Integrating Land Governance in the post-2015 Agenda: harnessing synergies for implementation and monitoring impact

The 15th World Bank Land and Poverty Conference considers that while the challenges of land administration are immense, developments in technology and increasing access to information, all of which will be discussed at this Conference, allows the World Bank to better meet these challenges in multiple ways: 

• Information on existing rights allows for more inclusive and effective protection of rights by expanding spatial coverage to document rights by those who have been excluded (women and marginalized groups), record a wider array of hitherto informal rights, and doing so much more efficiently than in the past to allow information to be updated on a recurrent basis. 
• Land records are a public good and can help improve public service delivery as they improve the scope for protecting public land against encroachment to preserve environmental amenities or to better plan urban expansion. By making regulations and restrictions clear to everybody, they enhance transparency. And they can help monitor tax collection and fiscal management by the public sector as well as decision-making by private individuals. 
• Even when we do have responsible investors willing to respect existing rights, the lack of documentation, compounded by absence of incentive-compatible mechanisms to reveal such rights, increases transaction costs. This reduces private investment and often makes construction of public infrastructure near-impossible. Information on land ownership and values allow owners to benefit from impersonal transactions to improve land use and also assumes increasing importance for supply chain management. 

While these developments will affect many areas, two seem particularly relevant for development economists and financial institutions: 

• First, drawing attention to the benefits from improved land governance and reduced costs of recording rights, will increase interest in investing in the land sector, as reflected in several recent initiatives, some of which will be presented at this Conference. It will allow countries to set more ambitious targets on land policy and to put in place mechanisms to monitor them more rigorously. In turn, this will allow institutions, such as the World Bank Group, to support the land sector on demonstrated performance, including attention to the rights of women and those at the bottom of the asset distribution. 
• Second, information is a public good and the benefits from better land governance come from linking domains (e.g. land tenure, land use, and taxation) that had earlier been isolated from one another. This entails transcending traditional boundaries (as reflected in the World Bank Group’s move to create Global Practices) and also being attentive to global standards for information sharing as well as regulatory regimes that govern access to and use of such information. This is likely to become an area for fruitful research that is informed by empirical evidence.