts are believed to influence it. Generally, secure tenure implies that claims to land are secure because they are defendable against other claims.

A fundamental aspect of tenure security is the means to prove rights to claims by way of evidence. All claims to land are part of a construction of an evidence-based “argument for claim.” Even formal title is only an argument based on evidence that can be, and often is, contested—as are claims based on tribal, ethnic, religious, and other identities. The legitimacy of evidence depends not only on the interpretation or translation of reality into evidence but also on acceptance by others (a community) that the inferences, interpretations, and conclusions are logical and legitimate.

The problem of such proving is at the heart of several popular approaches to land tenure, including the rights recognition approach (recognition of customary or indigenous rights to land), the capital/poverty/property rights approach (described by de Soto and adopted by numerous governments and development agencies), and attachments or claims to land based on identity (with the Palestine-Israel example being perhaps the most extreme).

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