Land Tenure

Historically, the concept of land tenure derives from English common law, in which feudalism installed a system where the lord was a tenant-in-chief who “held” the land and granted rights over it to “lesser tenants” in exchange for services or duties. In this system, the individual holds the land of someone else.

In a broader sense, particularly in legal systems such as civil law, the land tenure concept refers to the tenancy of the land; that is, the right to possess or own the land. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations defines the term land tenure as “the relationship, whether legally or customarily defined, among people, as individuals or groups, with respect to land.” The Food and Agriculture Organization, in simple terms, proposes that “land tenure systems determine who can use what resources for how long, and under what conditions.”

The world economy has three segments: subsistence, mercantilist, and free market. These economies are widespread over the globe. The free market is hegemonic but coexists and links with other economic segments such as subsistence and mercantilist economies to access resources. As trade occurs through the trails between these economic subsystems, it helps fuel the conditions by which the systems survive and coexist with the free market. These economies also use the landscape differently. Subsistence economies are characterized by low population density and large landscapes. Mercantilist economies occupy the networks of towns and cities that channel natural resources into the modern economy through capital cities, main economic cities, and ports to feed the world market. Thus, land tenure as an individual land title registered in a public access record is a reality that barely exists in areas of subsistence economies. Some rural areas in the eastern slopes of the Andes show that less than 10 percent of the land is held with official land titles, but there is a large amount of more local arrangements.

Land tenure is a contested space. Different societies find different meanings for the same concept. For example, common property can mean unlimited access to the resource, restricted collective access, or property rights that are assigned to a group or community of people. Many states have followed the single-oriented policy of promoting individual private property under the idea that private ownership would ensure adequate resource use; however, this is not necessarily the best recipe. On one hand, research has registered many cases of overuse on private lands, and on the other hand, most of the successful collective land management cases have been researched in recent decades. Thus, although in many cases governments aim to spread individual property rights over the landscape, in practice, social and cultural values enforce other land rights arrangements, such as various degrees of common property and open access. An adequate property regime for a certain area has to take into account historical, economic, and cultural issues, but every time it also has become more evident that there is a need to consider ecological interactions to ensure sustainability. Moreover, there is a need to consider the interactions of any property regime with population increase, higher demand for resources, and technological advances that can vary the property arrangements at a local level.

...