Registering the Human Terrain: A Valuation of Cadastre Batson

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 The National Defense Intelligence College supports and encourages
research on intelligence issues that distills lessons and improves Intelligence
Community capabilities to policy-level and operational consumers

This book is the culmination of research by Douglas Batson while he was an

Office of the Director of National Intelligence Research Fellow at this College
in 2006-2007. The manuscript was originally prepared to fulfill part of the
requirements for Research Fellows at this institution. Mr. Batson’s work offers
specifics on how to assist developing countries in registering property so the
owners have security of tenure. Property rights are at the heart of many problems
in dealing with refugees and in turn with governmental stability. Its publication
offers an example of the variety of applied intelligence research carried out by
the Research Fellows.

This publication is based on open sources, and the views expressed are those of
the author. The views do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of
the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.

Photographs and graphics from the American Geographical Society, the

Association of American Geographers, from the Land Titling and Economic
Reconstruction Activity (LTERA-Afghanistan), as well as from the Emerging
Markets Group (EMG) and the Terra Institute are used by permission. Photos
and maps from the Mexico Indigena Project are used courtesy of the University
of Kansas.

Distribution of this publication is unrestricted. Paper copies are available in

limited quantities to individuals in the Intelligence Community and to other U.S.
ii | Government officials through the Center for Strategic Intelligence Research of
the College. Electronic copies of this and other Center publications are available
via the Worldwide Web at http://www.ndic.edu. For more information on this
or other publications email the Center’s Associate Director at james.lightfoot@
dia.mil or phone 202-231-1917.

Dr. James E. Lightfoot

Editor and Associate Director,
Center for Strategic Intelligence Research
CONTENTS
FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

COMMENTARIES:
Mr. Yaives Ferland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Lt Col Henie Janse van Rensburg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Dr. John Peaty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

AUTHOR’S PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

CHAPTER 1: Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

CHAPTER 2: Land and Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Land is Fundamental to Human Existence . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Land Conflict Catalyzes Crises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Crises Catalyze Land Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
An Increasing but Ineffectual International Response . . . . . . . 13
CHAPTER 3: Land-Related Crises in Afghanistan . . . . . . . 17
Returning Afghan Refugees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Kabul: Victim and Catalyst of Land Crises . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
The Conditions of Land Crises in Afghanistan at a Glance . . . . . 27
Priorities for Addressing Afghanistan’s Land Crises . . . . . . . . 28
De Soto’s Proposal: A Viable Solution? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
The Housing, Land, and Property Triad . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
CHAPTER 4: Foreign Intelligence is Geography . . . . . . . . 35
Recent U.S. Intelligence Failures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Geography in 20th Century U.S. Foreign Policy and Academe . . . 37
Recovering Geography in the 21st Century . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
New Geographical Tools and Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Geography as a Tangible Foreign Policy Tool . . . . . . . . . . . 52
| iii
CHAPTER 5: Securing the Land: The Pivotal Role of Cadastres in
Nation-Building . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Cadastre and Controversy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Cadastres Help Rebuild Shattered Nations . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Cadastres Aiding Post-Conflict Afghanistan . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Advances in Land Administration in Afghanistan . . . . . . . . . 69
Land Policy in Afghanistan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
 CONTENTS (Continued)
Legal Aid in Afghanistan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
A USAID Project Makes Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
A Good Cadastre is a Great Achievement . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
CHAPTER 6: Cadastre for Reconstruction and Stability: The Land
Administration Domain Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Titles and Deeds in Cadastres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Challenges in Cadastres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
The Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) . . . . . . . . 91
LADM Components. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
LADM Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
LADM: The Future of Cadastre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
CHAPTER 7: Applied Geography as a Mainstay of
U.S. Foreign Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
The Early Phase of Addressing Land Crises:
The Role of the Military . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
The Next Phase of Addressing Land Crises: Civil-Military
Cooperation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Addressing Land Crises in the Long Term: Building Land
Administration Expertise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Mobilizing Government to Respond to Land Crises . . . . . . . 111
Training in Land Administration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
CHAPTER 8: Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .119
LIST OF ACRONYMS ............................ 125
APPENDIXES
A. México Indígena Project Cycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
B. AGCHO Cadastral Survey Forms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
C. Engineer Safar’s 3-level Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
D. 500-person Civilian Reserve Corps Skill Mix . . . . . . . . . . 135
E. University of Florida Land Tenure and Administration
Course Syllabus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
iv |
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

ABSTRACT IN FIVE LANGUAGES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

FOREWORD
I first met Doug Batson at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s
Washington Navy Yard location in 2005, before he was honored with the award
leading to the research and publication of this book. We shared an intellectual
passion in our work with human terrain analytical issues and I came to respect
Doug as someone I could learn from.
Doug’s subsequent selection as an Office of the Director of National
Intelligence Rearch Fellow was well deserved. Registering the Human Terrain:
A Valuation of Cadastre validates this selection. The scholarship that follows
is worthy of both study and careful reflection; this work is a must-read for
those engaging in research, analysis, and policy development regarding the
important issues of cadastre and human terrain analysis more generally.
As Doug points out in his preface, while many in the community have
been focused on the “where” relating to mapping the human terrain, this book
tackles the important issue of who is registered to land through property records.
Mapping the human terrain, of course, would be greatly aided by the collection,
processing, and analysis of the kind of data Doug advocates, but the work here
goes beyond the furthering of the emerging discipline of human terrain analysis
to broader strategic and policy environments. Clearly, the case is made for fur-
thering efforts in registering the human terrain as a means to achieving goals of
national security and global peace and stability.
As Doug’s work lays out, land issues are often at the core of violent
conflict, which could be prevented by the development and implementation
of land registration systems with formal mechanisms to arbitrate disputes
and make public record of land ownership rights and adjudications. The
United States can lead by assisting developing countries to develop such
systems for land tenure and property rights. This assistance would be much
less controversial than much of our current foreign policy. This systemiza-
tion of land tenure and property rights would do much for the national
security of our country, as it is increasingly dependent upon the stability of the |v
developing world.
Doug’s work here is timely and a harbinger of policy shifts to come. As
the United States government organizes and re-organizes itself to address con-
flict resolution and promote global stability, we will increasingly recognize the
value of the human terrain. Registering the Human Terrain: A Valuation of
 Cadastre will serve many as an introduction to the importance of cadastral
data and a way ahead to leverage the power of it.

Dr. Swen Johnson

Chief of Human Terrain Analysis
Socio-Cultural Intelligence Analysis, Inc.
Alexandria, VA

vi |
COMMENTARY
Mr. Yaïves Ferland
Defense Research and Development
Canada at Valcartier (DRDC-Valcartier)

There are three main aspects of prime interest in Douglas Batson’s

book about cadastre as a method to help create a peaceful and productive
civil society after conflicts and the return of refugees. First, for the defence
and security intelligence community, it represents a step forward in both
the comprehension and the application of the socio-cultural and economic
dimensions of any conflict: the structure of relationships to the land. The
role of land ownership in the fields and in cities as a conflict catalyst is dis-
cussed extensively. Land is fundamental for all societies and eras, but there
are dozens of complicated meanings and circumstances from the parcel-lot
and dwelling, the soil, and the ground-related activities and culture, to the
terrain to exploit and the homeland territory to secure. Land crises can lead
to conquests, depressions, revolutions, and reforms, but often conflicts pro-
voke crises by physical destruction or population expulsion, separation, con-
centration, or return. For intelligence to reach situation awareness, one needs
to understand the dynamic of such relationships to land, beyond the physical
terrain, as arguments in an actual conflict.
Second, Batson explores the deep significance of the cadastre as a
formidable institution that permits security for a fragile population and its
recovering economy. In any cases, by any means, even temporary titling and
registration of land allocation or possession contribute to security, at many
levels of Maslow’s pyramid. If well-established and adapted to both tradi-
tional and innovative views of land definition, measurement, identification,
registration, and conveyance, the cadastre informs and aids effective recon-
struction, peacemaking, and control of speculation. Cadastre is not a univer-
sal cure and no definition is globally accepted, even among land-surveyors
| vii
or planners; the cadastre is subject to controversy depending on the origins
of structural problems to address in different countries, and with respect to
various legal systems concerning property and land market. Batson brings in
his experience in post-conflict Afghanistan to discuss the crucial role of the
cadastre in land administration policies and institutions.
Third, this contribution fits well at the vanguard of a revitalized mili-
tary geography. Chapters directly engage in the rehabilitation of the geogra-
 pher’s perspective for improved land conflict and policy considerations. It is
no more a question only of geopolitics or geostrategy (which are not military
by essence), it is full geography as defined by the relationships of humans to the
Earth. Geography, a basis of military doctrines for decades since Clausewitz,
but reduced to popular travelogues, for a while considered useful only in the
form of accurate topographic maps, is recovering its standing within defence,
security, intelligence, and policy scientific domains. Geographical methods
and analysis provide more than information and knowledge about a geospa-
tially complex situation; they include a conceptual reference and expertise
frame for addressing land crises and building a stable land administration
model, as a cadastre.

viii |
COMMENTARY
Lt Col Hennie Janse van Rensburg
South African Military Academy

Batson has produced an easily readable book with a clear theme: effective
land administration is pivotal to sustainable Reconstruction and Stability (R&S)
in post-conflict societies. A link is established between land and its potential
for conflict, as well as how an appropriate land administration system can assist
in managing and preventing such conflict. Without a functioning, practical,
culturally sensitive and locally calibrated land administration system, sustain-
able R&S will be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. He proposes
focusing R&S efforts on creating a current cadastre of the post-conflict area
using a combination of top-down planning and community participation. The
reasoning behind this is that such a cadastre:
a. Is required for an effective land administration system and
provides a platform on which nation-building can take
place;

b. Provides a platform for securing land tenure, which is fun-

damental to building peace and stability within a society;

c. Provides a platform for solving local land disputes before

they escalate to violent conflict, thus assisting in maintain
ing peace;

d. Is sustainable because it is embedded in the societal fabric

of the area.
Policy makers and R&S specialists will do well to read this book and take
note of Batson’s arguments. The book is written with a U.S. audience in mind as
is evident in Chapter 7: Geography as a Mainstay of U.S. Foreign Policy, as well
as in the use of Afghanistan as a case study. Having said that, the book should
appeal to all countries faced with reintegrating displaced persons into their own | ix
societies, land restitution issues or having to manage R&S, both inside and out-
side their national boundaries.
A secondary theme that Batson expounds is the importance of geo-
graphic knowledge in relation to foreign intelligence, in the setting of appropri-
ate foreign policy as well as establishing and maintaining peace. Considering
 myself a geographer, Batson surely scores high on my card on this count. Bias
aside, good knowledge of human and physical geography leads to better under-
standing of the international political arena and Batson does well to remind the
reader thereof. Of course, this secondary theme would be totally out of place in
this book if it did not somehow relate to the main theme – which it does so very
clearly. An essential part of a cadastre is the geographic description of the land
contained in it. Such a description answers the fundamentally important ques-
tion: where? Without the answer to this simple geographic question a cadastre
cannot exist. Taking this into consideration, geographic knowledge becomes a
cornerstone in building peace and stability in post-conflict societies.
A key to the success of any R&S operation is sustainability. If a cadastre is
to be sustainable it has to be integrated into and accepted by the local com-
munity. Batson demonstrates a much-needed sensitivity in considering the
needs of local communities in establishing a cadastre. He aptly notes that
the “... problem in post-conflict societies is that cadastres have been designed
to serve the interests of governments and outside powers, not the local peo-
ple, who are usually poor.” In order for a cadastre to be successful it must be
designed keeping the end user in mind. This begs an important question:
who is the end user? Is it the society under reconstruction or the society
driving the reconstruction? Colonial expansion into Africa in the late 1800s
and first half of the 1900s provided Africa with infrastructure such as dirt
roads, railroads and harbours. Unfortunately, these infrastructural develop-
ments were geared towards resource extraction and not the development of
the local communities. Very little local development resulted from the new
infrastructure during colonialism and also proved hopelessly inadequate for
development in the post-colonial era. The U.S. faces a similar situation in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Expediency is one of the biggest Delila’s that the U.S.
government is currently facing in the Middle East. An expedient, top-down
approach that is focused on the need of the U.S. government, instead of the
countries under reconstruction, will result in a situation similar to the Afri-
can colonial experience. The cadastre resulting from such an approach will
not be sustainable and neither will the peace be. The U.S. must show patience
in engaging the local population in order to establish a cadastre that is cul-
x| turally sensitive and locally calibrated — as encouraged by Batson.
COMMENTARY
Dr. John Peaty
Defence Geographic Centre
Ministry of Defence, United Kingdom

Douglas Batson, a National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Regional

Analyst and a staff member to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, has
researched and written a study which he has titled “Registering the Human Ter-
rain: A Valuation of Cadastre.” He has looked in detail at the case of Afghani-
stan and the study could well have retained its name from the original proposal,
“The Repatriation of 4.6 million Afghan Refugees: Answering the Where Ques-
tion with Property Intelligence.”
Coalition intelligence agencies have learnt and are continuing to learn
many hard lessons in Iraq and Afghanistan to include the uncomfortable truths
that cultural factors were under-appreciated and that cultural knowledge and
awareness were lacking and/or not used effectively. As a result, the IC is now
rightly preoccupied with “Mapping the Human Terrain.”
But as Batson correctly points out, one must first “Register the Human
Terrain.” He argues that the “cadastre” is the key to predicting and responding
to global crises, a point well-known in Europe but virtually unknown in the U.S.
I believe Batson has written an important, valuable and timely study of the cru-
cial problem of land tenure and property rights in Afghanistan. I further believe
that his conclusions have a far wider application, well beyond Afghanistan.
Batson further argues that the European-developed Land Administration
Domain Model is compelling because it makes explicit the various types of land
rights, restrictions, and responsibilities. It may well record land tenure types not
based on the traditional cadastral parcel.
In his conclusion Batson puts forward practical recommendations: Rec-
ognize the importance of land in conflict prevention; Expand the definition of
national security to include security of land tenure; Construct states capable of
administering land; Build local capacity in resolving land conflict. His specific | xi
suggestions on how to engage multiple actors in land-related reconstruction
and stability activities are especially commendable.
I was privileged to collaborate with Batson by reviewing his drafts (and-
met with him at the International Conference on Military Geography and Geol-
ogy (ICMGG)). He is to be congratulated for researching and writing this study
and the National Defense Intelligence College is to be congratulated for making
it publicly available.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
Living and working for the U.S. Department of the Army in Germany
from 1979 to 1992, I observed world-changing geopolitical tensions and tri-
umphs: the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear weapons in that country,
the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, and German reunification. As I observed
the refitting of a recently-closed U.S. military base into a German government
asylum processing center, with barracks for thousands of Eurasian and African
refugees instead of American soldiers, I unknowingly witnessed the transition
from Cold War stasis to an era marked by unprecedented global migration. My
later career, full-time at the then-U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service,
and part-time in the U.S. Army Reserve, and attending successive U.S. Central
Command Southwest Asia symposia, alerted me that the mass displacement of
people is due largely to land conflict. My selection as an Office of the Director

| xiii

Figure 1. A Map of Afghanistan’s Ethnic Mix. Source: CIA, 1997.

 of National Intelligence Fellow allowed me to research the topic of “Registering
the Human Terrain.”
A term now in vogue to describe the rendering of socio-cultural infor-
mation to a map is “mapping the human terrain,” which is also an intelligence
topic of increasing salience. Ethno-linguistic maps, such as Figure 1 depicting
languages spoken or religions practiced in a given area, are plentiful.
However, this book is NOT about mapping the human terrain, but
about registering the human terrain: tying a “person,” an individual, a group,
or a non-natural person such as an organization, to a geographical place
through property records. This book manifests how to answer the “who”
question with the same precision the U.S. Intelligence Community answers
the “where’’ question.
In addition to offering intelligence value, strengthening land tenure and
property rights in volatile countries is an auspicious field of international devel-
opment for the U.S. to assert its “soft power.” I am grateful for the time my

xiv |

Figure 2. 1:1000 Scale Parcel-based Cadastral Map, Kabul, Afghanistan. Source:

Emerging Markets Group (EMG).
Figure 3. Persons Tied to a Cadastral Parcel. Source: Bhuvana Anand, EMG.

Washington-based U.S. government colleagues, a very small cadre of land ten-

ure and property rights practitioners, took to educate me on their unsung work
and to review my drafts. Thank you to Dr. Jolyne Sanjak, Senior Director, Prop-
erty Rights and Land Tenure Operations at the Millennium Challenge Corpo-
ration; Mr. Greg Garramone, Economic Policy Advisor in the Department of
State, Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stability, and Dr. Greg-
ory Myers, Senior Land Tenure and Property Rights Specialist, U.S. Agency for
International Development. I trust that this
book will attract a new generation of land
tenure and property rights experts into your
ranks. Many thanks also to:
Dr. J. David Stanfield of the Terra Insti-
| xv
tute, Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, USA, whose
passion for land tenure and property rights
and years of labor in Afghanistan is inspir-
ing. His interest in my study, reviews of my
drafts, and introductions to his Afghan col-
leagues prior to my research trip to Afghani-
stan were invaluable. Figure 4. The Author.
 In Afghanistan, to Engineer M. Yasin Safar, retired chief of the Afghan
Geodesy and Cartography Head Office cadastral department; Ms. Rebecca
Gang, former Project Coordinator in Herat of the Norwegian Refugee Council’s
Information, Counseling, and Legal Assistance program; Dr. Gregory Maassen,
Chief of Party, Emerging Markets Group Land Titling and Economic Restruc-
turing (EMG) project, for the time and effort to show me EMG’s endeavors
on the ground; to Mr. Gregg Badger, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
(NGA), for the daily logistical support in Kabul.
In the Netherlands, to Prof. dr. ir. Peter van Oosterom and Mr. dr. ir.
Jaap Zevenbergen, associate professor, both with the OTB Research Institute
for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies, Delft University of Technology, and
to Ir. Christiaan Lemmen, assistant professor at the International Institute of
Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) at Enschede, and vice
chair, administration of International Federation of Surveyors Commission 7
“Cadastre and Land Management,” for bending your respective schedules to
accommodate my visit while en route to Afghanistan, and for introducing me
to an opportune cadastral model.
For editing my multiple drafts, Dr. James Lightfoot, Center for Strategic
Intelligence Research, National Defense Intelligence College; Dr. Joel Kalves-
maki, U.S. Government Printing Office, and Mr. Yaïves Ferland, Defence
Research and Development Canada, Valcartier, Quebec.
For pointing me in the right direction after receiving the DNI Award, my
former U.S. Geological Survey colleague, John Moeller.
For encouragement from my home office, the NGA’s Political Geography
Division: Glen Lauber, Brian Hagan, David Eldridge, Jennifer Faraon, Dr. Peter
Viechnicki; from elsewhere in NGA: Randy Flynn, Al Human, Bruce Kiracofe,
Dr. Virgil S. “Steve” Lewis, Carter Edgeworth, Adrian Gomes, Tim Mclendon,
Brian Pope, and Wendy Zeller.
I thank my loving and supportive wife, Terri, who greeted news of the
fellowship award with excitement just three months after we had wed, and who
labored arduously on the footnotes and bibliography.

xvi |
CHAPTER 1:
Introduction
Seldom does an alert of potentially cataclysmic humanitarian cri-
ses occur in open-source press releases. An exception occurred in early
2007, in a little-reported story whose headline ran: “All Afghan Refugees to
be Repatriated from Pakistan by 2009.”1 The announcement, made by the
Pakistani government, foreshadows events that will no doubt parallel those
already underway in Iran, where 100,000 unregistered Afghan migrants were
deported in a six-week period.2 Yet, neither Iran’s stepped-up deportations
of its one million illegal Afghan migrants nor the announced Pakistani strat-
egy for sending back its remaining 2.4 million Afghan refugees by the end of
2009 has been met with alarm.
Alarm is the appropriate response to this impending scenario, since
every mass deportation of similar size in the last century—Armenians
from Ottoman Turkey during World War I and Chechens to Central Asia
under Stalin—has been a recipe for further conflict even generations later.
An astute regional analyst would have anticipated Pakistan’s preparations to
deport its Afghan refugees. First, a four-month, by-name registration cam-
paign of Afghan refugees living in Pakistan, completed in February 2007,
identified 88 percent of the refugee population.3 Second, several decades-old
Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan were closed in 2007.4 Third, the Pakistani
government has reiterated that after 15 April 2007, Afghans with no Proof of
Registration Cards will be subject to the laws of the land—deportation.5
The international community regards forced repatriation as a violation of
international law. But Pakistan is not a signatory to the 1951 Convention Relat-
ing to the Status of Refugees and subsequent protocols. Even if it were, the Paki-
stani government might have ignored this commitment and pursued its current

1 Syed Irfan Raza, “All Afghans to Be Repatriated by ‘09,” DAWN Group of Newspapers, online |1
edition, 16 February 2007.
2 “Afghans Protest Eviction of Refugees by Iran,” Hong Kong AFP in English — Hong Kong
service of the independent French press agency Agence France-Press (AFP)e, online edition, no.
JPP20070501969040 Hong Kong AFP in English 0952 GMT, 1 May 2007.
3 “Second Generation Afghan Refugees Prefer Living in Pakistan,” Lahore Daily Times, online
English edition, no. SAP2007030527002, 5 March 2007. Cited hereafter as “Second Genera-
tion Afghan Refugees.”
4 “Over 200,000 Afghan Refugees Said to Leave Pakistan after Deadline Expiry,” Associated
Press of Pakistan (APP), online edition, no. 20070424950088 Islamabad APP in English, 24
April 2007. Cited hereafter as “Over 200,000 Afghan Refugees.”
5 “Over 200,000 Afghan Refugees.”
 Figure 5. Internally Displaced Refugees Arrive at Destination. Source:
Photo courtesy of Luke Powell, http://www.lukepowell.com.

policy, to forcibly deport the estimated 1.5 million Pakistan-born refugees who
will not return voluntarily to an Afghanistan they have never known.6 Since
2002, three million Afghans have repatriated from Pakistan to an Afghanistan
ill-suited to absorb them.7 Another 2.4 million refugees pushed onto its borders
would likely trigger a large-scale humanitarian crisis; the reversal of many hard-
won gains from Afghanistan’s six-year, United States (U.S.)-led reconstruction;
and renewed conflicts over land, housing, and other land-related rights, con-
flicts that the Taliban and anti-coalition militias would immediately exploit.

The refugee crisis brewing in Afghanistan is the most vivid example of

a threat to regional stability, world peace, and national sovereignty, concerns
that fall under the purview of intelligence analysts and civil reconstruction
specialists. The crisis is slowly but inevitably unfolding, and U.S. civil and
military planners are inadequately prepared to deal with a titanic reordering
of the human terrain.
2| One of the critical omissions in U.S. efforts to anticipate and then address
regional conflicts is the failure to appreciate the relationship between people
and their land, information typically registered in a cadastre. For example,
spikes in property transactions, inexplicable from market forces alone, can

6 “Second Generation Afghan Refugees.”

7 “Over 3 Million Afghans Helped by UN for Repatriation from Pakistan since 2002,” Islam-
abad Associated Press of Pakistan in English — government-run press agency, online edition, no.
IAP20070409950077 Islamabad APP in English 1250 GMT, 9 April 2007.
indicate escalating criminal activity or ethnic tensions. For the U.S. Intel-
ligence Community, analysis of heretofore unavailable layers of cadastral
data has the potential to identify a group’s ideologies and economic pillars. By
tying a name to a place a cadastre can answer the difficult “who” question: who
is behind a given problem? A cadastre can also provide military commanders
with detailed knowledge of the human terrain, identification of power brokers
on the ground whose support or obstruction may determine mission success.
More specifically, this book tells U.S. civil and military planners how cadastral
information, where it exists and where it has been maintained, might improve
multi-lateral reconstruction and stability (R&S) efforts. Especially in post-con-
flict societies, land tenure and property rights (LTPR) are a much larger issue; a
cadastre is one of many solutions through which stability and peace can return.
Conversely, by assigning land ownership or rights to one claimant, a cadastre
can extinguish de facto rights and unleash further conflict by empowering a
nouveau elite at the expense of other claimants. Thus, knowledge and experi-
ence in sequencing changes to LTPR are critical to nation-building missions.
Lastly, with a common and well-informed understanding of cadastral data,
deployed U.S. civilian R&S teams could work more effectively with multi-lateral
partners such as the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,
the Organization of American States, and non-government organizations on
programs for emergency humanitarian aid, for refugees, and for internally dis-
placed persons resettlement, and infrastructure and economic recovery plan-
ning, taking into account vital LTPR issues.
The term cadastre, a French word of Venetian and Byzantine origins,
is used deliberately. Its infrequent use in American English, coupled with
its varying meanings throughout the English-speaking world and in various
civil codes, serves the author’s intent to define an ambiguous term and to
introduce an unfamiliar concept. Among a dozen current alternatives, the
International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) definition is used here.
A cadastre is normally a parcel-based, up-to-date land infor-
mation system containing a record of interests in land (e.g.,
rights, restrictions, and responsibilities). It usually includes
a geometric description of land parcels linked to other
records describing the nature of the interests, the owner-
|3
ship or control of those interests, and often the value of the
parcel and its improvements.8

8 Fédération Internationale des Géomètres (FIG), The International Federation of Survey-

ors Commission 7, Cadastre and Land Management, The FIG Statement on the Cadastre
(Copenhagen: The Surveyors House, 1995), URL: <http://www.fig.net/commission7/reports/
cadastre/statement_on_cadastre_summary.html>, accessed 24 September 2007. Cited here-
after as FIG, The FIG Statement on the Cadastre.
 Figure 6. Old Cadastral Map of District 7, Kabul, Afghanistan. Source: EMG.

Cadastres have registered the human terrain for centuries. Ting and
Williamson chronicled the historical relationship between land and people
and the evolutionary steps in cadastral and land registration systems, which
fall into four major phases:9
• From the age of agriculture to feudalism, human beings were physically
tied to land. Land was the primary symbol and source of wealth. In this
phase, the cadastre publicly recorded ownership for fiscal purposes.
• During the industrial revolution, strong physical ties to land began to
dissolve and land became a conceptual, tradable commodity and the
primary source of capital. This environment gave birth to land markets,
and so cadastre took on another focus—a tool in land transfers.
• Post-World War II reconstruction and an increasingly mobile,
growing population began to see land as a scarce resource that may
not be sufficient for the world’s needs. With this came growing interest
in urban and regional planning, an important new application for
cadastres.
4|
• In the 1980s the earlier focus on land widened to include issues of
environmental degradation, sustainable development, and social equity.
All of these issues have tempered short-term economic imperatives.
Planning has broadened to address community interests and detailed

9 Lisa Ting and Ian P. Williamson, “Cadastral Trends: A Synthesis,” The Australian Surveyor
4, no. 1 (1999): 46-54, URL: <http://www.sli.unimelb.edu.au/research/publications/IPW/
CadastralTrendsSynthesis.html>, accessed 25 September 2007.
 land use. This growing need for more detailed information about land
and land use has fueled a market for multi-purpose cadastres.

Satellite imagery has for decades been the primary way the U.S. gov-
ernment (USG) has answered the “where” and “what” questions, that is, how
it has tracked conventional adversaries and identified their numbers and
strength, for example, when it monitored Warsaw Pact T-72 tank regiments
during the Cold War. Today’s adversaries are not conventional armies but
nameless, tenacious, and adaptive individuals who trump superior U.S. mili-
tary power “by refusing to mass together and by submerging themselves in
urban seas.”10
To date the USG has invested little in collecting or creating land-
related information that can answer the ‘who’ question, for example, who
is behind poppy cultivation, ethnic cleansing, or attacks on United Nations
(UN) peacekeepers. Open source and human intelligence collection has not
deliberately sought to associate a personal name with a property. Narcotics
traffickers, warlords, and insurgents finance their destabilizing and violent
activities with wealth, wealth that often is tied to land property. Thus, analy-
ses made with layers of cadastral data would likely increase the ability of
USG policymakers to deal proactively with non-conventional foes and with
world crises. An intervening military force, emergency humanitarian aid,
and long-term nation-building all require an understanding of whose land
interests have been affected by natural disasters or warring factions.
In its booklet, Land and Conflict: a Toolkit for Intervention, the U.S.
Agency for International Development (USAID) aptly notes the complex
relationship between land and conflict and also the crucial role of land admin-
istration in post-conflict and post-disaster reconstruction and stability.
People have fought over land since the beginning of recorded
history. Population growth and environmental stresses have
exacerbated the perception of land as a dwindling resource,
tightening the connection between land and violent conflict.
Land is often a significant factor in widespread violence and is
also a critical element in peace-building and economic recon-
struction in post-conflict situations.11 |5

10 Ralph Peters, “Out-Thought by the Enemy,” New York Post, 1 June 2007, URL: <http://
www.nypost.com/seven/06012007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/out_thought_by_the_
enemy_opedcolumnists_ralph_peters.htm>, accessed 24 September 2007.
11 USAID Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation, “Land and Conflict: A Toolkit for
Intervention” (Washington, DC: USAID, 2005), URL: <http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/cross-
cutting_programs/conflict/ publications/docs/CMM_Land_and_Conflict_Toolkit_April_2005.
pdf>, accessed 24 September 2007.
 The timely USAID Toolkit moves beyond a mere diagnosis of prob-
lems. It provides USG officials responding to high-profile international cri-
ses a framework to assess land-related conflict, factors to consider when
developing interventions, and suggestions on how to monitor and evaluate
those interventions. The Toolkit was soon followed in 2005 by the signing
of National Security Presidential Directive 44 (NSPD-44), Management of
Interagency Efforts Concerning Reconstruction and Stability. In concert with
current efforts to implement NSPD-44, this book outlines the relevance of
cadastral data to determine, and to achieve, desired political outcomes for
post-conflict and post-disaster areas.
The book consists of eight chapters. Chapter 2 considers the relation-
ship of land to conflict. Chapter 3 identifies the risks to stability posed by
rapid urbanization and unresolved refugee plights, drawing from the refu-
gee situation six years into Afghanistan’s reconstruction. Chapter 4 makes
the case that collection and analysis of cadastral data are crucial to pre-
dicting threats to regional stability, world peace, and national sovereignty
expected of strategic intelligence. Chapter 5 examines the security of land
tenure in the developing world and the role of cadastres in reconstruct-
ing post-conflict countries, most notably in Afghanistan. Chapter 6 pres-
ents the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM), a likely first step to
an internationally recognized standard for a cadastre. The author’s March
2007 research trip to Afghanistan convinced him that the LADM’s flexibility
for capturing both Western-style, registered land rights and the customary,
informal land rights and interests typical of the developing world makes it
worthy of adoption as, or to serve as a model for, a cadastral data reposi-
tory. Chapter 7 identifies training in land administration as the foundation
for a coordinated whole-of-government effort to address land-related cri-
ses. Chapter 8 recommends how and why cadastral and land administration
expertise should be incorporated into USG R&S capabilities for a new direc-
tion in U.S. foreign policy.

6|
CHAPTER 2:
Land and Conflict
Land conflicts appear at all geographical scales and take multiple
forms. The March, a futuristic novel about mass migration turned into a 1990
British film, explores racial and political tensions that emerge when climate
change forces millions of Africans to march en masse to the coasts of Europe.
It was not for economic gain or for political asylum, but for sheer survival. In
the story, a perplexed European Union Commissioner, trusted to negotiate
with the march’s organizer, Isa El-Mahdi, is dumbfounded when the African
declares the marchers’ intentions to major media outlets: “We believe that
when we stand before you, you will not let us die. If you don’t help us, then
we will all die. You will be forced to watch how all of us die and may God be
merciful to us all.”12
In the years since the making of the film, misery on the African con-
tinent has descended to a point so abysmal as to make the novel’s author,
William Nicholson, wonder if he had penned fiction or not. In 1990, the
United Nations Development Program (UNDP) originated the Human
Development Report, also known as the Misery Index, to measure a nation’s
growth not by economic figures, but by statistical profiles of its people and
what they can expect from life. In the 2000 UNDP Human Development
Report, 30 of the 35 countries at the bottom of the index were sub-Saharan
African nations.13 Among the factors the index examines are the availabil-
ity of schools, clean water, and medical care, and whether all citizens can
play a role in politics, governance, and justice. Although these factors are
related to human well-being, one major agent of social stability especially
prominent in The March tends to be overlooked: the paramount relation-
ship between land and people. The social-legal-economic-cultural structure
of this relationship, in its variety of expressions, must be questioned, inves-
tigated, and understood.
|7

12 The March, starring Malick Bowens and Juliet Stevenson, directed by David Wheatley,
British Broadcasting Company, 1990, based on a novel by William Nicholson.
13 Barbara Crossette, “Misery Index of U.N. Panel Finds Africa Is Worst Off,” New York
Times, 5 July 2000, URL: <http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/070500un-africa.
html>, accessed 13 June 2007.
 Land is Fundamental to Human Existence
Land is the place of all shelter, in the city, the town, the vil-
lage, and the home. It is the source of food, of materials
for construction and manufacture, of coal, gas and oil, of
springs and rivers and other essentials for life. Indestructible,
immovable, it is the foundation of all human activity. Houses
and factories, forests and farms, river roads and railways,
mines, quarries, and reservoirs are all fashioned from the
land. It offers endless opportunities for development and
discovery. It is the source of all wealth.14
In this speech, delivered on the eve of WWI, Sir Charles Fortescue
Brickdale, Chief Land Registrar of Great Britain, lauded the bountiful fruits
of the land secured by a century of peace in Europe. Due in no small measure
to the growth of good governance during the 19th Century, when citizens
were granted security of land tenure, Western Europe and North America
advanced from agricultural to industrial societies. The Industrial Revolu-
tion saw not only a preponderance of factories, but also the ascendancy of
classical liberalism. Noted for its defense of free economic markets and free
political thought, classical liberalism also advanced private property rights.
The principal advances in liberal land reform in the United States occurred
with the Homestead Act (1862) and in Canada with the Dominion Lands Act
(1872), both of which granted free frontier land to settlers. Those who built
on the property and lived there at least five years were promised eventual
freehold titles. Hundreds of thousands of emigrants from Europe, who never
could have dreamed of becoming landowners in the “Old Country,” took
advantage of the Acts’ provisions and laid the foundation for the economic
vitality of North America’s heartland. The good governance responsible for
the prosperity that justified Brickdale’s laudatory description of the land
resulted from secure land tenure made possible by a century of burgeon-
ing legal frameworks, democratization, industrialization, and commerce in
Western nations.
Most developing countries never experienced an industrial revolu-
8|
tion, one of the key ingredients to the progress Brickdale hailed. Instead, the
developing world was rushed, in the 1980s and 1990s, into a neo-liberal eco-
nomic market by globalization, that is, by the rapid convergence of business
practices skewed toward the patterns long established in developed coun-

14 Cited in United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), Working Party on
Land Administration, Social and Economic Benefits of Good Land Administration,” 2d ed., January
2005 (London: HM Land Registry on behalf of UNECE WPLA), 5.
Figure 7. The Sahel. Source: LTC Francis A. Galgano, A Geographical Analysis of
Un-governed Spaces.

tries. Throughout the developing world, people face grave uncertainties over,
and threats to, their land: legal ambiguity, corruption, poor governance, lack
of enforcement, competing claims, armed landgrabbers, and even govern-
ments bent on arbitrary eviction or expropriation of private property and
land. Such threats to property rights, says Timothy Frye, can explain why
underdeveloped countries remain underdeveloped, even following massive
infusions of foreign aid: landless people “have little incentive to engage in
productive economic behavior.”15 It has become clear in recent years that
secure property rights anchor economic development. Noted economist
Hernando de Soto claims that rule of law defines the relationship between
land and people and that formalized property rights bring social order. Once
land rights are accessible and formalized, properties can be easily conveyed,
exchanged or inherited using protected, affordable, legal means. Property
owners, and their countries, then prosper.
“The relationship of people to land is fundamental to human
existence.”16 So begins a 2005 United Nations Economic Commission for |9
Europe (UNECE) Working Party on Land Administration publication,

15 Timothy Frye, “Credible Commitment and Property Rights: Evidence from Russia,” Amer-
ican Political Science Review 98, no. 3 (August 2004): 454.
16 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Working Party on Land Administra-
tion, Social and Economic Benefits of Good Land Administration,” 2d ed., January 2005 (London:
HM Land Registry on behalf of UNECE WPLA), 4. Cited hereafter as UNECE WPLA, Good Land
Administration.
 which also succinctly lists 13 benefits of an effective land registration system.
Such a system can17
• Guarantee ownership and security of tenure
• Be the basis for land and property taxation
• Provide security of credit
• Guarantee the result of judicial procedures relating to land rights,
including rights of repossession of land
• Reduce land disputes
• Develop and monitor land and mortgage markets
• Protect state lands
• Facilitate land reform
• Promote improvement of land and buildings
• Facilitate reliable land use records
• Improve urban planning and infrastructure development
• Support environment management
• Produce statistical data as a base for social and economic
development

From this UNECE list, it is clear that good land administration bene-
fits all: state and local governments, the business community, and individual
and family property owners.

Land Conflict Catalyzes Crises

The dissolution of the former Soviet Union markedly changed the
global geo-political landscape, ushering in an era, typified by Afghanistan,
where failed states pose more of a threat than does an adversarial super-
power. In his 2007 Threat Assessment, the U.S. Director of National Intelli-
gence (DNI) stated that “globalization is contributing to conflicts, instability,
and reconfigurations of power and influence” and that “violent conflicts in
a given state, as we see in Africa today, can swiftly lead to massive humani-
tarian tragedies, and potentially, regional wars.”18 While the international
10 | community is aware of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, Karol Boudreaux,
a senior research scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason Univer-
sity, points out what is less well known: “much of what underlies the con-

17 UNECE WPLA, Good Land Administration, 6.

18 John D. Negroponte, “Annual Threat Assessment of the Director of National Intelligence,”
report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Washington, DC, 11 January 2007, URL:
<http://intelligence.senate.gov/070111/negroponte.pdf>, accessed 26 January 2007.
flicts in Darfur remain disputes over property.”19 The same can be said of the
entire African continent.
All across Africa, from the Sahel [a large swath of land at
the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert] to Congo, tens
of thousands of people are at war. You might think these
struggles are about religion, or ethnicity, or even political
differences but often you’d only be partially right. In a great
many of these African struggles people are fighting their
neighbors, they are not fighting because the neighbor wor-
ships God in a different way or has a different set of genes.
Rather, they are fighting because this is the only way left
open to them to determine who “owns” which field, or who
has what rights to graze animals, or who should control the
revenue from the mineral wealth below people’s feet.20

Crises Catalyze Land Conflict

Not only do disputes over land trigger major crises; they also are
effects of world crises. History is replete with examples of how wars and
natural disasters have prompted large human migrations. Yet, even in the
absence of armed conflict between warring groups, each year one mil-
lion people are dispossessed piecemeal. This large-scale human migration,
known as forced evictions, escapes media coverage and therefore Western
attention. Because land is so fundamental to human existence, its loss is the
ultimate catastrophe.
Few experiences are more harrowing than being forced from
one’s own home. Every year many millions of people are left
with no other option than fleeing their homes, lands and
properties against their will. Whatever the cause, displace-
ment is always nasty, always brutish, but all too rarely is it
short. Millions of refugees and Internally Displaced Persons
(IDPs) who desperately want to return to their original
homes are unable to do so because restitution rights are
not treated with due seriousness by relevant authorities and | 11
international actors.21

19 Karol Boudreaux, “Property Holds Africa’s Answer,” Enterprise Africa! 23 September

2005, URL: <http://www.enterprise-africa.org/publications/pubid.2449/pub_detail.asp>,
accessed 8 January 2007. Cited hereafter as Boudreaux, “Property Holds Africa’s Answer.”
20 Boudreaux, “Property Holds Africa’s Answer.”
21 Scott Leckie, “New Housing, Land and Property Restitution Rights,” Forced Migration
Review, no. 25 (May 2006): 52.
 The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) is the lead-
ing international human rights organization campaigning for the protection
of housing rights and the prevention of forced evictions. The tenth edition
of the COHRE Global Survey22—based on information received from evict-
ees, the media, and from an expanding global network of contacts, including
individuals, grassroots groups and other organizations—informally reports
4.3 million forced evictions from 2003 to 2006. The real number, currently
unknown, is much higher. Over 95 percent of these evictions occurred in
Africa (nearly two million) and Asia and the Pacific (over 2.1 million), an
indication and warning of the nature, extent, and pervasiveness of the prob-
lem. Forced evictions, covered in the COHRE Global Survey, occur most vis-
ibly in situations of armed conflict and ethnic cleansing, or in their aftermath,
but also as a result of development projects, discrimination, urban redevel-
opment schemes, government delineation of parklands, and so forth.

Figure 8. A Result of Violence on the Outskirts of Johannesburg, South

Africa. Source: Agence France Press.

12 |

22 Centre for Housing Rights and Evictions COHRE, “Global Survey on Forced Evictions,”
2007, URL: <http://www.cohre.org/view_page.php?page_id=10>, accessed 10 May 2007.
 Sadly, a great number of these evictees, for whom informal, tribal,
or customary property rights have for centuries secured the tenure of their
homes and fields, cannot challenge the results of forced evictions when no
formal, documented property records exist or these are not maintained.
Once uprooted, they migrate from rural areas to cities or from city to city.
During the 1990s, the world’s urban population grew by 36 percent.
At the turn of the last millennium, 924 million people lived in slums, an
estimated 1.4 billion will do so by 2020, and 3 billion by 2050.23 The rapid
urbanization of the world brings mounting disaffection to the slum neigh-
borhoods.24 “The increasing polarization of cities caused by neo-liberal
globalization is providing many conditions that are ripe for extremes of
civil and military violence.”25
Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai foresees the coming urban anarchy
of increased rural-to-urban migration, calling it an “implosive force that
folds into neighborhoods the most violent and problematic repercussions
of wider regional, national and global processes. Furthermore, displaced
persons have migrated to numerous city-scale refugee camps for 50 mil-
lion people worldwide, creating a new phase in the life of cities, where the
concentration of ethnic populations, the availability of heavy weaponry, and
the crowded conditions of civic life create futurist forms of warfare...and
where a general desolation of the national and global landscape has trans-
posed many bizarre racial, religious, and linguistic enmities into scenarios
of unrelieved urban terror.”26

An Increasing but Ineffectual International

Response
In April 2006, Refugees magazine carried a photograph of what seems,
on the surface, like a normal day at the beach. A bikini-clad woman and her
bare-chested male companion sit on the sand with a cooler of cold drinks,
shielded from the sun by a large umbrella. Further down the beach, another
person lies on the sand, fully clothed. The third person’s repose is somehow
contorted, unnatural.

23 United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), Millennium Develop- | 13

ment Goals/Overview, 2001, URL: <http://www.unhabitat.org/content.asp?cid=2799&catid
=312&typeid=24&subMenuId=0>. Cited hereafter as UN-HABITAT, Millennium Development
Goals/Overview.
24 World Bank, Urbanization, 2007, URL: <http://youthink.worldbank.org/issues/urban-
ization/>, accessed 10 September 2007.
25 Manuel Castells, cited in Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics, ed. Ste-
phen Graham, ISBN 13: 978-1-4051-1575-9 (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 7.
26 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, vol. 1 of Public
Worlds Series (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 152-153.
 Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commission on
Refugees (UNHCR), Angelina Jolie, in a subsequent issue of Refugees, laments
that the couple in the photograph cannot “see the stark reality lying a few yards
further up the beach. An immigrant or a refugee, sprawled across the sand...is
dead. We’ll never know who he was or why he ended up there, and the couple
on the beach apparently couldn’t care less. It is a pretty sad picture.”27

Figure 9. The Corpse of a Would-be Migrant or Refugee on a Mediterranean

Beach. Source: Refugees Magazine, No. 142, p. 4-5 (2006), <http://www.unhcr.
org/publ/PUBL/44508c182.pdf>.

If only time would stand still, perhaps the global community could
focus on one geographic region at risk or a single development issue and
bring about the desired results. However, since the end of the Cold War,
the accelerated dynamics of high birth rates in the developing world, rural-
to-urban migrations, and globalization impede such efforts. For example,
to recognize the dire circumstances of the world’s urban poor in the year
14 | 2000, the UN made a Declaration on Cities and other Human Settlements
in the New Millennium. Among the UN Millennium Development Goals
is Target 11 Goal 7: “by 2020 to have achieved significant improvement
in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.” Trends in population
patterns suggest this worthy goal, even if it were attainable, would be neg-

27 Angelina Jolie, “Solving the Global Refugees Crisis,” Refugees, October 2006, URL:
<http://www.unhcr.org/publ/PUBL/4523cb392.pdf>, accessed 14 November 2006.
ligible: another UN organization estimates that the global slum-dwelling
population will increase from 924 million in 2001, to 1.4 billion by 2020,
and to 3 billion by 2050.28
The plight of the world’s dispossessed have recently gained the atten-
tion of the international community. Months after the 2004 tsunami in
Southeast Asia, the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights approved a
new set of “Principles on Housing and Property Restitution for Refugees
and Displaced Persons,” also known as the Pinheiro Principles. “The aim
of the principles is to provide international standards governing one of the
most basic entitlements for the survivors of a humanitarian disaster: the
restitution of property.”29 Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, a UN special Rapporteur
on Housing and Property Restitution, for whom the principles are named,
offers his insight:
The best solutions to the plight of millions of refugees and
displaced persons around the world is to ensure that they
attain the right of return freely to their countries and to
have restored to them housing and property of which they
were deprived during the course of displacement, or to be
compensated for any property that cannot be restored to
them. It is the most desired, sustainable dignified solution
to displacement.30
The DNI’s and the UN’s concerns about regional instability are echoed
by the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG, for Fédération Interna-
tionale des Géomètres). This non-government organization (NGO), always
close to the situation on the ground, engages in land dispute resolution, in
anticorruption, in transparency measures regarding land resources, and in
land access for the poor. FIG-affiliated land surveyors and land adminis-
trators, chiefly from European countries, have an impressive track record
of partnering with development organizations, private sector, civil society
organizations, and education/research institutes to bring about sustainable
development. Willi Zimmermann, an international land policy advisor with
25 years’ experience with the German foreign aid organization Gesellschaft
für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), explained at the 2006 International
Federation of Surveyors (FIG) Congress: | 15

28 UN-HABITAT, Millennium Development Goals/Overview.

29 Conor Foley and Ingunn Sofie Aursnes, “Land, Housing and Property Restitution after
Conflict: Principles and Practice,” Humanitarian Exchange Magazine (December 2005), URL:
<http://www.odihpn.org/search_results.asp?page=3&searchtext=&keyword=Conflict&pubTyp
e=Humanitarian+Exchange+Magazine&region=>, accessed 10 January 2007. Cited hereafter
as Foley and Aursnes, “Principles and Practice.”
30 Foley and Aursnes, “Principles and Practice.”
 Conflict prevention must be considered a global public good
warranting global cooperation and action.... There is grow-
ing recognition of the threat to international security posed
by failed and fragile states.... As globalization and interdepen-
dence increase, the threats posed by fragile and failed states
intensify. The international community has a practical and a
humanitarian responsibility to take coordinated action and to
tailor specific international development efforts to halting or
reversing their decline.31
The international community is increasingly aware of the nexus
between people and land, at all scales from parcel-lots to national territory,
and also between land and conflict. People and their land are so interlocked
that the dissolution of that tie both causes, and is caused by, major crises.
International efforts to address land issues are increasing but cannot keep
pace with the problems. Unless the ruptures in, and threats to, the relation-
ship between people and their land are addressed, the crises involving land
rights and usages will overwhelm all international aid, development pro-
grams, and post-conflict reconstruction and stability efforts. As will become
clear in subsequent chapters, new tools are available to meet this prodigious
threat to peace and stability.

16 |

31 Willi Zimmermann, “Good Governance in Land Tenure and Administration,” paper

TS.71-02 presented at the 23rd FIG Congress Shaping the Change, 8-13 October 2006 (Munich,
Germany). Cited hereafter as Zimmermann, 2006 conference paper.
CHAPTER 3:
Land Related Crises in Afghanistan
In his March 2003 plea, “Don’t Forget Afghanistan,” former New York
congressman and vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp recognized the sig-
nificant role of land and property rights in rebuilding Afghanistan. Kemp
lamented the residual power of warlords and the surge in opium cultivation
that perpetuates lawlessness and finances a resurgent Taliban.
Whatever happens in Iraq, the United States cannot afford to
neglect or forget about Afghanistan. That is why we believe
that a 21st century Marshall Plan for Afghanistan and the
region is required, which would provide not only financial
aid, but also assistance in setting up the infrastructure of dem-
ocratic capitalism. And, I can think of no one better suited
to advise [Afghan President] Karzai on bringing empower-
ment, private property and the rule of law to Afghanistan than
Hernando De Soto, who has helped so many other nations,
from his native Peru to Egypt, establish private property rights
and leverage them as collateral for capital creation. If we can’t
get it right in Afghanistan, what hope will we have in Iraq?32
Kemp’s prescient remarks about the role of property rights, made prior
to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, deserve a closer look. His affinity for De Soto
is telling. A Peruvian economist who currently runs the think tank Institute
for Liberty and Democracy, De Soto is famous for championing reform in
property rights and for coining the phrase “dead equity.” Dead equity is the
value of informally owned properties, potentially billions of dollars for many
a country, locked away because such properties cannot be sold. As a princi-
pal concern, he argues that the legal processes that regulate property should
be simplified and made transparent, and that formalization of property own-
ership can set developing countries free from their perpetual cycles of pov-
erty, i.e., constant dissipation of any generated capital. | 17
De Soto has won widespread praise for his work, but Kemp’s affirma-
tive endorsement of his economics is more optimistic than most experts’
assessments. Nevertheless, Kemp identifies a glaring deficiency in the U.S.’s

32 Jack Kemp, “Don’t Forget Afghanistan,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD),
Copley News Service, 4 March 2003, URL: <http://www.defenddemocracy.org/in_the_media/
in_the_media_show.htm?doc_id=160048>, accessed 11 February 2007.
 development agenda for Afghanistan. Not only is Afghanistan’s successful
reconstruction essential for the U.S.-led Global War on Terror, but the via-
bility and credibility of the U.S. with its multilateral, international partners,
most notably the UN and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), are at
stake. The lessons learned from inadequate solutions applied to the Afghan
situation should alert U.S. policy makers to retool U.S. government (USG)
policy and capabilities to deal effectively with the future social and economic
upheavals that will fall on populations far greater than Afghanistan’s esti-
mated 32 million.33

Returning Afghan Refugees

From 1990 to 2006, Kelegay, Afghanistan was an empty, dusty plain;
the site of an old Soviet military base with an abandoned village of broken
walls cutting across untended fields. But, since 2006, frantic construction
has been going on as Afghan laborers have built high-walled compounds
and flat-roofed houses from mud and straw. The building boom began when
the entire population of a ruined village, that had been called Naseri Chehl
Kapa, came back that summer after 26 years as refugees in Pakistan. Because
of their increased numbers as a new generation, they occupied government
land well beyond their original village and fields, up to and over the nearby
road. And, within a week, the returned villagers began dividing up the land par-

18 |

Figure 10. Afghan Walled Compounds. Source: Dr. Gregory Maassen, EMG.

33 Central Intelligence Agency, “The World Factbook” (Langley, VA: Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), 2007), URL: <https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
geos/af.html>, accessed 2 July 2007.
cels and buildings. “This is our ancestral land; our forefathers lived here,” said
Haji Abdul Jabar, who is building a large compound that will house his family
and those of his seven brothers. But, the provincial authorities say the villagers
have seized the land illegally. “When these families broke the law and grabbed
land, now everyone wants to grab land,” complained Imamuddin Hasan, the
chief Government of Afghanistan (GoA) refugee and repatriation official for
Baghlan Province.
The return of Afghan refugees over the last four years, and their ability
to adapt and to survive, has been one of the real successes of the international
intervention and of President Hamid Karzai’s government. Since the fall of

| 19

Figure 11. Afghan Refugees in Pakistan, 2001. Source: Photo

courtesy of Luke Powell, http://www.lukepowell.com.
 the Taliban in late 2001, an estimated 4.7 million refugees have flooded back
from neighboring Iran and Pakistan.34 This is a remarkable turnaround, given
that a quarter of the 1980 Afghan population of 24 million fled the country.
The observations of Conor Foley, a consultant to human rights and ref-
ugee organizations, add more urgency to solving land-related refugee mat-
ters. As the story of the Kelegay returnees demonstrates, while each refugee
return can be touted as a sign of success, without a land policy and a land
administration system to register land rights and interests-ownership, cus-
todianship, and use—each wave of returnees has the potential to destabilize
areas once thought stable.
Continued fighting and human rights violations mean that
many other Afghans remain internally displaced, often
occupying other people’s lands. The looting and destruc-
tion caused by war was recently compounded by severe
drought, which devastated much of the countryside over a
four-year period. Disputes over land and property remain a
significant cause of internal tension in Afghan society. The
inability of the courts to deal with these problems is also
having an extremely destabilizing effect. A recent report by
the independent Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit
described land disputes as the “number one source of con-
flict” in Afghanistan today.35
The resettlement and reintegration into society of Afghan refugees, the
4.7 million repatriated since 2002, plus the three million currently under
pressure from Pakistan and Iran to return home, has become a decades-long
humanitarian effort unprecedented in its scale. In addition to the millions
of refugees, there are around 250,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in
Afghanistan. Without clear definitions of who is and how long one remains
an IDP, the international community’s cited successes at refugee repatria-
tion will ring hollow when “people who have fled their homes in refugee-like
circumstances, but who have not crossed an international frontier receive
no such aid. The practical implications of this failure continue to be felt in
20 | Afghanistan and elsewhere across the world.”36 Foley states why land own-
ership in Afghanistan is starkly inequitable and, consequently, a significant

34 Carlotta Gall, “Afghans, Returning Home, Set Off a Building Boom,” The New York Times,
30 October 2006.
35 Conor Foley, “Afghanistan: The Search for Peace,” Minority Rights Group International,
November 2003, URL: <http://www.minorityrights.org/download.php?id=45>, accessed 23
April 2007. Cited hereafter as Conor Foley, “Afghanistan: The Search for Peace.”
36 Conor Foley, “Afghanistan: The Search for Peace.”
proportion of the rural population is landless, unproductive, unsheltered,
and dependent.
Returning refugees and IDPs often find themselves entangled
in property disputes, are unable to reclaim their property or
simply fall victim to extortion rackets run by local [militia]
commanders. In the ethnically divided northern provinces
in particular, where Kabul’s authority holds little sway over
powerful regional warlords, this is one of the most significant
factors hindering return. No clear regime for managing land
rights exists. The unorganized land registration system, the
large number of missing title deeds, and the fact that disputed
land has often been sold many times over, makes it very dif-
ficult to determine who owns what.37
Prior to the 2007 forced repatriations of Afghan refugees living in
Iran and in Pakistan, Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies research offi-
cer Srinjoy Bose presaged that a flow of refugees back from Iran and Paki-
stan into Afghanistan was likely to exacerbate social and economic problems
within Afghanistan. Moreover, refugees without a home or means to support
themselves could join the Taliban either out of resentment or merely to sur-
vive.38 Habibollah Qaderi, of the Afghan Ministry for Refugees and Repatria-
tion, emphasizes that to be sustainable, refugee returns must be voluntary,
informed, gradual, and linked to secure access to shelter, water, jobs, health
facilities, and education. The short-term humanitarian assistance to return-
ees has been commendable. At a time when many NGOs in Afghanistan are
tired and face dwindling donor support, long-term development programs
remain pressing needs. “Good governance, respect for human rights, and the
rule of law are not ‘optional extras’ when it comes to rebuilding a country,
but an intrinsic part of the process of reconstruction.”39 The specter of three
million additional Afghan refugees under pressure from Pakistan and Iran to
go home bodes ill for this volatile region.

Kabul: Victim and Catalyst of Land Crises

As evidenced by the current U.S. immigration debate, millions of peo- | 21
ple are on the move and settling, legally or not, in urban and peri-urban
areas of the world at an accelerating pace. Many migrants from rural areas

37 Conor Foley, “Afghanistan: The Search for Peace.”

38 Srinjoy Bose, “Afghan Refugees in Pakistan: An Uncertain Future,” New Delhi Institute of
Peace and Conflict Studies, Report SAP20070226342002, 23 February 2007.
39 Conor Foley, “Afghanistan: The Search for Peace.”
 Figure 12. Informal Dwellings Built on Kabul Hillside. Source: Dr. Gregory
Maassen, EMG.

seemingly bring only the clothes on their backs, but each also brings socio-
cultural, political, and economic “baggage” to the city. “What first was invis-
ible, when mixed into the urban cauldron of competing and antagonistic
ethnicities, economies, and powers, can suddenly become incendiary in a
venue laden with human tender. Indeed, urban areas are now the lightning
conductors for the world’s political violence.”40
Throughout the developing world, the tremendous growth of cities,
such as Lagos and Mexico City, has induced multifarious social, political,
and economic troubles. Since late 2001, when the repressive Taliban regime
was ousted from Afghanistan, Kabul’s population has increased by 230 per-
cent in five years, from 1.5 million to approximately 5 million, becoming one
of the world’s fastest growing cities.41 Kabul’s rapid urbanization, much of it
informal and haphazard, has many causes: a severe drought, unemployment,
fighting and insecurity, rural land disputes, and land-grabbing by the pow-
22 | erful. Returning refugee youth unfamiliar with agriculture but very famil-
iar with urban life (most refugee camps have electricity, running water, and
healthcare) currently flock to the cities.

40 Stephen Graham, Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics, ISBN 13:
978-1-4051-1575-9 (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 7.
41 USAID, Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, “Shelter and Settlements Update:
Afghanistan” (Washington, DC: USAID, October 2006). Cited hereafter as USAID, “Shelter and
Settlements,” 3.
 A B

C D

Figure 13. Change Detection Imagery of Kabul, Afghanistan. Source: NGA

Office of Science and Methodologies, Methodologies and Evaluation Division.

a. Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper-7 image from 2001

b. QuickBird multispectral image from 2007. Downsampled to Land- | 23
sat resolution. Copyright 2007 DigitialGlobe License: NextView
c. 2001-2007 change image. Large-scale changes are visible in this
image; blueish color objects are new since 2001. Note the large complex in
the center.
d. QuickBird Pan-sharpened multispectral image from 2007. Down-
sampled to Landsat resolution. Copyright 2007 DigitialGlobe License:
NextView.
 Figure 14. Comparative Average Population Densities in Built-Up Areas
in 51 Metropolitan Areas Create an arrow pointing to line of the graph for
Kabul. Source: Alain Bertaud, Order Without Design, 2003. http://alain_bertaud.
com/.

During the same period, however, the physical size of Kabul, as

mapped in a 1978 master plan, expanded by only 65 percent, leading to a
significant increase in population density. Kabul now ranks with other South
Asian megalopolises in population density, thus the accompanying inequi-
ties in land and property rights factor heavily into reconstruction and sta-
bility success. Houses in Kabul are overcrowded, with an average of 2.5 to 3
households in each single dwelling space (USAID 2006).42
With Kabul’s population density over 200 persons per hectare (2.47
acres) or 80 persons per acre, if current trends continue, its residents will
not experience many of the anticipated peace dividends. Basic indicators of
human welfare place Afghans among a handful of the world’s most hungry,
24 | destitute, illiterate, and short-lived people. The country ranks 173 out of 178
countries in the 2004 UNDP Human Development Index, competing with
a few devastated African countries for last place. Afghan women suffer the
highest rates of illiteracy and the lowest standards of health in the world.

42 USAID, “Shelter and Settlements,” 4.

Afghanistan has the world’s youngest population (an estimated 57 percent
under 18 years old) and few employment prospects.43
Nigel Allan, Professor Emeritus of Geography at University of Califor-
nia-Davis, has witnessed firsthand the exponential population explosion in
Afghanistan and wonders where the surplus population will go. When Allan
did the field research for his dissertation in 1970, Afghanistan’s population
was estimated at 12 million to 14 million. He decries the current Afghan
total fertility rate (TFR, the total number of children that women between
the ages of 15 and 44 or 49 can expect to bear in their lifetime, given the cur-
rent fertility rate) as horrific. Replacement TFR is 2.1. At this rate, a country’s
population remains the same. TFR for Caucasian Americans is 1.7, the same
as France; for Hispanic Americans it is 2.7. In Afghanistan, the TFR is 7.48!

Afghanistan at the moment is spewing out humans at

an alarming rate and has been doing so for a number of
decades because infant and child mortality has been greatly
reduced by inoculation programs. While justified as a great
humanitarian project, nobody ascertained what the effect of
reduced mortality would be on future generations and the
population/resources equation. Rural to urban migration is
the norm in the less developed world. For Afghans, rural-
to-urban migration is a positive force. The land cannot sup-
port the huge population-and never will.44
Landlessness due to poverty, land occupied by opium-cultivating war-
lords or squatters, land made inaccessible by mines and unexploded ord-
nance, clashes between Taliban militants and GoA forces, and parched land
that can no longer sustain livelihoods are reasons why returnees have set-
tled in Kabul’s slums rather than their ancestral homes. Inexorably drawn to
Kabul in search of job security and social cohesion, returnees without secu-
rity of land tenure in their former pastoral lands find their new existence in
informal urban slums equally untenable for an equivalent reason. Neverthe-
less, they stay.
Among other impediments, land tenure insecurity threatens to under- | 25
mine the achievements of post-conflict, stabilized Afghanistan, such as

43 USAID, “Shelter and Settlements,” 4.

43 Barnett R. Rubin and Humayun Hamidzada, “From Bonn to London: Governance Chal-
lenges and the Future of Statebuilding in Afghanistan,” International Peacekeeping 14, no. 1
(February 2007):20.
44 Nigel J.R. Allan, USA, Professor of Geography Emeritus, University of California at Davis,
e-mail interview by the author, 16 May 2007.
 Figure 15. The Author Chats with Youths in Herat. Fifty-seven Per Cent of
Afghans Are Under Age 18. Source: Author.

Figure 16. Regional Total Fertility Rates (TFR). An evident, inverse correlation
exists between affluence and a lower fertility rate, as reflected by the location of
dense lines of communication (in red) and corresponding TFRs. Source: Office of
26 | the Chief of Navy Reserve, http://navyreserve.navy.mil.
a legitimately elected president, a progressive national constitution, a free
press, and a host of new schools. No doubt improvements have been made,
but they are dwarfed by the increased demand for essential services and
infrastructure in the rapidly growing cities, Kabul especially. The invisibil-
ity of anxiously awaited improvements heightens the disparities between the
haves and the have-nots. Rubin notes:
17. Gasoline for Sale for Use in Private Generators. Source: Dr. Gregory Maassen,
EMG.
A major economic issue that is aggravating relations between
Afghans and the international community is the supply of
electricity to Kabul. As the city’s population expands toward
five million (up from 2.3 million in 2001), Kabulites today
have less electricity than they did five years ago. While for-
eigners and the rich power air conditioners, hot water heaters,
high-speed internet, and satellite TV with private generators,
average Kabulites are now ending a summer without fans, and
fearing a winter without heaters.45

The Conditions of Land Crises in Afghanistan at a

Glance
In 2006, the Geographic Research Branch of the U.K. Defence Geo-
graphic Centre summarized how decades of chaos have affected the relation- | 27
ship of people to land in Afghanistan.46
• The present legislation on land tenure in Afghanistan is complex,
uncertain and incomplete. Land relations in Afghanistan have been

45 Barnett R. Rubin, “Still Ours to Lose: Afghanistan on the Brink,” written testimony, Sen-
ate Foreign Relations Committee, Washington, DC, 21 September 2006, 7. Cited hereafter as
Rubin, “Still Ours to Lose: Afghanistan on the Brink.”
46 U.K. Defence Geographic Centre, Geographic Research Branch, “Summary of Land Own-
ership in Afghanistan,” (Middlesex, U.K.: October 2006).
 governed by a number of legal frameworks, and these frameworks have
been interpreted differently by successive administrations; therefore,
identifying the current law is a challenge.
• Stark inequalities in land ownership, ethnic conflict over land access,
and mismanaged land reforms by the state have generated and
sustained conflict over the past 25 years.
• No clear regime for managing land rights exists and, by default, many
management functions have fallen to the courts, which handle the
bulk of land disputes. With instability and coercion by warlords over
the last decade, land rights management and dispute resolution lost
credibility in many areas.
• Most rural Afghans regulate their land ownership relations customarily,
without using officials or courts. Customary sector management offers
a strong foundation, but is rife with practices that favor wealthier elites,
men, and dominant ethnic groups.
• The rules addressing who may own land in Afghanistan and in
what circumstances vary depending on the type of land under
consideration.
Foley, likewise, captures both the chaotic nature of land conflict in
Afghanistan and how the absence of rule of law and civil institutions are
impediments to sustainable development:47
• Houses have often been destroyed or occupied by others, and these
“secondary occupants” may themselves have been driven from their
homes.
• Official records proving ownership may have been destroyed, or were
never entirely accurate to begin with.
• Ownership and transfer documents are often forged.
• People may have been compelled to “sell” their land or property under
duress.
• People who have lived in a particular place for years may not have an
official title, because it was in the form of social ownership or only
recognized through customary law.
28 | Priorities for Addressing Afghanistan’s Land Crises
The challenge is daunting and of a higher order. Similar to the lower
levels of human needs in Maslow’s hierarchy, lower level nation-building
needs must be addressed to bolster progress on higher levels. The authors of
The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-Building emphasize that the first-order pri-

47 Conor Foley, A Guide to Property Law in Afghanistan, 1st ed. (Oslo/Pakistan/Afghanistan:

Norwegian Refugee Council (Flyktninghjelpen), 2005), 204.
orities for any nation-building mission are public security and humanitar-
ian assistance. They propose the following priority of nation-building tasks,
starting with the most urgent:48
1. Security: peacekeeping, law enforcement, rule of law, and security
sector reform

2. Humanitarian Relief: return of refugees and response to potential

epidemics, hunger, and lack of shelter

3. Governance: resuming public services and restoring public

administration

4. Economic Stabilization: establishing a stable currency and providing

a legal and regulatory framework in which local and international
commerce can resume

5. Democratization: building political parties, free press, civil society, and

a legal and constitutional framework for elections

6. Development: fostering economic growth, poverty reduction, and

infrastructure improvements
The above activities need not be accomplished sequentially. If adequate
funding is available, they can and should proceed in tandem. But if more
urgent priorities are not adequately resourced, investment in less urgent (but
no less important) ones is likely to be wasted.49
Addressing the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, President Bush
asked Congress for $10.6 billion in more aid for Afghanistan for 2007, pri-
marily to increase security. A quarter of this aid, a good $2.6 billion, will
go largely to building an electrical power distribution system—only 6 per-
cent of Afghans now have dependable electrical power—and to constructing
roads.50 The bulk of the 2007 aid package attends to the more urgent needs
while at the same time recognizing that long-term economic development
requires a legitimate, non-narcotics-based economy and land tenure security
based on the rule of law. In parallel, a corruption-free public administra-
tion in the form of credible and efficient institutions will have to manage the
| 29
resettlement of returned refugees. Hence, the difficulties of the people-land

48 James Dobbins, Seth G. Jones, Keith Crane, Beth Cole DeGrasse, The Beginner’s Guide to
Nation-Building, ISBN 978-0-8330-3988-0 (Arlington, VA: RAND Corporation, 2007), xxiii. Cited
hereafter as Dobbins, Jones, Crane and DeGrasse, The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-Building.
49 Dobbins, Jones, Crane and DeGrasse, The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-Building.
50 Elaine Shannon, “Can More Aid Save Afghanistan?” Time, 26 January 2007, URL:
<http://www.time.com/time/printout/0.8816.1582650.99.html>, accessed 18 April 2007.
 Figure 18. A Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT). Source: U.S. Department of
Defense.

relationship are intertwined at all stages: from registering the familial par-
cel lot to controlling State lands and cross-border activities. Even abroad,
the botched diplomacy with Iran over reception of the tens of thousands of
deported Afghans nearly resulted in the sacking of Afghan Foreign Minister
Rangin Dadfar Spanta in June 2007. Thus, the linchpin for the success of all
foreign aid projects in Afghanistan is law and order.
Afghanistan expert Barnett R. Rubin foresees a multi-year, perhaps
decades-long, transition from customary law to civil and state law. Keenly
aware that a lack of law enforcement undermines the basic legitimacy of any
government, Rubin, from his 2006 travels in the country, recognizes that
“the only capacities for dispute resolution and law enforcement that actu-
ally exist in much of Afghanistan consist of informal or village councils or
mullahs who administer a crude interpretation of sharia. Community lead-
ers complained constantly about judicial corruption. Many demanded the
30 |
implementation of sharia law, which they contrast not to secular law, but to
corruption. During the years required for [judicial reform] the only genuine
alternatives before Afghan society will be the enforcement of such customary
or Islamic law, or no law.”51 The avowal of community decisions and initia-
tives is in concert with Jalali and Grau’s assertion that if Afghanistan is to

51 Rubin, “Still Ours to Lose: Afghanistan on the Brink,” 10.

regain stability, the fractured social order must be restored by the empower-
ment of civil (tribal, community) leaders.52

De Soto’s Proposal: A Viable Solution?

As Afghan and foreign experts address land tenure matters, they will
be looking for a remedy to Afghanistan’s broader problems. Consider Kemp’s
hearty endorsement of Hernando De Soto’s poverty alleviation strategies.
Would De Soto’s advocacy of land reform—amending laws currently at odds
with local customs of understanding and dealing in land, and re-invent-
ing land registration systems that are not within reach or useful to the vast
majority of a country’s citizens—work in Afghanistan? Although De Soto
has won wide acclaim for his work, most notably from former President Bill
Clinton, he has been criticized for offering a silver-bullet solution to poor
countries’ complex tribulations. In the case of Afghanistan, this caution is
commendable because a single solution may not fit its myriad land tenure
issues. The application of his principles in different parts of the world have
yielded uneven results. In some countries, De Soto-like ideals play out beau-
tifully and bring about prosperity; in other places, his reforms are ineffectual
or even destabilizing. Ben Cousins and Donna Hornby detail difficulties in
South Africa’s experiment with reforms advocated by De Soto:
Renowned economist Hernando De Soto says he has found
an answer to global poverty. “Let’s give poor people indi-
vidual titles to the land so they can access credit, loans, and
investment, and transform it into live capital,” he once said.
Powerful words by an expert whose ideas have been pack-
aged and peddled all over the developing world by interna-
tional development agencies. In South Africa, where land
ownership is a controversial issue, the notion of provid-
ing individual title to land previously owned through cus-
tomary or collective land rights has become fashionable in
development circles. This approach, trumpeted by De Soto,
is intended to “capitalize the poor,” as in the West where
every piece of land is documented as part of a vast legal
| 31
process that endows owners with the potential to use it as
collateral or capital. Land titling in South Africa has engen-
dered strong opposition from NGOs, social movements,
and some land rights experts. Why aren’t they celebrating

52 Ali Ahmad Jalali and Lester W. Grau, Department of the Army, “Putting Humpty
Dumpty Together Again” (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Foreign Military Studies Office,
December 2001), 1.
 De Soto’s prescriptions? Because his policy prescriptions
oversimplify the complexities of informal economy and
land rights... This approach can actually weaken land rights
and marginalize vulnerable people.53
A boon to some, perilous to others: the truth about the value of indi-
vidual land titling in developing countries lies somewhere in between. A
study conducted in Argentina determined that individual land titles can have
positive effects, even if the prosperity De Soto envisions is not an imme-
diate result. Galiani and Schargrodsky, of the Stanford University Center
for International Development, found a modest but positive effect of land
titling on access to mortgage credit, but no impact on access to other forms
of credit. Yet, “moving a poor household from usufructuary land rights to full
property rights substantially increased investment in the houses.”54 More-
over, land titling reduced the fertility of the household heads, and the pres-
ence of extended family members. Also, these smaller families invested more
resources in the education of their children.
In sum, “entitling the poor increases their investment both in the house
and in the human capital of their children, which will contribute to reduce
the poverty of the next generation.”55 While secondary and tertiary effects
from individual land titling, such as smaller, better educated families, may
disappoint De Soto devotees, such results would be welcome in Afghanistan,
a nation struggling to emerge from decades of conflict and devastation.

The Housing, Land, and Property Rights Triad

The year 2007 marks the first time in human history that the number
of city dwellers surpassed the world’s rural population. In Afghanistan, the
capital city, Kabul, the destination of millions of repatriated refugees and
IDPs, is the most visible urban area in the developing world grappling with
rural-to-urban migration. Hard-pressed to absorb these numbers, much less
any of the remaining three million refugees who face an uncertain future in
neighboring countries, Afghanistan is the 21st century proving ground for
approaches to reconstruction and stability. De Soto’s reforms may certainly
32 | constitute part of the solution to Afghanistan’s land crises and community
needs. But his larger theories must yield, when necessary, to those culturally

53 Ben Cousins and Donna Hornby, “Land Rights: De Soto Solution Not for South Africa,”
Business Day, 13 January 2007, 1.
54 Sebastian Galiani and Ernesto Schargrodsky, Property Rights for the Poor, Working Paper
#249 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Center for International Development, 2005): 30. Cited
hereafter as Galiani and Schargrodsky, “Property Rights for the Poor.”
55 Galiani and Schargrodsky, Property Rights for the Poor, 30.
attuned applications that can best build a civil society and a legitimate econ-
omy, anchors for sustainable development in Afghanistan. Foley elaborates,
“The issue of housing, land, and property (HLP) rights should be considered
as one central, but interlinked component of a process of nation-building.
Perhaps a central lesson from Afghanistan is that a ‘one size fits all’ approach
to HLP is rarely likely to be successful at the national level. It is essential,
instead, that those involved in designing and implementing HLP rights pro-
grams have a clear understanding of the cultural, social, and political context
in which they are working.”56
Even though land issues do not have the urgency that other short-term
humanitarian crises do, resolving land conflicts can address both long-term
and short-term needs and can foster stability in Afghanistan. In the remain-
ing chapters, it will become apparent that lack of a land administration sys-
tem that registers multiple (shared or even competing) rights and interests
in land—as opposed to private property rights—may be the deciding fac-
tor between success and failure for the international community’s six-year
investment in Afghanistan.

| 33

56 Conor Foley, Housing, Land and Property Restitution Rights in Afghanistan (Centre for Hous-
ing Rights and Evictions COHRE, in press 2006), 31, URL: <http://www.cohre.org>, accessed
5 April 2007. Cited hereafter as Foley, Housing, Land and Property Restitution Rights.
CHAPTER 4:
“Foreign Intelligence is Geography’’
— Jerome Dobson

Recent U.S. Intelligence Failures

Numerous books, all critical, most scathing, some commiserating,
but few perceptive, have appeared in recent years to bemoan a litany of post
Cold-War U.S. intelligence failures, diplomatic blunders, alienated allies and
enraged adversaries. The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, prompted a
mammoth reorganization and consolidation of 22 separate agencies into the
U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2003. The 16 agencies composing
the IC, since 2005 under a single Director of National Intelligence, now col-
laborate on the basis of “responsibility to provide” as opposed to the previous
“need to know.” And technological advances such as the Wiki-inspired Intel-
lipedia allow analysts to add personal insights to an ever-increasing aggre-
gate of information. Years before the September 11th attacks, and days before
the East African Embassy bombings that foreshadowed them, John Hillen
cited unfamiliarity with the Kosovo Liberation Army and total stupefaction
at Indian nuclear tests as evidence that the Intelligence Community (IC) was
replete with information-saturated Know Nothings.57 U.S. intelligence assets
were, and still are, too skewed toward technical solutions to decipher the cul-
tural currents of foreign shores.
A decade ago Hillen wrote that “the U.S. is unusually clueless on things
it really must know, such as what stands to happen in post-Suharto Indone-
sia, the security of Russia’s nuclear weapons (and scientists), China’s intentions
about virtually anything outside its borders, Japan’s economic and trading strat-
egies, or the state of the North Korean regime.”58 Dobson reflects on the Iraq
“quagmire,” noting that U.S. “policy makers did not take culture—Shia Arab,
Sunni Arab, and Sunni Kurd—adequately into account in post-war planning for
| 35

57 John Hillen, “Know Nothings: U.S. Intelligence Failures Stem from Too Much Information,
Not Enough Understanding,” National Review 50, no. 14 (3 August 1998): 1. Cited hereafter as
Hillen, “Know Nothings.”
58 Hillen, “Know Nothings,” 2.
 Figure 19. The Arc of Instability Encompasses the Least Affluent Regions of the
World. Source: Office of the Chief of Navy Reserve, http://navyreserve.navy.mil.

Iraq.”59 Iraq is but an example of how “the United States is now a mighty global
power crippled by abysmal ignorance of its vast global domain.”60
A list of geopolitical concerns for 2007 might be headlined by a post-
Musharraf Pakistan, Iran’s nuclear capabilities and intentions, Hizbollah’s de
facto state-within-a-state influence in Lebanon, China’s economic invest-
ments in Panama and Africa, and the consequences of a unilateral declaration
of Kosovar independence. And those are concerns in the governed regions
of the world. Thinking geographically about the large, porous, ungoverned
regions, devoid of political control, presents a greater challenge still. The
western provinces in Pakistan, portions of Lebanon and Yemen, wide swaths
of South America (Amazonia) and Africa, the Sahel and the Horn, parts of
the southern Philippines, several Indonesian islands, Chechnya, and rural
Myanmar are outside effective government control and thus can be affected
severely by humanitarian disasters and ethnic conflict. “These regions are
defined by endemic imbalances in the distribution of wealth, staggering
health problems, fragile political systems, regressive social systems and dis-
enfranchised youth susceptible to the lure of extremism. They contain equal
potential for either positive growth, or catastrophic failure,”61 which is why
36 | they should be of particular concern to the IC.

59 Jerome E. Dobson, “Foreign Intelligence Is Geography,” Ubique — Notes from the Ameri-
can Geographical Society (AGS) 25, no. 1 (2005): 1-2. Cited hereafter as Dobson, “Intelligence is
Geography.”
60 Dobson, “Intelligence is Geography.”
61 Francis A. Galgano, “A Geographical Analysis of Un-Governed Spaces,” The Pennsylvania
Geographer 44, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2006): 72.
Geography in 20th Century U.S. Foreign Policy and
Academe
Dobson recalls the first half of the 20th century as a time when the forging
of American foreign policy could not have been accomplished without geogra-
phers. In the aftermath of the “War to End all Wars, U.S. President Woodrow
Wilson believed that America would lead the world in peace through political
and economic, rather than military means. Wilson called on a distinguished
geographer, the Harvard and Yale educated Isaiah
Bowman, to help frame American foreign pol-
icy at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.
Wilson’s plight is especially instructive. For 140
years, America had practiced isolationism. No
one in government—not even the officers and
analysts of the Department of State or Military
Intelligence—was ready to analyze foreign intel-
ligence or face sophisticated European nego-
tiators. Wilson, scholar that he was, recognized
his problem as being geographic and called on
the AGS for help. AGS director Bowman led
The Inquiry, a massive analysis of foreign intel-
ligence staffed by 150 scholars from geography
and other disciplines. Their task was to col-
Figure 20. Isaiah Bowman. lect and analyze the information that would
Source: American Geographical
Society. be needed to establish a “scientific” peace at
war’s end. As part of The Inquiry, the AGS was
responsible for drafting Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points, one of the
most reassuring and effective policy statements ever written. When
Wilson and the American delegation left for France, Bowman sailed
with them. On arrival, Bowman pulled off an amazing bureaucratic
coup, and Wilson decreed that analysts from the Department of State,
Military Intelligence, and Central Bureau of Statistics would report to
him through Bowman. In January 1919, AGS geographers and car-
tographers turned out more than 300 maps per week based on geo- | 37
graphic analysis of The Inquiry’s massive data collections covering
language, ethnicity, resources, historic boundaries, and other perti-
nent information. America’s delegation became the envy of Versailles.62

62 Jerome E. Dobson, “Bring Back Geography!” ArcNews Online by ESRI, Spring 2007,
URL:<http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/spring07articles/bring-back-geography-1of2.
html>, accessed 18 July 2007. Cited hereafter as Dobson, “Bring Back Geography!”
 One might think that the American political isolationism at the time
would have found geographers, especially political geographers with expertise
on foreign areas, wanting. That was hardly the case. The focus of geography
until about 1850 was celestial navigation. Charles Darwin’s theories of evolu-
tion revolutionized geography; the discipline increasingly catechized the rela-
tionship between land and people. By the turn of the 20th century, the “Heyday
of Ivy League Geography,”63 America’s first professional geographers, like their
European counterparts, held fast to the prevailing theory of environmental
determinism. Simply stated, environmental determinism postulates that physi-
cal geography, including climate, at a minimum influences people or, according
to some, even determines mentalities and cultures. Tropical climates dispose
inhabitants toward sloth, for example, while the harsher weather of the middle
latitudes leads to perseverence, and to social and industrial progress. The theo-
ry’s Darwinian “survival of the fittest” tenet is obvious.
The environmental deterministic works of Friedrich Ratzel, a German
geographer who invented the term “Lebensraum” (“room for living”), were
influential in stoking the arms race of Imperial Germany. Ratzel’s 1875 tour
of the American Midwest acquainted him with the positive influence Ger-
man immigrants had had as a fertilizing element on the culture of the newly
settled frontier. The aggressive, “Übermensch” or superior man ideology
of Nazi Germany came not from Ratzel, but from Karl Haushofer and his
Geopolitik or German geostrategy. Haushofer, a former military attaché to
Japan and a WWI general, became a geography professor at the University
of Munich, where future Deputy Reichsführer Rudolf Hess was his student.
As founding editor of the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, the “Magazine of Geo-
politics,” he so influenced geographers in Japan that a school of geopolitics
modeled after Haushofer’s was established there. Haushofer helped craft the
WWII German-Japanese alliance; he committed suicide in 1946. The envi-
ronmental determinism that charged Geopolitik became the bedrock, first
of Adolf Hitler’s bellicose speeches, and later of his horrific foreign policy.
Haushofer proffered a scientific justification of Geopolitik:
As an exact science, Geopolitik deserves serious consider-
ation. Our leaders must learn to use all available tools to
38 |
carry on the fight for Germany’s existence—a struggle which
is becoming increasingly difficult due to the incongruity
between her food production and population density . . .
Germany must emerge out of the narrowness of her present

63 Richard Wright and Natalie Koch, Geography in the Ivy League (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth
College, in press 2007), 5, URL: <http://www.dartmouth.edu/~geog/dc_geo_AG_WGI1.html>,
accessed 15 July 2007. Cited hereafter as Wright and Koch, Geography in the Ivy League.
 living space into the freedom of the world....We must famil-
iarize ourselves with the important spaces of settlement and
migration on Earth. We must study the problem of boundar-
ies as one of the most important problems of Geopolitik. We
ought to devote particular attention to national self-determi-
nation, population pressure, living space.64
In later life Bowman’s views, especially as a co-architect of the UN, exhib-
ited probabilistic, as opposed to deterministic, geographical thought. The Euro-
pean Union, adding ever more member states, is a half-century testimonial
for regional cooperation among naturally competitive polities. Nevertheless,
immediately after German capitulation in 1945, Geopolitik fell into disrepute
as a bizarre Nazi pseudoscience responsible for 70 million deaths. Academia
quickly distanced itself from environmental determinism, the theory behind
Geopolitik, and, in the U.S., quite inexplicably, associated geography as a whole
with Nazism. Lacking alternative operable theories to environmental determin-
ism, scholars then berated geography for being poorly defined, and for its best
work having been done by non-geographers.65 Dartmouth College geography
professor Richard Wright and Harvard University graduate student Natalie
Koch explain a trend that began in 1948 when Harvard, soon followed by Stan-
ford, Yale and other leading universities, closed its geography departments.
The reasons behind these terminations vary around themes
of weak faculty and the discipline’s uncertain intellectual
terrain. The adverse fiscal context faced by institutions in
the aftermath of World War II probably made things worse.
Increased demand for practical education and the attack on
environmental determinism was particularly devastating for
the future of geography in the Ivy League universities, which
increasingly emphasized the importance of theory and held
technical instruction in low esteem. In contrast, geography
departments in the land-grant colleges of the Midwest pros-
pered in this environment. Because these universities were
designed in part to support the Midwestern agricultural econ-
omy and serve the broader public, they welcomed the applied | 39
elements of geography.66

64 Andreas Dorpalen, The World of Haushofer: Geopolitics in Action (New York: Farrar & Rhine-
hart, Inc., 1942), 28.
65 Wright and Koch, Geography in the Ivy League, 8.
66 Wright and Koch, Geography in the Ivy League, 7.
 The Ivy League geography departments closed in favor of new area stud-
ies and political science curriculums. These newer disciplines often lack a spa-
tial component. Widespread disdain for geography as an applied, rather than
a basic, science saw geography replaced in many universities by urban plan-
ning, which is far more applied, pragmatic, and arguably vocational. Noting
these contradictions, Dobson, incredulous that any discipline could be so dras-
tically punished for its alleged shortcomings, acclaims geography as much more
than its recent consignment to leisure travel and photo journals popularized by
National Geographic:
Geography is more than you think! Geography is to space
what history is to time. It is a spatial way of thinking, a sci-
ence with distinctive methods and tools, a body of knowl-
edge about places, and a set of information technologies
that have been around for centuries. Geography is about
understanding people and places and how real-world places
function in a viscerally organic sense. It’s about understand-
ing spatial distributions and interpreting what they mean.
It’s about using technology to study, in the words of the
late professor J. Rowland Illick, “why people do what they
do where they do it.” Geography is a dimensional science,
based on spatial logic in which locations, flows, and spatial
associations are considered to be primary evidence of earth
processes, both physical and cultural. Its hallmarks are spa-
tial analysis, place-based research (e.g., regional, area, and
urban studies) and scientific integration.67

Recovering Geography in the 21st Century

Fifty years ago the launch of the Sputnik satellite caused widespread alarm
but also presented a tangible objective for American foreign policy. The adver-
sarial Soviets had seemingly surpassed the U.S. in rocket and, by implication,
missile technology. To recover from the shock and embarrassment, Congress,
passing the National Defense Education Act, infused federal money into K-12
40 | teacher education and built a pipeline leading students from phonics to univer-
sity degrees in math and science. In 1969 the U.S. won the space race against the
Soviets to put a man on the moon.
The challenges facing the U.S. in the 21st century as the world’s sole super
power are less technical but immensely more complex. Not only because human
behavior is complex, but because yet another dimension to the battlespace has

67 Dobson, “Bring Back Geography!”

appeared, the third new realm to be contested in under a century. From time
primordial to WWI, the battlespace was limited to the earth’s surface—land and
sea. “Control of the skies” or airpower proved to be decisive in the Allied vic-
tory in WWII. In the late 20th century, from Sputnik to the Strategic Defense
Initiative “Star Wars,” the battlefield expanded into a third dimension—space.
The Global War on Terror once again catches the U.S. behind its adversaries in
operating in a fourth dimension, virtual space, not only in exercising effective
command and control, but in promulgating ideologies. Vitriolic virtual media
coverage of U.S. foreign policy missteps has cemented anti-American senti-
ment in many corners of the world. The lack of a galvanized U.S. assertion of its
positive international identity, one that might equate to Franklin’s Roosevelt’s
casting of America as an “arsenal of democracy” in 1940, allows the extremist
ideologies to go unchallenged and worse, to be operationalized. Are further U.S.
foreign policy embarrassments necessary to recover an understanding of “why
people do what they do where they do it?”
In a century of transitions in warfare the real world has not been so easy
to see as the theoretical. Wars on the surface still go on. Conflicts in air and
space continue. The venues of virtual warfare are so new that those on the
defensive have been slow to respond if not completely overwhelmed. The capa-
bilities afforded by new technologies have been difficult to absorb and use to an
advantage, altering the very concept of what is national security.
The increasing affordability of the Internet and other virtual technolo-
gies has greatly increased communications in the developing world. Cellular
phone provider Vodaphone recently took over half of the telephone system
for the Republic of the Congo and offered monthly service for as low as $2 per
user. Now a street vendor making $8 a day can afford a telephone. Similarly,
other technologies have dramatically dropped in price, making their use fea-
sible in areas without electricity. Another example now available worldwide
is the global positioning system (GPS). In affluent countries, drivers have
been thrilled to see prices of these systems drop from thousands of dollars
to $300 in less than a decade, all the while with improved real-time traf-
fic reports and voice commands. Simpler GPSs, but with laser pointers and
surveying capability, are available to users at prices that make them viable to
employ even by the poorer states. | 41
Using inexpensive GPS surveying tools, governments and individuals
can produce cadastral maps that tell residents, farmers, shop owners, and oth-
ers exactly where their properties are in relation to goods and services, mar-
kets, and transportation nodes. Using Geographic Information Science (GIS)
they can even record details as to the uses of the land and the various details of
it—geology, drainage, crops, soils, economic use, affiliation of the owner, and
 other variables. This openly available, but often unrecorded, information is the
basis not only of business intelligence decisions, but of peoples’ ways of life. GIS
allows better understanding of a culture, its customs and norms regarding land
use, property ownership, and the development of the local infrastructure.
Attorney and former U.S. military attaché officer Geoffrey Demarest con-
tends that foreign policy decisions, whether related to counter-narcotics, coun-
ter-terrorism, economic aid, nation-building, and so on, are ill-founded when
not informed by intelligence regarding the ownership of real property. More-
over, the link between the existence of formalized property and internal peace
is direct and substantial. The implication for the Intelligence Community (IC) is
compelling. In addition to economic, political, and military intelligence, the IC
must expand its product line to include property intelligence.68
Foreign Intelligence is Geography. As taught in university-level regional
geography courses, open-source geography offers an untapped intelligence
bonanza. Once transformed into property intelligence, open-source geogra-
phy, such as property information, can potentially predict the course of civil
violence, determine the effectiveness of an opium eradication campaign, and
uncover heretofore hidden familial, financial, and organizational ties of non-
state actors, the murky adversaries in the Global War on Terror.
After all, the scale of danger presented by an individual or
organization is somehow commensurate with their material
wealth....The leaders of the Colombian FARC or of Al Qaeda
manage considerable wealth and defend territory by secrecy
and force. If secrecy of ownership were unavailable to them,
and their wealth and sanctuaries exposed, then their ability to
use violent force would be insufficient to keep them from los-
ing power. Such leaders are well aware of this fact....They are
careful to protect the lack of records and confidentiality of the
wealth that the lack of a formalized property system assigns to
them. Not only can we take their wealth away, it will lead us to
them. It is their Achilles heel.69
Demarest adds that property, as a subject of study, provides a link
42 | between law and geography. U.S. intelligence collectors, analysts, and policy
makers, historically indifferent to details of property ownership, with new GIS
applications can exploit property ownership data to refine national intelligence

68 Geoffrey Demarest, Property & Peace: Insurgency, Strategy and the Statute of Frauds, report
for the U.S. Army, Foreign Military Studies Office (Ft. Leavenworth, KS: Foreign Military Studies
Office, 2007), 80. Cited hereafter as Demarest, Property & Peace.
69 Demarest, Property & Peace, 53.
 | 43

Figure 21. Old Cadastral Records Overlaid onto Commercial Satellite

Image of Current Parcel Boundaries, and Figure 22. A Matching Pro-
perty Deed—Tying a Name to a Place. Source: EMG.
 strategy. “We should recover geography itself as a discipline for matters of state,
because the object of ownership, and of most armed struggles is, after all, a
place. It is simultaneously the link between economics and strategy, assessing
and addressing internal conflicts, allowing precise assignment of relative value
to territory.”70
Foley, prescribing remedies for the international community to untangle
the 40-year impact that tribalism, communism, Islamic theocracy, and now the
lure of a free market economy has successively had on land and property in
Afghanistan, rightly concludes, “send money, guns, and lawyers.”71 The U.S. is
sending money and guns to Afghanistan and elsewhere, but very little in the
way of legal, social, and land administration experts because such deployable
expertise resides neither in the ranks of USG foreign aid workers nor in univer-
sities that prepare students for foreign service and international development
careers. Although the U.S. is afflicted by a dearth of foreign geographic knowl-
edge, there are signs of change, beginning with the military forces. Dobson,
in one-on-one conversations with General David H. Petraeus, commander of
the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), has sufficient reason for optimism that
geography’s indispensable role in war and peace will not be relegated to the past.
General Petraeus “holds a doctorate in international relations from Princeton
University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and
he’s every bit as smart as you’ve heard. His innate sense of geography comes
through in his 14 observations from soldiering in Iraq. Observation number
nine says, ‘Cultural awareness is a force multiplier,’ and he adds, ‘knowledge
of the cultural ‘terrain’ can be as important as, and sometimes even more
important than, knowledge of the geographic terrain.’”72 Dobson’s inter-
action with General Petraeus indicates that influential leaders can modify
their impressions of geography.

44 |

70 Demarest, Property & Peace, 9.

71 Foley, Housing, Land and Property Restitution Rights, 30.
73 Dobson, “Bring Back Geography!”
New Geographical Tools and Applications
Geographic Information System
Intelligence Preparation of the Environment is the graphical analysis of
the enemy, environment, and terrain for all types of military operations. GIS is
the civilian counterpart, a visual depiction of a given problem’s geospatial com-
ponents such as transportation networks, income distribution, demographic
factors, land use, and property ownership. GIS has created a body of action-
able knowledge far greater in size than open-source textual data, but until the
maturing of GIS, around the turn of the millennium, an assertion that prop-
erty intelligence could inform policy makers as well as economic, political, and
military intelligence, would have been viewed as fanciful. Michael F. Goodchild,
Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, describes
GIS as “a way of looking at the world, a lens through which the world is filtered
as it is projected on the geographer’s screen...and access to a vast range of ana-
lytic techniques that can test theories and hypotheses or search for patterns and
anomalies.”73 With the advent of MapQuest and Zillow, GIS applications for
navigation and real estate valuations, respectively, it is no longer a pipe dream

| 45

Figure 23. Membership Soars in the Association of American Geographers.

Source: Association of American Geographers.

73 Michael F. Goodchild, “Geography Prospers from GIS,” Environmental Systems Research

Institute, Inc., April 2007, URL: <http://www.esri.com/news/arcwatch/0407/feature.html>,
accessed 1 August 2007. Cited hereafter as Goodchild, “Geography Prospers.”
 that property data, too, can be collected, organized, analyzed, and visualized to
support foreign policy decisions. Goodchild continues:
Several recent advances in geospatial technology have truly
caught the popular imagination, starting with wayfinding sites
such as MapQuest and progressing to today’s Google Earth,
Microsoft Virtual Earth, and many more. People are now able
to see their own houses and neighborhoods in a global con-
text...People are better equipped to see the relevance of GIS in
many aspects of human activity and to appreciate the power
that GIS provides to government, the oil and gas industry,
disaster management, law enforcement, the military, conser-
vation, and a host of other sectors.74
Indeed, from a low point in the 1980s, GIS has not only revived the popu-
larity of geography as an academic discipline, but has become an indispens-
able tool for other fields. According to Goodchild, GIS is taught in surveying,
civil engineering, computer science, anthropology, environmental science, and
many other disciplines, particularly on campuses with no department of geog-
raphy. Most GIS courses are offered through departments of geography, and
geographers make up a healthy percentage of the global community of GIS
researchers.75 The resurgence of geography as a discipline is reflected in the
10,000 members in the Association of American Geographers (AAG), a figure
which has nearly doubled since 2000.

Bowman Expeditions
The uniqueness of geography is epitomized in a new proposal by Dobson
to dispatch place-based geographic research expeditions around the world, a
project that has captured the attention and funding of the U.S. Army. Named
in honor of former AGS Director Isaiah Bowman, the first Bowman Expedi-
tion, called the Mexico Indigena Project and led by Peter Herlihy, Associate
Professor of Geography at the University of Kansas (KU), in 2005-06 traced
the transfer of property from ejidos (a uniquely Mexican form of large land-
holdings owned communally but cultivated by individual farmers) to private
46 | property (see Appendix A. Mexico Indigena Project Cycle). Dobson opines that
this project merely foreshadows what geographers can do to convey knowledge
of foreign lands, establish relationships with indigenous peoples and institu-
tions, collect unclassified information, and build an open-source GIS that can
be employed by other investigators, regardless of discipline. It is but one remedy

74 Goodchild, “Geography Prospers.”

75 Goodchild, “Geography Prospers.”
to restore geography in its rightful place in higher education and public policy
circles. Dobson recalls the genesis of the expedition.
I wrote a proposal suggesting that most of the missing knowl-
edge about foreign lands is not secret, insider information that
should be classified. The AGS can send a geography professor
and two or three graduate students to every country in the
world for a full semester each year, with teams rotating on a
five-year cycle so that each country is understood by five sepa-
rate teams. I calculated a budget and was shocked myself to
realize that the entire program would cost only $125,000,000
per year, a pittance compared to what the IC typically pays
for far less effective information. I circulated the proposal and
found allies at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. They marketed the
concept and funded a prototype for the larger concept that,
ideally, would reach every country in the world. 76
An important part of a Bowman Expedition’s design is to allow each
investigator to choose a research topic for in-depth analysis. Professor Herlihy’s
research team chose land tenure and uncovered a revolutionary land reform
comparable in magnitude to the land reform under the Mexican constitution of
1917 that first created ejidos.
The Program for Certification of Ejidal Rights and Titling of
[parcels] (PROCEDE) began in 1993 as a Mexican govern-
ment program to privatize the ejido lands. Lands that have
been held communally for almost a century are being con-
verted to private property on a massive scale. In a two stage
process, each present occupant can apply for a certificate that
does not imply actual ownership. After one transfer, say when
the farmer dies and the land passes to an offspring, the new
holder can apply for an actual title. Henceforth, the parcel can
be sold or used as collateral on a loan. The implications are
staggering for about 90 percent of the more than 30,000 agrar-
ian communities in the country where PROCEDE has already
finished its work, now covering around 100,000,000 hectares | 47
or about half of Mexico’s land area and including millions of
indigenous farmers.77

76 Jerome E. Dobson, “American Geographical Society (AGS) Conducts Fieldwork in Mex-

ico,” Ubique—Notes from the American Geographical Society (AGS) 26, no. 1 (2006). Cited here-
after as Dobson, “Fieldwork in Mexico.”
77 Dobson, “Fieldwork in Mexico.”
 Mexico Indigena Project 2005-2006

48 |
Figure 24. Participants and Figure
25. Sketch Map of Parcels. Source:
Mexico Indigena. http://web.
ku.edu/~mexind/index.htm.
Mexico Indigena Project 2005-2006 (Continued)

| 49

Figure 26. Area Map. Source: Mexico Indigena.

 An analysis of PROCEDE’s effects on the Mexican populace is a
perfect example of salient GIS information untapped by the IC. The U.S.
Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection, based
on hometowns or origins of detained illegal immigrants where PROCEDE
has been enacted, could identify out-migration trends from Mexico and
enhance the deployment and effectiveness of border protection resources.
While a comparative GIS analysis of the world’s various property regimes
might be years away, the identification of shortcomings or strengths on which
to base property rights revisions is attainable now. In fact, the Mexico Indi-
gena Project had this very purpose in mind. All Bowman Expedition results
will be published in open literature, and GIS data will be available on-line
because the goal is to inform not just the government, but also the general
public via a new type of automated regional geography. Dobson announced
that a second Bowman Expedition received Department of Defense fund-
ing to conduct fieldwork in the Antilles, an unusual challenge with so many
island nations. Over three years, recipients of Bowman Expedition funds to
the Antilles will include the following institutions and tasks:78
• Kansas State University has accepted primary responsibility for building
and maintaining a multi-resolution, open source GIS database for the
entire Antilles Region.
• Virginia Tech will conduct a comparative analysis of water resource
issues in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
• Louisiana State University will focus on land-use and land cover
dynamics as they relate to tourism, the dominant economic sector in
the Leeward segment of the Lesser Antilles.
• Miami and Hofstra Universities will compare and contrast rural
economic conditions, land use change, and job prospects in three
independent countries of the southern Lesser Antilles.
• Indiana University will conduct field-based research to investigate
the consequences of rapid urbanization in Trinidad and rapid coastal
zone tourism-related development in Tobago.
• The University of Kansas will coordinate the effort among participants,
report to AGS, and interface onsite with the sponsor .
50 |
The Bowman Expeditions are only an indication that future endeavors to
collect and create cadastral data will not be the domain of central governments
alone. Not only are American academicians analyzing property data with GIS,

78 Jerome E. Dobson, “AGS Bowman Expeditions,” The American Geographical Society

(12 June 2007), URL: <http://www.amergeog.org/bowman-expeditions.htm>, accessed 27
June 2007.
but also indigenous peoples, whose rural livelihoods are threatened by insecure
tenure and incapacitated governments, are GIS-empowered to locally manage
their land matters.

Community/Participatory Mapping
The International Land Coalition (ILC) is a network of intergovernmen-
tal, governmental, and civil society organizations that work to increase oppor-
tunities for the poor and disadvantaged to participate in decision-making
on land tenure security issues. For many rural communities, maps are a step
toward grass-roots empowerment for better land access and tenure security.
Rural maps, in the experience of ILC’s partners, have many times increased the
users’ capacity to advocate, lobby, plan, manage and monitor the territorial and
land-related dimensions of development activities in the mapped areas.79
A prime example involved former combatants in the 1980-1992 Salva-
doran civil war, in which land tenure was one of the primary causes of a con-
flict that claimed over 70,000 lives. When post-conflict land transfers from the
El Salvadoran government slowed, disaffection rebounded. The government’s
desire to expedite the land titling process resulted in joint land titles rather than
the promised individual ones. “In that situation, everyone owns everything and
so no one owns anything.”80 No individual could get credit for loans without
the support of the entire group. The original land tenure conflict in El Salvador
remained unsolved until the Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere
(CARE) enabled the community to decide how to divide the land into indi-
vidual plots or into grazing or other communal use lands. With GPS that used
laser beams to measure distances, the titling process became transparent and
owned by the community. “There was a lot of discussion,” said Roberto Candel,
CARE’s GPS expert, “But once they could see the map, see what decisions they
were talking about, they were able to make those decisions.”81
The Salvadoran case demonstrates that community-produced sketch
maps can be combined with GIS to go beyond the determination of primary
rights (ownership rights) to include secondary use rights (access to grazing
land, water resources, fruit trees and forest) to regularize tenure and to resolve
land conflict. In the developing world, “a blend of statutory, customary and
hybrid (formal or informal) institutions and regulations may co-exist in the | 51

79 Stefano de Gessa, Participatory Mapping as a Catalyst for Rural People’s Empowerment: An

Overview of Experiences from the International Land Coalition (ILC) Network (Rome: International
Land Coalition (ILC), April 2006), URL: <www.landcoalition.org/pdf/mapping_ILC.pdf>,
accessed 25 September 2007. Cited hereafter as De Gessa, Participatory Mapping.
80 De Gessa, Participatory Mapping.
81 Douglas Farah, “Satellites Solve Salvadoran Farm Disputes,” The Washington Post, 14
July 1996.
 same territory, all having a de jure or de facto authority over land rights. Land
conflicts, particularly in rural and remote areas, are multi-dimensional and
complex.”82

Geography as a Tangible Foreign Policy Tool

Geography, the discipline that buttressed American eminence in early
20th century world affairs, suffered a decline which contributed to policy
makers’ inability to fathom that human conflict springs from ruptures in the
relationships between land and people. The ethnic origins of post-Cold War
conflicts accentuate the significance of geography in foreign policy matters.
Geographic education at all levels in the U.S. should be bolstered, similar to
the emphasis placed on math and science following the launch of Sputnik.
Theories of geography alone, however, are insufficient for decision-making.
On the other hand GPS and GIS tools, as employed in field studies such as
the Bowman Expeditions and the ILC initiative, can encourage and improve
property rights, a most tangible objective for U.S. foreign policy. Both tech-
nological developments portend a recovery of geography, namely human
geography, as a pillar of intelligence analysis. There is an even more valu-
able tool to aid in broader foreign policy decisions, one that can capture the
multi-dimensional and complex sets of land rights and interests. That tool
will be discussed in Chapter 6, but to appreciate its importance, basic prin-
ciples of land tenure must be understood, the topic of Chapter 5.

52 |

82 De Gessa, Participatory Mapping.

CHAPTER 5:
Securing the Land: The Pivotal Role
of Cadastres in Nation-Building
In medieval Europe a king’s realm was his own. It was by the favor of
the king that his subordinate nobles and lords held property and territory.
Holding—not owning—the land implies a dependence upon the king, not
only for his continued permission, but for his protection from those who
might try to seize the property. The Latin word tenere—to hold—forms the
basis of this arrangement, and serves as the root for tenant, tenement, and
tenure. These words, like landlord, are so familiar that their original feudal
overtones have been lost.
In the modern West the tenant relationship no longer holds between
citizens and the State. Individuals may own their property independent of
the government, which normally has property holdings of its own, separate
from privately owned property. This is the arrangement in Western coun-
tries, but across the world there are various patterns. In developing coun-
tries the state may own all land, or it may have a laissez-faire policy toward
informal property rights—until foreign investors show interest in the land.
Common to every country, no matter the political or economic system, no
matter whether industrialized or developing, is the notion of land tenure,
one of the key concepts of this book.
Land tenure is the relationship, whether legally or customarily
defined, among people, as individuals or groups, with respect to land. Land
tenure is an institution, i.e., rules invented by societies to regulate behavior.
Rules of tenure define how property rights to land are to be allocated within
societies. In simple terms, land tenure systems determine who can use what
resources for how long, and under what conditions.83
As opposed to English Common Law, four European Civil Code prin-
ciples concerning property rights are: usus (to use, but not to financially ben-
| 53
efit from), fructus (to enjoy the fruit of the land: sell crops, sublet), abusus
(alienation: the right to sell or transfer ownership), and accessio (assets of
deceased persons). By rule of law, these principles form the legal basis of
cadastres and the registrations of land rights, which must be supported by

83 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Land Tenure and Rural
Development, FAO Land Tenure Studies (Rome: FAO Publishing Management Service, 2002), 13.
Cited hereafter as FAO, Land Tenure and Rural Development.
 some sort of land representation, the forma aspect, i.e., on a cadastral map
or a parcel-lot graphic containing a geographic location, a parcel description
(e.g., measures and directions, plain text, metes and bounds, coordinates,
township subdivisions), and a designation (label, structured or sequentially
identifying number).84 It may be useful to examine property rights by dis-
tinguishing three different kinds:85
• Use Rights: (a combination of usus and fructus aspects) rights to use
and enjoy the land for grazing, growing subsistence crops, gathering
minor forestry products, etc.
• Control Rights: rights typical of custodianship, the right to make
decisions (chiefly usus, seldom abusus) about how the land should
be used, including deciding what crops should be planted, and who
should benefit financially (fructus) from the sale of crops, etc.
• Transfer Rights: typical of ownership, the right to sell or mortgage
the land, to convey the land to others through intra-community
reallocations, to transmit the land to heirs through inheritance, and to
reallocate use and control rights (accessio and abusus).

There are other rights associated with property, but these three are
the chief ones. In a single tract of land these rights may be held by three
different parties. Perhaps only in Switzerland is each registered individual
property right guaranteed by the State; nevertheless, landowners and other
people who enjoy various rights to land still rely upon the state for enforce-
ment of their property rights.
• Security of Tenure is the certainty given by a government that a
person’s various rights to land will be recognized by others and
protected from violations.

Security of tenure is taken for granted in the West, but in many parts
of the world, particularly in developing countries, millions of people face
the risk that their land rights will be threatened by others, and even lost
as a result of eviction. The layers of complexity and potential for conflict
are compounded when, for example, the state suddenly claims ownership
of land long held by people through custom and tradition. Officially, these
54 |
people are landless. But these “landless” poor care deeply about their prop-
erty. Even if not legally registered “people invest in turning a tin-sheet house
into a concrete house and upgrade their properties. It does not matter that

84 Yaïves Ferland, “Geographically Informed Structures (GIS) for Cadastral Representation,”

paper presented at the 97th annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers
(AAG), 1 March 2001 (New York City, NY).
85 FAO, Land Tenure and Rural Development.
Figure 27. In Kabul’s Informal Settlements Water Vendors Make Deliveries to
Homes without Running Water or Wells—or Security of Tenure. Source: Author.

they hold the land informally without legally produced individual titles, the
wealth of all of these poor people is tied up in their land and housing.”86
Thus, the security with which people hold their lands is crucial for the
world’s landless poor. Ownership is not as great a concern, because their
most immediate worry is forced eviction, whether by the state or a third
party. Unfortunately, in the developing world time and expense of issuing
and registering titles often undermine the goal of secure tenure for the poor.
These “land tenure policies confuse ‘ownership’ with ‘security of tenure,’
resulting only in delays in extending effective security of tenure”87 to those
who need it.
Consider, for example, Figure 28, which depicts a typical situation in
a developing country. Imagine a well-watered valley. Every spring a fam-
ily of herders do what their ancestors have done for centuries, bring their
| 55

86 Allan Cain, Urban Poverty and Civic Development in Post-War Angola of Preparing for
Peace Workshop on Future Swedish and Norwegian Development Cooperation with Angola, April
2002, URL: <http://www.angonet.org/article.ph?story=20061116174108871&mode=prin
t>, accessed 13 July 2007.
87 Ben Cousins and Rosalie Kingwill, “Land Rights and Cadastral Reform in Post-Apartheid
South Africa,” paper presented at the 9th International Conference of the Global Spatial Data
Infrastructure (GSDI-9), 6-10 November 2006 (Santiago, Chile), URL: <www.gsdi9.cl/english/
abstracts/TS26.4abstract.pdf>, accessed 24 July 2007.
 Figure 28: Complexities and Conflicts Resulting from Different Types of Tenure.
Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Land Tenure
and Rural Development, 3, May 2003.

flocks to pasture in the valley (Layer A in the Figure 28). In that same val-
ley there are farmers practicing their ancestral livelihood (Layer B), who,
honoring a longstanding verbal agreement, allow the herders water rights
every spring. Recently, a major drought forced a related ethnic group from a
neighboring country to settle in the valley. The government does not enjoy
friendly relations with the neighboring country and considers these new
arrivals illegal squatters. Decades ago, unbeknownst to either the herders or
the farmers, the newly emergent government laid claim to the entire valley
as state domain (Layer D). The government never attempted to develop the
land until now, when a foreign mineral company notified the government
56 | of a valuable resource in part of the valley, and negotiated a lease (Layer C).
For each of these four parties a different land right is at work.
Responses to tenure insecurity vary according to local contexts, to
the size and nature of land invasions and informal settlements; national
political leanings; and pressures exerted by civil society, NGOs, and the
affected peoples. But overall, there are two main approaches to providing
security of tenure, different but not contradictory. The first, typical of
Western societies, conducts tenure regularization based primarily on the
conveyance of individual titles, but sometimes also based on public acts
and private deeds. The second approach emphasizes an administrative
or legal protection against forced eviction. Unlike complicated, expen-
sive, and time-consuming formal tenure regularization programs, under
this approach security of tenure can be provided through simple regula-
tory and normative measures.88 Fourie lists some use and control rights,
which at a later stage, through incremental regularization procedures, can
be upgraded to freehold or long-term leases:89
• De facto recognition, but without legal status, such as an anti-eviction
measure
• Recognition of security of tenure, but without any form of tenure
regularization (the authorities certify that the settlement will not be
removed)
• Provision of temporary occupancy permits
• Temporary non-transferable leases

Cadastre and Controversy

As mentioned in the Introduction, cadastres are systems of land reg-
istration. In a nation where a war or a major catastrophe has displaced large
numbers of people, restoring those people to the land is a key part of any
serious effort to reconstruct the country. Reconstruction attracts people
with a variety of viewpoints. There are various competing theories on cadas-
tres and how to rectify a nation’s defective, fragmented, or non-existent land
administration system. Regardless of the chosen method or intervention, a
cadastre remains for post-conflict planners the primary source of informa-
tion about the broad spectrum of formal and informal rights and interests
in land. Such information includes:90
• People who have interests in parcels of land
• Interests in the land, e.g., nature and duration of rights, restrictions
and responsibilities

88 Graham Adler, “Ownership Is Not a Priority among the Urban Poor: The Case of Nairobi’s | 57
Informal Settlements,” Habitat Debate UNCHS--The United Nations Centre for Human Settlements
5, no. 3 (1999), URL: <http://www.unhabitat.org/hd/hdv5n3/viewpoint.htm>, accessed 24
September 2007.
89 Clarissa Fourie, “Best Practices Analysis on Access to Land and Security of Tenure” (Durban,
South Africa: University of Natal, 1999), on-line information site of Dr. Clarrisa Augustinus
(previous last name Fourie), consultant for UNCHS, also known as UN-HABITAT, URL: <http://
www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Fourie+2B+Best+practices+analysis+on+access+to+lan
d+>, accessed 16 July 2007.
90 FIG, The FIG Statement on the Cadastre.
 • Basic details about the parcel, e.g., location, size,
improvements, value.
Despite their basic utility, cadastres are controversial today. “When
a land registrar writes down the name of an owner in a land book, or a
land surveyor draws a boundary line on a cadastral map, it could be either
the start of a prosperous economic development, or the overture to a new
conflict.”91 Some critics say that a classical cadastre, a top-down, state-led
approach is best for economic growth because participatory, community-
level exercises are not recognized by higher-level planning authorities who
see the bigger picture. Others with a grassroots agenda insist upon a citizen
cadastre, one that is participatory, affordable, and tenure-securing, that har-
monizes informal and customary needs and norms with formal and statu-
tory needs and rules, without which a national land policy can never be
credible. The grave concerns and objections raised by some members of the
international development community suggest that cadastral surveys have a
history of causing, rather than mitigating, conflict and instability.
Cadastres and land tenure reforms associated with them can be threat-
ening, especially to parties who want to maintain a status quo that cements
their prestige, power, and profit. Alain Durand-Lasserve and Lauren Roys-
ton have no illusions that national decrees or new land policies alone pro-
vide security of tenure to the most marginalized of society: the poor, the
poorly educated, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, and women.
Slum organizers, political bosses and tribal chiefs can often
view tenure regularization as eroding their privileged social
and economic position. Municipal officials and ministries
that exhibited near absolute power over land decisions do not
easily give up control. Political sympathy for squatters is fre-
quently low. Change, which improves the situation for some,
will necessarily erode political, cultural, and/or economic
power for others. For all these reasons and more, the process
is often complicated, political and violent.92
True, cadastres can be used to nefarious ends. Conflict is inevitable
58 | when outsiders, a category that includes regional or national governments,
conduct or sponsor cadastral surveys supported by foreign investment or

91 Paul van der Molen and Christiaan Lemmen, “Land Administration in Post-Conflict
Areas,” paper presented at the 3rd FIG Regional Conference, 2004 (Jakarta, Indonesia),
URL: <www.itc.nl/library/Papers_2004/n_p_conf/vandermolen_land.pdf>, accessed 25
September 2007.
92 Alain Durand-Lasserve and Lauren Royston, Holding Their Ground: Secure Land Tenure for
the Urban Poor in Developing Countries, ISBN 1853838918 (London: Earthscan Publications
Ltd., 2002), 241.
other outside interests that divest local land stakeholders in favor of other
parties. Additionally, in many parts of the world, the very word cadastre
smacks of ties to colonialism, increased taxation (perceived to benefit only
corrupt officials at the expense of sewer, water, electrical, transportation,
health, or other services), or to government attempts to expropriate land
from indigenous peoples. Thus, the neutral term of land administration is
supplanting the word cadastre, especially in Europe. In reality, a cadastre is
theoretically neutral. The problem in post-conflict societies is that cadastres
have been designed to serve the interests of governments and outside pow-
ers, not the local people, who are usually poor. If a cadastre does not reflect
local arrangements concerning the land, it is open to abuse, particularly
in post-conflict countries. Cadastres in these situations should be designed
to be flexible, registering all land claims, including competing ones. From
a comprehensive repository of land information, tenure decisions can be
made efficiently and equitably. The cadastre then becomes multi-purpose.
As the rebuilding nation develops the capacity to resettle refugees, adjudi-
cate land claims, and provide economic and other incentives to maintain the
cadastre, a key foundation of civil society takes root.
In stable Western countries the cadastre reflects the land policies of
the central government, and it falls at the bottom of a well-ordered hierar-
chy. At the top is the land management system, which develops a national
land policy and strategy. The land administration system, next in the hier-
archy, implements the policy and strategy. Beneath that fall various sub-
systems: land tenure, taxation, utilities, and so forth. Finally comes the
cadastre, which records boundary lines, surveyors’ reports, land registra-
tion, and claims to land.93 Augustinus and Barry identify this as the conven-
tional approach to land management, an arrangement adequate for most
stable countries. But, they argue, post-conflict societies cannot follow this
positivist model without incurring massive delay and expense and prolong-
ing and exacerbating the land crises they are meant to address. They advo-
cate a soft-systems approach, where the traditional top-down hierarchy
becomes adjustable according to ever-changing local needs. If tenure issues
are pressing, the land tenure system can be prioritized over land manage-
ment and land administration. If the local situation changes yet again, any | 59
other system can come to the fore.
For soft systems, a cadastre remains central, just as it is in the con-
ventional approach, but it should not be centralized. The tendency in many

93 Clarissa Augustinus and Michael B. Barry, “Land Management Strategy Formulation in

Post-Conflict Societies,” Survey Review 38, no. 302, ISSN 0039-6265 (October 2006), 10. Cited
hereafter as Augustinus and Barry, “Land Management Strategy.”
 international aid or development enterprises is to design a cadastre to fit
the needs of a local settlement, then to take that model to a national level
and attempt to create a single overarching cadastral system that can suit
every part of the country and take into account existing land policy. In
post-conflict societies “land policy is being developed at the local settle-
ment [level]”94 and cadastres must record what is happening there and then,
not wait for a national land policy to take shape.
The Rural Lands Administration Project (RLAP) in Afghanistan
advocates a similar approach, patiently seeking in post-conflict society
the “empowerment of people at the local level to manage their land rela-
tions themselves.”95 Just as Augustinus and Barry advocate a soft systems
approach over a positivist one in post-conflict societies, J. David Stanfield
of RLAP argues that the application of formal law to adjudicate claims to
land through government officials consigns communities to a diminished
role, and even then only in the final validation of findings by outsiders. In
the Afghan context, “where a local consensus exists about the rights people
have to land, that local definition is the starting point to define rights and
rules.”96 Furthermore, reasons Stanfield:
A community administration of property records is the
place to start searching for answers. By “community
administration” we mean the actual administration by
community people of property records, and not a District
Office of a central land registry receiving petitions for
land information or for recording transactions, nor a
District Office sending a team once in a while to commu-
nities to gather evidence of transactions. As in the case of
land, people feel more secure in their documentation of
their rights to land when they “own” their land records,
that is, when they control access to these records. When
this security exists people invest in the maintenance and
usefulness of land records.97

60 | 94 Augustinus and Barry, “Land Management Strategy.”

95 Liz Alden Wily, Governance and Land Relations: A Review of Decentralisation of Land Admin-
istration and Management in Africa, ISBN 1-84369-496-4 (London: International Institute for
Environment and Development (IIED), 2003), 1. Cited hereafter as Alden-Wiley, Governance and
Land Relations.
96 J. David Stanfield, “Community Recording of Property Rights: Focus on Afghanistan,”
paper presented to the International Association of Clerks, Recorders, Election Officials and
Treasurers (IACREOT) 2007 Annual Conference and Trade Show, 19 July 2007 (Charlotte, North
Carolina). Cited hereafter as Stanfield, “Community Recording.”
97 Stanfield, “Community Recording.”
 As noted anthropologist Liz Alden-Wiley states, “only when land
administration and management is fully devolved to the community level...
is there likely to be significant success in bringing the majority of land inter-
ests under useful and lasting record-centered management.”98

Cadastres Help Rebuild Shattered Nations

One of the world’s poorest countries suffered a devastating civil war
that ended in 2002 after nearly three decades. The war killed up to one and
a half million people and displaced four million more, destroyed much of
the country’s infrastructure, and left a deadly legacy of landmines, which
have maimed an estimated 80,000 people. When the conflict ended, perhaps
three percent of the arable land was under cultivation, two million people
were on the brink of starvation, and three million received direct humani-
tarian assistance.99
The country in question is surprisingly not Afghanistan, but Angola.
In both countries, as humanitarian relief gives way to broad-based devel-
opment, a national land policy is sorely needed. The laws currently on the
books in Angola, based upon the outdated Portuguese colonial cadastre,
are inadequate to provide security of tenure. “Many of Land Law 1992 (Law
21-C/92) provisions were not enforced and it soon became clear to most
observers that the legal framework it provided was inadequate.”100
One agent for reform is Development Workshop (DW), an NGO pres-
ent in Angola since 1981 with “programs for shelter, peri-urban upgrading,
water supply and sanitation, microfinance and small enterprise develop-
ment, peace-building, governance, and disaster mitigation.”101 The efforts of
DW, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO),
and a network of NGOs known as the Rede Terra helped pass needed
amendments to the flawed 1992 law. The 2004 Angolan Land Act Number
09/04, with rights recorded in a new cadastre, provides some protection
from arbitrary evictions and government land expropriations prompted by

| 61
98 Alden-Wiley, Governance and Land Relations.
99 Conor Foley, Land Rights in Angola, (London, England: Overseas Development Institute,
2007). Cited hereafter as Foley, Land Rights in Angola.
100 Foley, Land Rights in Angola.
101 Developmental Workshop, Contributing to Poverty Reduction in Angola, 31 December
2005, URL: <http://www.dw.angonet.org/>, under the keywords “poverty” and “Angola”,
accessed 19 July 2007.
 increasing Chinese investments.102 As a hedge against encroaching com-
mercial interests that threaten traditional livelihoods, the Norwegian Refu-
gee Council (NRC) in Angola educates a mostly illiterate population about
their land rights under the new law.
Another post-conflict nation aided in its return to stability by a
reformed cadastre is Cambodia. Their cadastre is a model for being at once
low cost, digital, and thoroughly integrated. Few countries’ needs are as
great as Cambodia’s.
Cambodians have suffered through a tumultuous recent
history, during which the rules for rights to land have
been in constant flux.... The Khmer Rouge, which came to
power in 1975, collectivized all land and destroyed all land
records, including cadastral maps and titles. The right to
own land was re-established in 1989.... In 1992, a program
was initiated calling for applications for land tenure cer-
tificates to confirm occupancy and use rights. More than
four million applications were submitted, but only 15 per-
cent of them had been processed due to limited capacity
of government. A lack of national policies related to land,
inadequate organizational structure, lack of educated pro-
fessionals and equipment hindered and delayed establish-
ment of land register.103
The trauma Cambodia suffered included the gutting of its techni-
cally trained workforce. Concerted international efforts ultimately led in
2002 to a Land Management and Administration Project (LMAP) that took
local capacity and resources into account. Rather than professionally train
a cadastral staff for four or more years, LMAP mobilized 300 Cambodians
and taught them for 18-36 months to become cadastral technicians. In a
relatively short time LMAP implemented the first Cambodian land registra-
tion and multipurpose digital cadastre. It aspires to cover the entire country
and issue seven million land titles in 10 to 15 years.
Higher accuracy cadastral surveys for urban areas are conducted with
62 | total station traverse, lower accuracy surveys with orthophotograph inter-

102 Conrad Hendry, “China’s Challenging Investment in Angola,” Hong Kong Trade and
Development Council (28 March 2006), URL: <http://www.tdctrade.com/imn/06032804/
investment037.htm.>, accessed 19 July 2007.
103 Pertti Onkalo, “Cadastral Survey Methodologies and Techniques in Developing Coun-
tries; Case Cambodia and Kosovo,” paper TS-61presented at the 23rd International FIG Con-
gress, 8-13 October 2006 (Munich, Germany), URL: <www.fig.net/pub/fig2006/papers/ts61/
ts61_02_onkalo_0318.pdf>, accessed 25 September 2007. Cited hereafter as Onkalo, “Cadas-
tral Survey Methodologies.”
pretation and digitization. Land owners often serve as field assistants, which
improves their understanding of the cadastral surveys and, with the pub-
lic posting of the cadastral index maps, reduces the number and intensity
of boundary disputes. “Accuracy cannot be a top priority, especially not in
rural areas where land values are low. Also for the buildings, high accuracy
is not essential and sometimes even the location point could be enough.”104
In most parts of the developing world high registration fees, unaf-
fordable to the poor, perpetuate informal, unregistered property transac-
tions. This, in turn, undermines the accuracy of a new cadastre, which
comes at no small cost anywhere in the world. Moreover, if the govern-
ment plans to fund the land registry from user fees, as is the case in Cam-
bodia, failure to convince landowners to use the cadastre for property
registration and subsequent transactions results in an overpriced, incom-
plete (and therefore useless) database. Cambodia’s LMAP has been a suc-
cess: 15 years of substantial international and donor support has kept the
cost for registering a title low. In rural areas of Cambodia the registry cost
per parcel is $6.20; in urban areas $17.41, among the cheapest in the world
(see Table 1). For an average of $8.74 per parcel, property registration in
Cambodia includes title production, materials, and salaries, but not equip-
ment and aerial photography.105
Cost Per
Country Parcel in
USD in 2006
Cambodia 8.74
Moldova 9.90
Peru (urban) 12.66
Kyrgyzstan 15.76
Albania 18.00
Armenia 18.02
Indonesia 24.40
Thailand 32.80
Peru (rural) 46.86 | 63
Trinidad and Tobago 1,064.00
Latvia (sporadic) 1,356.00
Table 1. Average Cost Per Parcel in Systematic Registration in Developing
Countries. Source: Onkalo, 2006.

104 Onkalo, “Cadastral Survey Methodologies.”

105 Onkalo, “Cadastral Survey Methodologies.”
 Figure 29. 1:5000 Scale-Delineated Satellite Images. The boundaries of forest
and pasture parcel boundaries have been delineated. Source: Terra Institute.

Finer spatial accuracies needed in urban areas of Cambodia can be

obtained at a later date, funded by user fees from the parties involved. Simi-
larly, land disputes that needlessly hinder a cadastre’s completion can be reg-
istered as completing claims as part of the cadastral survey. A resolution may
come all the sooner when the dispute is made part of the public record.
Like Cambodia, Ethiopia changed radically in 1975. In this case the
government nationalized all rural land with the intent to distribute land
rights more equitably. Unfortunately, continued changes in tenure laws, a
growing rural population, and a shortage of land have led to markedly inse-
cure land tenure for many. This has undermined investment in agriculture,
64 | destabilized agricultural output, and contributed to land degradation.106
Cadastres have become an important element in rectifying Ethio-
pia’s complex problems. Land Administration Specialist Lennart Bäckstrom
oversaw a three-year pilot in the Amhara region of Ethiopia in which a Land

106 United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) World Resources, the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, and the World Resources Institute (WRI),
The World Resources 2005--the Wealth of the Poor, 11, Ch. 3 (2005), URL: <http://multimedia.
wri.org/wr2005/023.htm>. Accessed 31 March 2007.
Administration System (LAS) thwarted land-grabbers by registering 2.4
million cases of rights and interests in state-owned rural lands and issuing
1.3 million occupancy certificates. The extensive project included the train-
ing of 1000 District-level civil servants and 200 lawyers on the legal system,
surveying and mapping techniques, and property valuation and real prop-
erty and user registries. A 2005 World Bank mission lauded the Amhara
LAS for its transparency, the high degree of community participation and
low cost of certification. “The most important part to development was to
define tenure security in user rights, but not mix it with ownership.”107
But not all has gone well in Ethiopia. Its experience shows that, with-
out the right infrastructure in place a cadastre may be only partially effec-
tive. In 2004, masters degree students Fella, Jensen, and Knudsen, sought
to learn, “Will the formalization of land tenure, assisted by the GIS project,
benefit the current informal settlers within Addis Ababa?” The results, both
positive and negative, were uneven. While improvements in city planning
were evident, numerous obstacles prevented any actual improvement in
basic services to settlers. These obstacles included the inefficiency of munic-
ipal staffs and the ill-defined roles within the various government bureaus.
“The formalization process did lead to an increased sense of security related
to land tenure for the informal settlers and it was found that tenure security
is very important for investments in housing improvements. This means
that tenure security is an essential spur for the magnitude of investment
and quality of housing transformation in the informal settlements in Addis
Ababa. The increased tenure security leading to investment in housing is
certainly a benefit for the informal settlers.”108 Nevertheless, the increase in
taxation and the improvement in planning and administration never trans-
lated into better services for the informal settlers.
An even better example of a well-designed but poorly used cadas-
tre is Kosovo, where ethnic conflict resulted in the deliberate destruction
of property records. Prompt support from Sweden, Norway, and Switzer-
land facilitated the construction of a state-of-the-art electronic cadastre. In
this cadastre a common parcel ID number links the graphical orthophotos
and vectorized cadastral plans in the Kosovo Cadastre and Land Informa-
tion System (KCLIS) with the textual information found in the Immovable | 65

107 Lennart Bäckstrom, “Look at Ethiopia! A Simplified and Result Oriented Development
and Implementation of a Low Cost Land Administration System,” paper TS-61 presented at the
23rd International FIG Congress, 8-13 October 2006 (Munich, Germany), URL: <www.fig.net/
pub/fig2006/papers/ts61/ts61_01_backstrom_0312.pdf>, accessed 24 September 2007.
108 Tim Fella, Kim Jensen, and Martin Knudsen, “Consequences of the Formalization of Informal
Settlements in Addis Ababa,” (Aalborg, Denmark: Aalborg University, 2004). Cited hereafter as
Fella, Jensen and Knudsen, “Consequences.”
 Figure 30. Customary Deeds. Source: LTERA.

Property Rights Register (figure 30).109 All the data are integrated and made
available to users through the Internet. The Kosovar e-cadastre enables the
visualization of areas where documentation of land ownership or rights
is missing or has been destroyed.110 But because the cadastral system was
modernized apart from a supporting land policy, Kosovo’s land informa-
tion systems are unsustainable.111

Cadastres Aiding Post-Conflict Afghanistan

Little assistance in settling land disputes and registering rights and
interests in lands is forthcoming from the Afghan national government, and
even less from the meagerly resourced provincial and district governments.
Thus, moving beyond the morass requires initiative at the community level.
Nearly all Afghan pastureland, while state-owned, is customarily managed
by families, clans, or tribes, and not by private owners. These parties, set-
tled agricultural families and also nomads, raise livestock and gather fuel
and medicinal herbs on semi-arid pastures. The locally devised agreements
66 | about who has rights to these lands for what purposes during what time of
the year have never been recorded.

109 Fella, Jensen and Knudsen, “ ”

110 Murat Meha, “Effects of E-Cadastre in Land Administration in Kosovo and in Other Post
Conflict Countries,” paper TS-50 presented at the 23rd International FIG Congress, 8-13 Octo-
ber 2006 (Munich, Germany), URL: <www.fig.net/pub/fig2006/papers/ts50/ts50_01_
murat_0392.pdf>, accessed 25 September 2007.
Augustinus and Barry, “Land Management Strategy.”
111 Augustinus and Barry, “Land Management Strategy.”
 Most rural families, and also many urban ones, do not use the formal,
court-prepared title deeds to document property transactions. Yet the lack
of court-prepared documents does not leave Afghans who conduct business
informally without any form of tenure security. Customary arrangements,
even verbal agreements, witnessed by family members and respected elders
have sufficed for centuries because most dealings are inheritance matters
and intra-family or intra-tribal agreements. Non-related persons privately
draft documents, again witnessed by locally respected people, which are
retained by the parties to the transaction without the involvement of any
government official.112
In response to increasing insecurity of tenure on Afghan rangelands,
which occurred only in recent post-conflict years, an RLAP team—funded
by the Asian Development Bank and the U.K. Department for Interna-
tional Development (ADB/DfID) and administered through the auspices of
Afghanistan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock—has cre-
ated a community-based initiative to produce and record community agree-
ments about who has the legitimate rights to use pasture lands for particular
purposes during specific times of the year. Local land stakeholders agree in
writing on the legitimate uses and users of pasturelands, delineate boundar-
ies using satellite imagery, and develop plans for improving productivity of
defined parcels of rangeland. Following the customary signing and witness-
ing by village elders, often including local leaders known as maliks or arbabs,
the documents are archived in the village with copies sent to government
land institutions. There is trust in this system for several reasons: 1) because
local leaders have indicated their concurrence with the agreements, 2) the
documents describing legitimate use rights are kept in village archives; 3)
the agreements are facilitated by the efforts of educated maliks to represent
the local people in court disputes or in dealings with government agencies
and other outside organizations.
The RLAP initiative has summarized the tested procedures for pro-
ducing the rangeland agreements with the acronym A-D-A-M-A P:113
Ask for community cooperation.
Delineate the boundaries of rangeland parcels.
Agreements are prepared concerning the legitimate users of the | 67
rangeland parcels.
Meet, discuss and approve the agreements and delineations.
Archive the agreements and delineated images.
Plan for the improvement of the rangeland parcels.

112 Stanfield, “Community Recording.”

113 Stanfield, “Community Recording.”
 There have been discus-
sions of expanding RLAP’s
rangeland agreements into a
national effort. RLAP’s method
has resulted in increased secu-
rity of tenure and a decrease
in rangeland disputes. Village
leaders may desire a similar
approach to council-supervised
identification of private agri-
cultural lands. Satellite imagery
identifies parcel boundaries;
forms noting ownership and
other rights to the parcels are
prepared, signed, witnessed,
and retained by the village
councils (shuras or jirgas) with
copies sent to provincial gov-
Figure 31. A Signed Pasture Land ernment agencies.
Agreement. Source: Terra Institute. Nomadic peoples have
serious problems with access
to land for feeding and watering their flocks. Traditional seasonal migra-
tion routes are often being interrupted in Afghanistan by local militia com-
manders trying to stop nomads from traveling their traditional routes to
and from mountain pastures in the summer. To counteract these demands
with evidence of long-term traditional easements, steps are being taken
by the nomads to document those routes. GPS information facilitates the
negotiations of agreements with villagers for rights of passage.114
Addressing the pasturelands experience and the incremental step
to extend the method to agricultural lands with ADAMAP, Stanfield
concludes:
The legitimization of rights to pasture lands, a potentially
68 | very complicated process, shows that community defini-
tion of such rights is entirely feasible and normally quickly
accomplished. Moreover, villagers are quite willing to keep
those records and commit to updating the agreements
when the conditions change requiring changes in the writ-
ten agreements. Taking that experience another step and

114 Stanfield, “Community Recording.”

Figure 32. Villagers Review a Delineated Satellite Image of Pasture Land
Parcels. Source: Terra Institute.

applying the same principles of community legitimization

of property rights to agricultural land showed that the
generation of property records at the community level is
not only feasible but that village elders are organizing to
do the work themselves, using the satellite imagery pro-
vided to them.115

Advances in Land Administration in Afghanistan

Community-based creation and maintenance of land rights records
is a bottom-up response to weak state institutions. Centralized land-gov-
erning institutions in particular have not enjoyed public confidence. With
participative, transparent, and observable processes of community record-
ing of locally derived agreements about the legitimate users of rangeland,
the RLAP team substantially supports the words of Alden Wily: “Democra-
tization of land administration and management should be an objective of
all countries... the more accessible, useable and used, cheaper, speedier and | 69
generally more efficient the system will be.”116
Community-based mapping in rural Afghanistan needs all the help
it can get. To this end a valuable resource, eclipsed by a quarter century
of conflict, exists intact. While conducting research in Kabul, the author

115 Stanfield, “Community Recording.”

116 Alden-Wiley, Governance and Land Relations.
 Figure 33. Kuchi Herders in Afghanistan Learn about GPS. Source: Terra
Institute.

visited the Afghan Geodesy and Cartography Head Office (AGCHO) and
met Engineer (Eng.) M. Yasin Safar, a retired chief of the AGCHO cadas-
tral department. Safar informed the author that between 1965 and 1978,
one-third of Afghan agricultural lands, 12.9 million jerib (a traditional unit
of land that equals 1/5 hectare, 2000 square meters, or 0.494 acre), were
professionally surveyed by the Cadastral Survey. This enormous undertak-
ing, covering 25,800 square kilometers, nearly the size of Rwanda, was not
used in a land registration system or in issuance of formal titles. Cadastral
surveyors compiled names of probable parcel owners to dispel any notion
that they were also official government title adjudicators. Despite their age
today, these painstakingly assembled graphical and textual records survived
the wars and could contribute to a future land administration system. Own-
ers and occupants certainly have changed but not so for most of the parcel
boundaries. There have been few subdivisions and consolidations, at least
in the study village.117 See Appendix B for samples of the AGCHO cadastral
survey forms.
70 |
Eng. Safar suggests a three-level strategy for establishing a modern
land administration system in Afghanistan. His plan, summarized here,
appears in its entirety in Appendix C:118

117 M. Yasin Safar, retired chief of the Cadastral Survey Department of the Afghan Geodesy
and Cartography Head Office (AFCHO), interview by the author, 10 March 2007. Cited hereafter
as Safar personal interview.
118 Safar personal interview.
Figure 34. A Garbage-strewn Dirt Road in Kabul’s District 7. Source: Author.

1. Improve the technical capacity for mapping property.

2. Decentralize the Property Records Administration.
3. Build a national technical and financial property information
infrastructure to support this local property information administrative
infrastructure.
Eng. Safar recounts favorable experience in recording and archiving
property transaction documents at the village level, with elders supervis-
ing and verifying record updates and maintenance. He suggests that if done
properly, the documents so recorded will be given a preferential legal sta-
tus by local judges in claims presented to them, over claims without such
documents.119
Nearly 3 million Kabulites live in informal urban settlements lacking
security of tenure and the most basic of services: sewer systems, potable | 71
water, electricity, roads, schools, and health clinics. The squalor in Kabul’s
informal settlements is very real. Nevertheless Kabul’s informal residents

119 Safar personal interview.

 Figure 35. With no open spaces in the densely-populated informal settlements,
children play in a dilapidated graveyard in Kabul’s District 7. Source: Author.

have invested an estimated $1 billion in their neighborhoods120 — an indi-

cation that informal settlers care creditably about their homes.
In Afghanistan’s growing urban areas, informal property transactions
and informal settlements/squatter towns are legion. The legal route is too
riddled with bureaucratic obstacles to be viable. In a Terra Institute report
J. David Stanfield, Jonathan Reed, and Eng. M. Yasin Safar outlined the
25 cumbersome steps required to legally register a deed for a house pur-
chased in Kabul.121 More importantly, they recommend improvements
to the current practice which deters many from formally registering
property transactions.
In the same spirit, at the January 2006 Afghan Conference on Infor-
mal Settlements and Tenure Issues, Dr. Djalalzada, the Deputy Minister of
72 | Urban Development stated, “the formation of informal settlements demon-

120 Afghan Ministry of Urban Development (MOUD), “White Paper on Tenure Security and
Community Based Upgrading in Kabul,” paper presented at the Conference on Informal Settle-
ments and Tenure Issues, 15 March 2006 (Kabul, Afghanistan).
121 J. David Stanfield, Jonathan Reed, and M. Yasin Safar, Description of Procedures for Pro-
ducing Legal Deeds to Record Property Transactions in Afghanistan in Asia and Near East Reports,
prepared under contract with USAID (Mount Horeb, WI: Terra Institute, Ltd., 2005), URL:
<http://www.terrainstitute.org/reports.html>, accessed 24 September 2007. Cited hereafter
as Stanfield, Reed and Safar, Producing Legal Deeds.
Figure 36. A scribe assists illiterate and semi-literate countrymen through one
of the twenty-five steps required to legally register a property. Source: Terra
Institute.

strates a weakness of [the formal system] which has been unable to provide
land plots to poor people despite the availability of thousands of hectares of
vacant lands. It could be argued that the formation of informal settlements
has been as much a solution [to housing returnees] as it is a problem.”122

Land Policy in Afghanistan

Dr. Yohannes Gebremedhin, formerly USAID/Land Titling and Eco-
nomic Restructuring of Afghanistan (LTERA), Land Titling/Legal Team
Leader, and now advisor to the Afghan Ministry of Agriculture, has advised
a Land Working group in preparing a draft national land policy to be
approved by the entire Afghan cabinet, which would enable the following
urban land conditions to be addressed with an overarching strategy123 (at
this writing the policy has been approved by three line ministries and by the | 73
Economic Commission of the Cabinet):

122 Stanfield, Reed and Safar, Producing Legal Deeds.

123 Yohannes Gebremedhin, Legal Issues Pertaining to Land Titling and Registration in Afghani-
stan, prepared by Land Titling and Economic Restructuring in Afghanistan (LTERA) Project for
USAID Review (Kabul, Afghanistan, 2006), 12, URL: <http://www.terrainstitute.org/reports.
html>, accessed 25 September 2007. Cited hereafter as Gebremedhim, Legal Issues.
 1. Residents living in informal settlements
do not hold registered title. Property
in informal settlements may have been
acquired by squatter settlements built on
public lands; settlements built on privately
owned land; settlements built on grabbed
land or land bought from land grabbers. In
order for residents in informal settlements
to obtain formal deeds the legal issues
surrounding the mode of land acquisition
must be clarified.

2. Many properties are occupied on the basis

of customary (informal) deeds; others are
based upon multiple claims. The existing
registration process is also an adjudication
Figure 37. Parties to an Afghan
process. Afghanistan needs a separate
Land Dispute. Source: Department
of Defense. coherent land registration law. It also needs
a land adjudication law that establishes a
process by which claims of interests over land are evaluated, conflicting
claims resolved and customary settlements recognized.

3. In addition, and critical to the registration process, is the necessity

to clarify the legal authority for land mapping, surveying, and related
activities in Afghanistan. Improvement of land tenure security is an
essential element to peace building in Afghanistan.

4. Land grabbing, particularly in urban areas, has given rise to an extensive

informal real estate market. Individuals have appropriated, sub-divided,
and distributed public land using the informal market. The ease with
which informal land transactions take place discourages formalization of
property titles and makes provision of services in urban areas very difficult
and complicated for the municipality.

5. The excessive judicial and administrative steps and archaic modes of

operation which exist in the system of transfer of real property rights
74 | are cumbersome, inefficient and often riddled with corruption. The real
property transfer tax, coupled with the unavoidable illegal fees (bribes)
at every step in the process, is sufficiently onerous as to discourage legally
recognized title registration. More often than not, individuals resort to
only using the informal system.

The adoption of a national land policy would establish the foun-

dation for a desperately needed National Land Administration Agency,
Figure 38. An NRC Counselor Explains the Information Counseling and Legal Aid
(ICLA) Program to Afghan Villagers. Source: Author.

distinct from the entity now administering rural land records and state-
owned lands. Resting on the national land policy, a consolidated Land
Administrative System could formalize land tenure, integrate formal and
informal processes to register property freely, and link cadastral with
other maps to create a parcel-based cadastre. Such lofty goals in a stable
and well-resourced environment would take years to achieve, in Afghani-
stan two decades at a minimum, even assuming that the insurgency com-
pletely disappears. Like any mammoth undertaking, the way forward is by
incremental steps.

Legal Aid in Afghanistan

One step that cannot be overlooked in achieving tenure security is
dispute resolution. As a guest of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC),
the author witnessed NRC’s Information Counseling and Legal Aid (ICLA)
program counselors resolve land disputes. In addition to shelter, aid dis-
| 75
tribution, education, and (refugee and IDP) camp management, the
NRC employs Afghan nationals as legal specialists and counselors. Free
of charge, the ICLA has helped tens of thousands of people regain their
land.124 The ICLA wisely does not import Western notions of jurispru-
dence, and the staff is highly skilled in handling small cases. Parties to

124 Foley, Housing, Land and Property Restitution Rights.

 a dispute, once satisfied that their case—often perceived to be against a
socially more powerful opponent—has been heard, are then encouraged
to accept arbitration from a traditional jirga or shura.
Foley, a former program manager of the ICLA, believes that jirgas, in
which all neighborhood or village males participate, or the more restric-
tive shuras, comprising select elders, “are the closest thing to democratic
institutions in Afghanistan today. They can reach decisions much faster
than the official courts, are virtually cost-free, are less susceptible to brib-
ery and are accessible to illiterate Afghans.”125 The ICLA earns legitimacy
by infusing traditional, community-based dispute resolution institutions
with vitality and with the added prestige of an “international” endorse-
ment. Militia commanders and other power brokers may behave more civ-
illy, and there may be less bloodshed, due to the international status of the
NRC representatives. Yet Foley has no misconceptions about the paucity
of justice in Afghanistan.
Such initiatives may help individuals, and may even have a
role to play in strengthening civil society and holding the
authorities to account, but they are no substitute for an effec-
tive justice system based on respect for the rule of law and
human rights. Many of NRC’s clients have still not obtained
justice, and managing people’s expectations is becoming an
increasing problem. The organization’s successes may attract
more cases than the centers can handle.126

76 |

125 Conor Foley, “Legal Aid for Returnees: The NRC Programme in Afghanistan,” Humanitar-
ian Exchange, March 2004, URL: <http://www.odihpn.org/report.asp?id=2610>, accessed 24
September 2007. Cited hereafter as Foley, “Legal Aid for Returnees.”
126 Foley, “Legal Aid for Returnees.”
A USAID Project Makes Progress
The Land Titling and Economic Restructuring of Afghanistan
(LTERA) Project, USAID-funded and implemented by Emerging Markets
Group (EMG), has presented a five-pronged integrated approach to land
titling and economic restructuring efforts:127
• Land Registration System
• Mapping and Land Information System
• Tenure Regularization
• Policy and Legal Framework
• Release of Public Land

The project has done important work in rehabilitating and reorga-

nizing deeds in Provincial Court archives although little progress has been
made in simplifying land titling procedures, clarifying the property rights
legal framework, reducing the cost of transactions, or reorganizing land
administration agencies. A complete listing of LTERA projects in Afghani-
stan is at www.ltera.org. Two of their projects are worth special consider-
ation: the upgrading of informal settlements in two districts of Kabul, and
the Makhzan rehabilitation program.

| 77

Figure 39. LTERA’s Pilot Project in Kabul District 7. Source: LTERA.

127 Gebremedhin, Legal Issues.

 LTERA’s Effort to Upgrade Informal Settlements in Kabul
Districts 7 and 13
LTERA selected two Community Development Councils (CDCs) that
were established by UN-HABITAT in two gozars (neighborhoods) in Dis-
tricts 7 and 13. This decision occurred in part because the community had
already established representative bodies (shuras) and both residents and
the municipality were willing to participate in the program. Although the
shuras had been involved in previous upgrading projects, the issue of ten-
ure security had not been addressed prior to the LTERA project’s program.
In District 13, newly established land clarification boards review property
deeds presented by the informal settlers. Ninety-five percent of these are
informal, customary deeds. Disputes settled at the community level avoid
the bureaucratic and uncertain procedures of the Kabul courts. Once com-
munity consensus is reached about who lives where or who has the right to
live where, LTERA requests a municipality to issue a “certificate of comfort.”
While not a property deed, it is a valuable form of tenure security.128
Out of this pilot effort to formalize informal settlements, LTERA has
developed preliminary proposals to create a legal basis for regularizing ten-
ure in other such contexts. The team has developed a replicable and cost-
effective methodology that upgrades basic services, regularizes tenure, and
formally integrates informal settlements into the municipality’s urban plan-
ning process. The projects in Districts 7 and 13 are testing an incremental,
community-based method of upgrading and tenure regularization. These
neighborhoods were chosen because their problems were obvious. Informal
settlers lived in fear of forced eviction and therefore had no incentive to
improve their dwellings, start businesses, or upgrade their neighborhoods.
An LTERA employee informed the author:
We estimate that in Districts 7 and 13, the implementation
of the 1978 Kabul Master Plan would result in evicting 2000
households (about 14,000 people). We are preparing a land
use plan for the Districts. The plan contains alternative land
development options which better reflect current land pat-
78 | terns, provide residents access to basic services, and consider

128 “Providing Land Tenure Security in Afghanistan,” LTERA, 2007, URL: <http://www.
ltera.org/USAID_LTERA_LAND_TENURE.html#Teaming_Up_With_the_World_Bank_
KURP_Program_>, accessed 7 August 2007. Cited hereafter as “Providing Land Tenure
Security,” LTERA.
Figure 40. The Author Shopping in Kabul. Housed in old shipping containers,
shopkeepers’ goods are secure. Source: Author.

ably minimize the number of evictions. Once approved by the

municipality, it will halt forced evictions.129
A 2006 preliminary study of the LTERA project in District 7 was con-
ducted by an Afghan NGO well-versed in the techniques and philosophy
of community action planning, the Cooperation for the Reconstruction
of Afghanistan (CRA). CRA identified the possibility of improved tenure
security in terms of increased business activity and housing construction,
especially where improvement in security of tenure was accompanied by
community organization and the physical upgrading of the District’s streets
and drainage systems. Interviews with community leaders and residents
also showed that people’s perception of tenure security and general com-
munity conditions have improved significantly since the implementation of | 79
the project. In summary, the work done by the community is due, in large
measure, to the organizational and guiding efforts of CRA and the financial
support from USAID/EMG:130

129 “Providing Land Tenure Security,” LTERA.

130 “Providing Land Tenure Security,” LTERA.
 Figure 41. Drainage is a Key Community Improvement. Source: LTERA.

More construction: 46 houses have either been reconstructed or extended

in the pilot area since the implementation of the project. This represents
9% of all houses in the area. All but one of these houses are constructed of
brick and concrete, a substantially greater investment than the usual mud
construction.

More Businesses: The number of business activities has increased from

117 to 126, an increase of 7% since the last survey was undertaken ten
months previously, in November 2005.

Increased Prices of Vacant Land: Although house prices appear to have

stabilized and, in some instances, decreased in value, the price of vacant
land has increased by as much as 50% since the project was implemented.
There are fewer houses on the market than before the project started. There
are fewer properties for rent, and rentals have increased by an average of
80 | 30% during the last year.

More Tenure Security: Thirty residents were interviewed regarding their

knowledge and understanding of the LTERA upgrading effort. All but one
felt more secure as a result of the project and believed that the area would
eventually be formally incorporated into the City Plan. Three respondents
noted that the mere fact that roads and drains had been constructed had
resulted in improved perceptions of secure tenure.
 Images of Title Deeds

Screen Prints of the Land Information System Linked to the Deeds Database

| 81

Figure 42. Archive Computerization and Digitization of Property Deeds. Source:

LTERA.

Positive Impact on Community Development: The shura and community

leaders involved with the property adjudication process reiterated their
support for the project and confirmed that it had resulted in improved
perceptions of security and increased economic activity.
 By reducing fear of the forced eviction bulldozer, resolving disputes,
demarcating plots, providing funds for community infrastructure upgrad-
ing, and actually enabling community development, each success, no matter
how small, builds upon the other to provide security of tenure and upgrad-
ing of the settlement.

LTERA’s Restoration of Legal Documentation in Afghan

Registration Courts
When land disputes occur in Afghanistan, taking matters to the courts
often only adds to the woes of returnees and others dispossessed of their
land due to war, land-grabbing, or other avarice. Plagued by corruption,
inefficiency, delays, and an inability to enforce decisions, the official justice
system disappoints many Afghans, who understandably resort to customary
dispute resolution methods.
In Afghanistan the Primary Courts in both urban and rural districts
actually prepare title deeds when people come to the judges for this purpose.
The Provincial Appeals Courts, located in the provincial capitals, maintain
the archives of title deeds documenting the transfer of title according to
procedures established by the Supreme Court. These archives, which con-
tain all primary and provincial court documents and are maintained by the
judiciary, are called mahkzan. But the author’s visits to two Afghan makh-
zan revealed that “maintain” is perhaps too kind a word. During the Afghan
civil war, makhzan suffered neglect and destruction, and were in generally
poor condition. Many legal documents, including title deeds, were stolen,
destroyed, and falsified, and fraudulent new title deeds were created for dubi-
ous property transactions. To restore confidence in the judicial system, it is
essential to rehabilitate the legal archives and make them accessible to the
public, especially for land and property disputes. LTERA’s Mahkzan Reha-
bilitation Program’s goal is to build on efforts started by previous USAID
supported programs to improve land tenure security through the design
and implementation of a cost-effective, transparent, accessible and simple
deed preparation, and archiving and consulting system. The reorganization
of the archives concentrates on the following objectives:131
82 |
• Sort the original legal documents to make them accessible to the
public and the judiciary.
• Secure the legal documents that exist in the archives which can be
used in the future to build a national Land Information System (LIS).
• Digitize and organize the digital records to improve the security of

131 “Providing Land Tenure Security,” LTERA.

 Figure 43. Mahkzan Rehabilitation Photos: Before and After.
Source: LTERA.

storage of these documents, and to accelerate the delivery by the

judiciary of certificates and duplicates of official title documents to
the public.

By February 2007 more than 590,000 title deeds for immovable prop-
erty had been re-organized and stored in dry and secure cabinets; 30,000 of | 83
these documents had been digitized.132 The computerization of the archives
and the digitization of title deeds not only preserve the documents, which
were often in very poor condition, but also digital copies can replace hand-
prepared duplicates. This makes it much more difficult to falsify existing

132 “Providing Land Tenure Security,” LTERA.

 title deeds or introduce new falsified property documentation. A transpar-
ent recording and archiving process with secure access to the legal informa-
tion limits the possibility of corruption. The improvements in document
storage and retrieval are real, but the system is not used by most people
engaging in real estate transactions. In a city of over 3 million people, or at
least 800,000 housing units, according to an LTERA employee, radio and
newspaper public service announcements and the normal usage of courts
for deed preparation have prompted an average of only 10-15 persons a
day to visit the Kabul Makhzan. In most urban contexts, a land market of
transactions averaging 20% of the properties each year would be a minimal
expectation. In Kabul, that would mean perhaps 160,000 annual transac-
tions, or about 600 per working day. The courts are clearly assisting with a
small percentage of actual transactions. But even with a low rate of capture,
the improvement in the archiving process is useful. Many Kabulites had
given up hope that their deeds could be found, and are elated that legal deed
copies can now be obtained. In some cases, the deed copies are used in the
settlement of land disputes, and in others for proving property ownership to
secure loans, and for inheritance clarifications.
Additionally, a national database has been created containing the
indexing of 67,000 legal document registration books called kundas. The
LTERA Project intends one day to be able to link property information in
the makhzan with cadastral maps and databases maintained by the munici-
palities and government ministries. Linking these databases is essential to
implement an integrated LIS. Once operational, the LIS will facilitate an
efficient and cost-effective transfer of ownership of immovable property,
support the development of a formal economy in Afghanistan, and provide
greater tenure security to millions of Afghans.133 The first steps toward these
lofty goals have been taken, but much more needs to be done. LTERA is
demonstrating that progress is better measured in small steps rather than
stressing ambitious but unrealistic plans.

A Good Cadastre is a Great Achievement

“A good cadastre will be the greatest achievement in my civil code,”
84 | said Napoleon, who 200 years ago wanted an end to costly and useless trials
to resolve land disputes between neighbors. Napoleon sought to create a uni-
versal type of property right; its perennial representation would eliminate
boundary disputes and facilitate uniform taxation. Cadastres, along with
security of tenure, land policy, dispute resolution, are key tools in efforts to

133 “Providing Land Tenure Security,” LTERA.

restore sound land administration to post-conflict nations. When used cor-
rectly, as shown in Angola, Cambodia, and Ethiopia, they can dutifully serve
the local citizens rather than outside powers. In the case of Afghanistan,
the various programs discussed show how promising registration of land-
related rights can be to address the Afghan refugee crisis, Kabul’s unwieldy
urban growth, and to maintain peace on rural pasturelands. How might the
results of community/participatory mapping, the plethora of legal, statu-
tory, and customary land records, and competing post-conflict land claims
be registered alongside formally held properties so that the power of GIS
can be harnessed to visualize amicable solutions to land administration
problems worldwide? This is the topic of Chapter 6.

| 85
CHAPTER 6:
Cadastre for Reconstruction and
Stability: The Land Administration
Domain Model
Land ownership, which springs from humanity’s agricultural roots,
predates recorded history. And as long as people have owned property, they
have also sold it, bought it, and passed it on to their heirs. In antiquity to
effect a transaction the parties involved would meet at the city gates in the
presence of the community elders, or congregate in the marketplace in the
presence of a government official, or assemble somewhere else in public and
there agree upon their terms. The transaction may or may not have been
written, depending upon local custom. But whether recorded in parchment,
books, or peoples’ memory, the transaction was public, and therefore con-
sidered legitimate.
This universal human practice is the basis for deeds, the written record
of transfers of rights, ownership, or possession between parties. The word
deed, which comes from the same root as the word do, implies an action, an
activity. Although adequate in antiquity, and still practiced in many parts
of the world, the deed in modern Western countries is insufficient to prove
the legality of an exchange. After all, a perfectly legitimate deed may merely
record how a thief sold stolen land. Competing, contradictory, or fraudulent
deeds require adjudication. In response to a changing economic order, after
the industrial revolution Western countries found a need to record the own-
ership of land parcels in a way that would make transactions easier to track
and more readily available to government and financial institutions. This led
to a shift to an absolute individual land parcel record of who owns what and
where. Having clear title to a property gave financial institutions the abil-
ity to secure a loan against the property. This protected both the lender and
the borrower. For the government, ownership was clear for taxation pur- | 87
poses, or in the case of eminent domain, the government knew who owned
the property. This is how title-based land administration systems began in
many Western countries.
Unlike a deed, which is a physical object, a title is conceptual. A title is
a right a state gives to a certain person or persons recognizing the legitimate
ownership or possession of a given property. There may be a document that
 acknowledges this title, but the title itself is the right, not the piece of paper.
Whereas a deed always involves two parties and records a transaction at a
certain time, a title, which must oftentimes be determined on the basis of
deeds, merely declares who has what rights to what property.

Titles and Deeds in Cadastres

This somewhat oversimplified picture of the difference between deeds
and titles helps explain competing models in land administration. Because
of the stability of models of Western land administration, many foreign
aid workers have attempted to establish in post-conflict societies systems
based on titles, not deeds. Titles, unlike deeds, are well suited to computer
databases and have no ambiguity about them. They are very familiar to the
Western aid workers who are trying to rebuild the country. But there are
problems with this ideal, as mentioned in the previous chapter. While such
systems are slowly set up, a post-conflict society may degenerate further
as one land dispute piles upon another. Titles have taken centuries to be
established in Western civilization, yet this model of land administration
would try to transform in a matter of months tribal societies and shattered,
post-conflict nations without the foundational knowledge contained in a
national cadastre. In fact, this is true for many countries in the world; only
ten nations, mostly in Western Europe, report having total cadastral cover-
age. Developing countries such as Tanzania, Cambodia, and Namibia have
cadastral coverage in 10, 18, and 60 percent of urban areas, and five, 10, and
20 percent of rural areas, respectively.134
Some of the specialists discussed in this book advocate moving from
a title-based to a deeds-based model of land administration. A deeds-
based model seeks to rebuild a post-conflict society by taking advantage
of, and building upon, the integrity of centuries-old customs of recording
land exchanges. The goal of a deeds-based model is to map the relationship
between people and their land as quickly as possible—disputes, ambigui-
ties, and all—and make this information available to local leaders, officials,
judges, and citizens so the competing claims can be adjudicated and local
social structures can be restored, without waiting for the central govern-
88 | ment to develop a corruption-free and competent public administration.
The same problem that plagues the title-based model also affects the
deeds-based one. To map this terrain, one needs a cadastre, a record of
who owns what, and who has what rights. How does one approach the

134 The University of Melbourne Department of Geomatics, Cadastral Template (Melbourne,

Australia: University of Melbourne, 2007), URL: <http://www.cadastraltemplate.org/>,
accessed 12 August 2007.
land issues in Afghanistan where cadastral coverage of populated places is
virtually nonexistent?

Challenges in Cadastres
Most Western cadastres depend upon a title-based, centralized
model of land administration. When imported into post-conflict societ-
ies, they prove ineffective or inadequate for a number of reasons. First,
title-based cadastres adhere to strict database rules, so they are unable to
handle ambiguous or vague boundaries common in post-conflict societ-
ies. A similar ambiguity occurs in cadastral descriptions of urban versus
rural areas. Functioning cities require precise boundaries, with an accu-
racy of 10 centimeters or less. Rural areas have a greater tolerance for
imprecision; in many cases an accuracy of 10 meters or less is sufficient.
Unfortunately, many cadastres cannot merge different accuracies into a
single data environment. By the year 2030 up to one third of the world’s
population will live in informal slums, so the requirement for urban-level
accuracy is a major challenge.135
Title-based cadastres presume that land conflicts or ambiguities have
been resolved, that deeds have been carefully examined to determine who
legitimately holds the rights to the land. If two parties are in dispute, the
property in question will not be legitimately registered in the cadastre until
possibly years later, when the government is capable of adjudicating the
claim. Meanwhile the cadastre remains incomplete, and the unreliability of
the land records precludes planning, most investment, and infrastructure
and environmental improvements. Title-based cadastres, which presume a
black-and-white distinction between a property’s legal owners and all oth-
ers, generally cannot account for the distinction between formal and infor-
mal land tenure. Because cadastres are most effective when centralized, they
are difficult to build. Logistics are a constant problem. How might survey
reports be entered into a central database? Once there, if a discrepancy in
the data is found, how is this finding conveyed to the regional survey, to
have the issue revisited? How do local documents fit unambiguously the
well-formed fields of the database, especially when local custom may not
use the same distinctions presumed by the cadastral design? | 89
One might logically think that cadastral information already serves
as the foundation for objective comparisons of property regimes world-

135 Christiaan Lemmen, Clarissa Augustinus, Peter van Oosterom, and Paul van der Molen,
“The Social Tenure Domain Model--Design of a First Draft Model,” paper presented at the FIG
Working Week 2007, 13-17 May 2007 (Hong Kong SAR, China), 3. Cited hereafter as Lemmen,
Augustinus, van Oosterom, and van der Molen, 2007 conference paper.
 wide, but this is illusory. There has never been an internationally accepted
standard or method for evaluating land administration systems. Cadastres
cannot be compared across borders. “Each land system reflects the unique
cultural and social context of the country in which it operates.”136 Van
der Molen cites this fact as one reason why title-based, conventional land
administration systems have been unable to record rights and interests and
thus manage informal settlements, customary tenure, and fluid, post-con-
flict situations.137 The ability to measure, compare, and analyze the world’s
various cadastral systems is forthcoming. Rajabifard, Binns, Williamson,
and Steudler have begun development of a cadastral template that can link
the operational aspects of a country’s land administration systems with
its land policy. Side-by-side country comparisons and statistics, available
on a public website at www.cadastraltemplate.org, are already useful for
analysis. In 2006, for example, 39 nations’ self-reports indicate that 67%
have title-based cadastral systems, 24% deed-based, and the remaining 9%
a mix of the two. It would seem that title-based cadastres are not as ubiq-
uitous as one might presume.
One final issue that plagues the implementation of either title-based
or deed-based cadastres is that various countries often describe parcels
of land in their own unique national coordinate system, not in absolute
latitude and longitude. There are attempts to make these various systems
interchangeable. One of many new surveying reference systems under
development worldwide is the African Geodetic Reference Frame (AFREF).
The AFREF is a planned, uniform coordinate reference system for all 53
African countries to enhance the accuracy of multi-country, cross-border
mapping and development projects.138 Once the still-developing AFREF
and similar initiatives are implemented, coordinates in existing reference
systems can be transformed into new, standard coordinates independent
of local origin or local datum.
Given these problems, could a cadastre be developed to apply to all
countries and all situations? In the late 1990s Juerg Kaufmann and Dan-
iel Steudler co-authored Cadastre 2014, a pioneering approach to model
the cadastral domain based not on parcels, but on legal land objects. Pub-
90 |

136 Daniel Steudler, Abbas Rajabifard, and Ian P. Williamson, “Evaluation of Land Adminis-
tration Systems,” Land Use Policy 21 (2004): 4.
137 International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), “Land
Administration: The Path Towards Tenure Security, Poverty Alleviation and Sustainable Develop-
ment,” paper presented at the ITC Lunstrum Conference: Spatial Information for Civil Society,
14-16 December 2005 (Enschede, The Netherlands), 66.
138 United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), African Geodetic Reference
Frame (AFREF), 2006, URL: <http://geoinfo.uneca.org/afref/>, accessed 12 September 2007.
lic rights and restrictions will be included as well as private ones. Cadas-
tre 2014 is a fine starting point but is highly abstract, years away from any
implementation. Nevertheless, Kaufmann supports the notion that a cadas-
tre must depend more on deeds than titles in post-conflict society. He notes
that a cadastre, with its traditional role of documenting land rights, restric-
tions, and responsibilities, can be viewed as a book-keeping or “accounting
system” for land issues, ultimately supporting a post-conflict reconstruction
period through the transition to sustainable development.139

Land Administration Domain Model (LADM)

Significant inventiveness on the part of Christiaan Lemmen, Clarissa
Augustinus, Peter van Oosterom, and Paul van der Molen has resulted in
the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM). Not yet an operational
system, but a concept that international experts have been working on since
2002, the LADM is compelling because it makes explicit the various types
of land rights, restrictions, or responsibilities. It is flexible enough to record
land tenure types not based on the traditional cadastral parcel, i.e., custom-
ary, informal land rights such as occupancy, usufruct, lease, or traverse.
LADM may be the first step to an internationally recognized stan-
dard for a cadastre. It has garnered support from standardization and
professional bodies such as the FIG, Open GIS Consortium (OGC), UN-
HABITAT, and the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (EU-
INSPIRE).140 In May 2007 the International Standards Organization (ISO/
TC211), the body responsible for determining all international standards,
accepted the LADM as New Work Item Proposal (NWIP) 1954. A draft
ISO standard is the next stage, one that may lead to the first internationally
standardized cadastre.
The LADM has reduced the complex database models that underlie
title-based cadastres to a simple principle: that a relationship (rights, socio-
tenure) always exist between land (spatial objects) and people. No matter
how messy or difficult the world’s land disputes, nothing falls outside this
basic principle. A person or group of persons have (or claim to have) cer-
tain rights to a given tract of land. The LADM translates these three catego-
ries into Unified Modeling Language (UML), a general purpose modeling | 91

139 Juerg Kaufmann, “Future Cadastres: The Bookkeeping Systems for Land Administra-
tion Supporting Sustainable Development,” paper presented at the 1st International Seminar
on Cadastral System, Land Administration and Sustainable Development, 3-5 May 2000
(Bogota, Columbia). Cited hereafter as Kaufmann, 2000 conference paper.
140 Peter van Oosterom, Christiaan Lemmen, Tryggvi Ingvarsson, Paul van der Molen, Hen-
drik Ploeger, Wilko Quak, Jantien Stoter, and Jaap Zevenbergen, “The Core Cadastral Domain
Model,” ScienceDirect 30, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems (2006): 629.
 language, to establish three classes for its cadastre: Person-Right-Spatial
Object, in that order. The LADM enables registration and maintenance of
“relationships between people and land irrespective of the nature of the
country’s jurisprudence; this ability offers opportunities for the integration
of statutory, customary, and informal arrangements within conventional
land administration systems.”141 For the first time in cadastral history the
LADM enables the systemic recording of rights that are not title-based legal
rights but claims that may need adjudication. It allows tremendous flexibil-
ity in describing the persons and places involved.
The LADM possesses the critical functionality to merge formal
and informal land tenure systems, and urban and rural cadastres, into
one data environment. LADM requires that spatial information be repre-
sented in multiple geodetic networks, which are systems to measure the
earth’s surface. Therefore, conversion from a local to a national, and, in
the case of AFREF, to a continental reference system must be possible
before LADM can become interoperable. These standards, as mentioned
above, are already under development. In brief, the LADM promises the
following features:142
• Formal and informal tenure systems can be held in one data
environment.
• The computer-based system is reversible to and from a paper-based
one.
• Spatial information can be represented in existing geodetic networks
and in new spatial frameworks.
• Spatial data can be linked to other systems.
• The environment is distributed and decentralized, simultaneously
processing on multiple geographically separated computers over a
network, making it usable centrally and locally.
• Source data can be of disparate types, with different geospatial
accuracies.
• Different tenures can be allowed to overlap.
• Places can be identified by a range of identifiers: geo-referenced
92 | parcels, unreferenced parcels, lines, points, and so forth.
• Conflicts can be recorded, women’s access to land can be ensured, and
highly complex relationships can be described.

141 Lemmen, Augustinus, van Oosterom, and van der Molen, 2007 conference paper, 7.
142 Lemmen, Augustinus, van Oosterom, and van der Molen, 2007 conference paper, 12.
 <<FeatureType>>
RegisterObject

+objectId:
+useCode[1..2]
+taxAmount:Integer[1..*]
+name:Character[0..1]
+value:Integer[^]
+tmin:Date
+tmax:Date

<<FeatureType>>
RRR
*
+share:float
+timeSpec:Time
+min:Date *
+max:Date

<<FeatureType>>
Person

+subjId
+tmin:Date
+tmax:Date

Figure 44. The Central Premise of the Land Administration Domain Model.
Source: Christiaan Lemmen, et. al. http://www.fig.net/pub/fig2006/papers/
ts12/ts12_02_lemmen_vanoosterom_0605.pdf. RRR = Right, Restriction,
Responsibility.

LADM Components
As mentioned above, LADM depends upon three classes of objects: per-
sons, rights, and spatial units. Figure 44 illustrates the central premise of the
LADM, that a land-related right, or better stated, a socio-tenure relationship
(a term based on the 2003 UN-Habitat Continuum of Rights), always exists | 93
between land and people. In Figure 44, yellow marks social tenure relations;
green, persons; and blue, spatial units.
Two of these classes—rights (or informal social land tenure relation-
ships) and persons—are administrative or legal. The other class, spatial
unit, is geographical. The difference is important, for it reflects the two pil-
lars of all land administrations. On one side is the administrative or legal
aspect. Who has the property? Do they own or possess it, or do they have
 Horizontal Property Individual Unit

Tom: Natural Person Shared Unit

CondoOwnersAssembly:
Tom: Natural Person GroupPerson Common Parts

Figure 45. Horizontal Property Objects. Source: Modified by author from Hespanha
et al.

other rights? What taxes do they owe? On the other side is the geographical
requirement. Exactly what is the land? What are its borders? What immov-
able structures are on the land? Thus, at its core, the LADM reflects the two
aspects common to all land administration systems.

LADM Modeling
To illustrate LADM flexibility, it may help to look at two dimensions of
landholding that have proved difficult for traditional cadastres to handle: com-
plex spaces and changes in time.
The worldwide rural to urban migration has sparked a significant increase
in multi-unit dwellings, such as condominiums. Figure 45 shows how LADM
proposes to treat individual units within a multi-unit building. Individual units
94 | in such “horizontal property’’ relate to a specific natural person, Tom, through
the Right of Horizontal Property. To fully characterize Horizontal Property,
however, common areas of the building, represented by the spatial object Shared
Unit, are related to the group of persons holding Horizontal Property Rights on
the Building, that is, the “Condo Owners Assembly,” a Group Person, through a
Common Parts Right.143 Thus, in Figure 45, rights (in yellow) mediate between
spatial objects (light blue) and persons (in green). In this way LADM can accu-
rately reflect a complex arrangement made between an individual and group in
an equally complex building.
Now let’s add to this scenario the dimension of time. In recent years
time-share units, typically in resort areas, have become attractive to own.
These units are often condominiums, but the right of use is fixed, for exam-
ple, to the same one or two weeks each year. This type of recurring use right
is best described in a cadastre with four dimensional (4D) representation,
so as to correctly situate the object of the right both in the space (3D) and in
time.144 Table 2 below shows how a fourth dimension expands the range of
possible rights, restrictions, and responsibilities to be recorded in a cadastre.

Sharing Type Right Restriction/Responsibility

No share in space Individual property Homeowners association
No share in time ownership covenants/restrictions apply
No share in space Time sharing Pay annual maintenance fee
Share in time Succession usufruct Maintain property’s
condition for subsequent use
Share in space Co-owned property Auto-limiting rights require
No share in time majority of owners’ vote to
change landscape contract
Table 2. Source: modified by author from Hespanha et. al.

LADM: The Future of Cadastre

LADM links spatial data from very different systems. In the past this
linking has been very problematic for land information, in part because of the
database structure. To link disparate data, however, LADM is less a database
than a word processor. Anything can be put into the document, as long as
it records all evidence relevant to a property and the rights various people
claim on it. Thus, LADM is especially suited to recording deeds.
Land information systems should serve decision makers at national, | 95
regional and local level with the emphasis on decentralized decision mak-
ing. This is the basic concept behind the LADM: to produce and provide (1)

143 João P. Hespanha, Mónica Jardim, Jesper Paasch, and Jaap Zevenbergen, “Modelling
Legal and Administrative Cadastral Domain — Implementing into Portuguese Legal Frame-
work,” (2007), 26. Cited hereafter as Hespanha, Jardim, Paasch, and Zevenbergen, “Model-
ling.” Unpublished manuscript provided to author.
144 Hespanha, Jardim, Paasch, and Zevenbergen, “Modelling,” 12.
 land registration (the administrative/legal component) and (2) geo-refer-
enced cadastral mapping (the spatial component) for land administration
in a decentralized environment. The model will allow better vertical coor-
dination, between “bottom up” local/community interests and “top down”
information and policy guidance. National development policies can be
harmonized with local programs.145 Thus, LADM facilitates the rehabilita-
tion of both local and central governance.
The LADM fulfills the criteria outlined by Kaufmann to be reliable,
systematic/complete, appropriate to needs and laws, adaptable to develop-
ment, public, and transparent.146 And whereas Cadastre 2014 is a generic,
abstract set of guidelines, the LADM is a real system under real develop-
ment. It is pragmatic because unique socio-tenure relationships can be rep-
resented to reflect the realities on the ground.
It may be objected that the LADM cannot represent all possible cases
for one area of the world, or that the categories it describes for one country
may need to change for the next. But this is LADM’s strength, not its weak-
ness. The classes in LADM are expandable. The system is being designed so
that additional attributes, operators, associations, and perhaps even com-
plete new classes can be added for a specific country or region.147 For exam-
ple, Tryggvi Már Ingvarsson and his colleagues suggest how the LADM can
reflect the natural features of the Icelandic landscape, which are in constant
motion and change in extent and shape.148
In the CCDM [an earlier name of the LADM], fuzzy boundaries may
be employed and applied in such circumstances. The CCDM [LADM]
supports this concept using history attributes, but an approach using
specially defined boundaries would be more appropriate. One way to adapt
the CCDM [LADM] to Icelandic requirements would be by conceptually
defining a number of new boundary types. Boundaries the veracity of
which have not been established, [and] designated general boundaries
can be identified only by further research. Fixed boundaries have been
surveyed according to requirements as defined in laws and regulations.
Dynamic boundaries are boundaries between public and private lands
subject to change over long periods, such as coastline change, glacial
96 | movement or due to individual events such as volcanic activity. These

145 Lemmen, Augustinus, van Oosterom, and van der Molen, 2007 conference paper, 13.
146 Kaufmann, 2000 conference paper, 3.
147 Lemmen, Augustinus, van Oosterom, and van der Molen, 2007 conference paper, 8.
148 Tryggvi Már Ingvarsson, Tom Barry, and Margrét Hauksdóttir, “Reform of Icelandic
Cadastre,” GIM International, The Global Magazine for Geomatics 21, no. 3 (2007), URL: <http://
www.gim-international.com/issues/articles/id867-Reform_of_Icelandic_Cadastre.html>,
accessed 27 September 2007.
 boundaries are considered fixed at each period of time. Fuzzy boundaries
are those subject to more attenuated periods of change on a smaller scale;
riverbeds are an example. Fuzzy boundaries can also be used to indicate
areas of conflicting interests.
The LADM aspires to be everything that civilian land administrators and
civil-military planners want to address regarding land issues of post-conflict
societies. It merits close attention by NATO, the U.S. State and Defense Depart-
ments, and USAID or other entities tasked with bringing about stabilization
because it could be an important breakthrough tool for aiding countries with
weak or totally absent land administration.

| 97
CHAPTER 7:
Applied Geography as a Mainstay
of U.S. Foreign Policy
In 1999, following a vote for independence from Indonesia, widespread
violence in East Timor destroyed countless buildings and homes. Abandoned
properties invited illegal occupation by the 150,000 people, or 15% of the pop-
ulation, who became IDPs. In early 2006, renewed violence resulted in more
property destruction, a new wave of displaced persons, and further confusion
of the earlier property restitution claims already underway. A 2006 USAID
Conflict Vulnerability Assessment in East Timor found that “the inadequacy
of mechanisms to resolve disputes over land and property rights cause[d] land
tenure insecurity and can encourage [a] resort to violence.”149 The UNHCR
has long advocated a four-phase return process: repatriation, reintegration,
rehabilitation, and reconstruction. With the end of the Cold War, repatria-
tion became more realistic and attractive as a durable solution to the interna-
tional refugee problem; the UNHCR even declared the 1990s as “the Decade of
Repatriation.”150
A rights-based approach to resettlement and repatriation is now in vogue.
The Pinheiro Principles, noted in Chapter 2, declared that refugees and IDPs
should be guaranteed a variety of restitution rights. According to the Principles,
displaced persons may either return to their land or instead claim financial com-
pensation, should they wish not to return. East Timor’s descent into renewed
violence in 2006 underscores the fact that human rights pronouncements from
Brussels and Geneva are as ineffectual as was the international community’s
response to the 1999 East Timorese civil war. A rights-based approach has severe
limitations. The Pinheiro Principles do not instruct reconstruction and stabil-
ity (R&S) practitioners on the ground what to do concerning land tenure and
property rights (LTPR). The Principles do not say who should pay restitution
or how various claims should be adjudicated, to separate the fraudulent from
| 99

149 Cynthia Brady and David G. Timberman, “The Crisis in Timor-Leste: Causes, Conse-
quences and Options for Conflict Management and Mitigation,” report for the USAID (Washing-
ton, DC: USAID, 2006).
150 United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), The State of the World’s
Refugees 2006 - Chapter 6, Rethinking Durable Solutions: The Search for Durable Solutions (2006),
2006, URL: <http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/publ/opendoc.htm?tbl=PUBL
&id=4444d3ca28>, accessed 25 September 2007.
 genuine. The rights-based approach often amounts merely to a well-meaning
platitude. It envisions an ideal but says nothing about how to achieve it.
The international community should recognize that a rights-based
approach alone is insufficient, and that a rule-of-law approach to LTPR must
also be embraced. A rule-of-law approach acknowledges that in a conflict or
disaster the international community’s most urgent responsibilities pertain
to public security and humanitarian assistance. No less important (but seem-
ingly easily forgotten) are the mandates to restore legal, educational, and leg-
islative institutions. These priorities, discussed in Chapter 2, must include land
administration at the forefront. The rule-of-law approach invests immediately
in the restitution of central and local institutions, to implement changes that are
merely wished for in rights-based approaches. Noted experts De Soto, Foley,
and Rubin advocate a rule-of-law approach, both for the sake of short-term sta-
bility and for longer-term economic development.
The 2006 USAID report mentioned above prompted the government
of East Timor (GOTL) to establish a national land registration and titling
system. The initiative is praiseworthy, but how will it be implemented? Will
the international community help GOTL with a rights-based or a rule-of-
law approach? The GOTL will require substantial technical assistance, con-
certed human resources, institutional capacity building, and, more than
anything else, time to achieve these objectives. The UN-HABITAT Handbook
for Planning Immediate Measures from Emergency to Reconstruction soberly
reminds practitioners that long after the media, emergency services personnel
and stability forces pull out of a country, post-conflict land management “is
dependent on political will and a determination to build effective systems—
including technical and governance—over long periods. As a rule of thumb, it
takes about 25 years to build such a system.”151
East Timor, a nation of only one million people, requires both immediate
and long-term commitments for its needs in land administration. R&S practi-
tioners there must implement a viable land administration system now. Foreign
aid agencies and donors must take a long view of the matter. How might land
administration receive a much higher priority in whole-of-government and
100 | whole-of-alliance R&S doctrine, human, and technical resources? How should
civilian and military personnel be trained to deploy to collapsed states, knowing
that land administration, unlike short-term emergency aid distribution, takes

151 Clarissa Augustinus and Dan Lewis, Handbook for Planning Immediate Measures from
Emergency to Reconstruction (Peer-Reviewed First Draft), ed. Paul van der Molen, Japp Zevenber-
gen, and Thierry Naudin (Nairobi, Kenya: UN-HABITAT Disaster, Post-Conflict, and Safety Sec-
tion and the Land and Tenure Section, 2004), 126. Cited hereafter as Augustinus and Lewis,
Handbook.
years, perhaps decades, to institutionalize? This chapter presents recommenda-
tions on how U.S. government agencies should adapt and change to be prepared
to address future land crises, both in the short and long term.

The Early Phase of Addressing Land Crises: The

Role of the Military
George Boguslawski was deployed to Afghanistan with the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers Contingency Real Estate Support Team (CREST). His
experience shows that an intervening U.S. military force can trigger conflict
by inadvertently creating a land market and that one of the first needs in a
country is a repository for recorded land-related rights and interests, rights
both substantiated and claimed. Boguslawski explains:
A group of Afghans leased their land, previously of negligible worth,
to the U.S. Army based on the ownership documents they had
provided. Since ownership disputes are common, our leases stipulate
that a competing ownership claim stops payment until the dispute is
resolved. Months later another man claimed partial ownership of the
same land. We stopped paying on the lease and informed the first party
that payments will resume as soon as that party got a decision from the
court. These folks swore that the other guy had no right to the land. They
even brought a village elder to lend credibility to their argument. When
I explained that the matter must be settled in court, they told me that
it was not possible because the other guy is “al-Qaeda” and refuses to
go near courts or law enforcement. It is common for parties in disputes
around Kabul to accuse each other of being al-Qaeda or Taliban. When
telephoned, the alleged al-Qaeda man unhesitatingly agreed to come to
the base the next day. He brought court papers indicating that he had
filed suit over ownership of the property. He turned out to be related to
members of the first party.

Weeks later, the first party resorted to chicanery in order to gain an

audience with me; that party showed base security a document with
a seal on it and told security that it was a court document. Security | 101
telephoned me that the group had brought a court document with them.
This “court document” was written in poor English and was covered with
the thumbprints of the group members. The seal was actually to verify
that the thumbprints belonged to the individuals named in the document.
The “court document” was nothing more than a letter from the group
demanding that I pay them. Shortly after they realized that I was not
going to decide the issue of ownership, the parties settled out of court by
 Figure 46. Military “First-Responders” to a natural disaster are greeted in
Nicaragua. Source: Department of Defense.

signing a supplemental lease agreement; we then paid the rent that had
been withheld.152
With increasing frequency, the first responders to post-disaster and post-
conflict crises are the U.S. and allied armed forces, trained to deal with any
number of contingencies. Former U.S. Marine Corps Commandant Charles
Krulak coined the term “three-block war” to describe three missions: combat,
peace enforcement, and humanitarian, that the U.S. military could be expected
to execute within a three-block radius of a given urban center. Lieutenant Col-
onel Steven Fleming, a geography professor at the U.S. Military Academy,
relates that resolving land conflicts is indispensable for operations other
than war, so that for two of the three missions of the three-block war con-
cept it is important. This is in striking contrast to wars of bygone eras. Mili-
tary planners in WWII were not concerned with property ownership when
planning a battle, aside from making sure they minimized destruction to
102 | selected cultural locations. Even in the recent fighting in Iraq, Fleming notes
that “From a military position, warfighting, e.g., ‘the March to Baghdad,’
does not concern itself much with land ownership. However, post-conflict
nation-building and reconstruction inherently involve mass movements of
people. Therefore, knowledge of land ownership is central to the success of

152 George Boguslawski, U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, phone interview by the author, 2
August 2007.
Figure 47. A Symposium Sponsored by the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School’s
Center for Stabilization and Reconstruction Studies. Source: NPS.

those missions.”153 For military or civilian responders, early assessment of

the state of post-conflict land records, of land institutions, and of land prob- | 103
lems is an integral part of restoring peace and stability. Round-the-clock
food, water, medical, shelter, and other emergency aid distribution often
eclipses the need to conduct these assessments. A lack of public clamor
about land issues invites further postponements.

153 Steven Fleming, Professor of Geography at the U.S. Military Academy, e-mail interview
by the author, 10 August 2007.
 Citing his experience in Liberia, Jon Unruh cautions R&S specialists not
to be fooled: in postwar countries a surge of land tenure problems tend to sur-
face three to five years after the fighting ceases. “This is because in the immedi-
ate postwar lull, people are upgrading livelihoods in rudimentary ways. But, at
about three to five years, continued upgrading needs a property rights system
and it is then that the problems emerge. While social unrest connected to land
and property issues is unlikely while UNMIL [United Nations Mission in Libe-
ria] has a large presence in the country, at some point the peacekeeping forces
will be stepped down and the rule of law needs to step up.”154 Naturally, the ideal
time to head off a post-conflict land crisis, as occurred in East Timor, is to
anticipate it and, soon upon arrival in a country, develop a cadastral frame-
work, years in advance of the inevitable problems.
While military forces are often the first responders to world crises,
most would gladly limit their role to providing security so that other enti-
ties can execute their own vital missions. In a perfect world, NGOs deliver
humanitarian aid; intergovernmental bodies such as the UNHCR resettle
refugees. It may seem that involvement in local land matters, something
normally relegated to civilian agencies, is not in the interest of the military.
But in reality, the military’s involvement in recording early land disputes
enhances, not hinders, its military mission. Joseph Nye, former Chair of the
U.S. National Intelligence Council, and Deputy Under Secretary of State for
Security Assistance, Science and Technology, coined the term “soft power” as
the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion.155
Nye lamented that only in academic circles, in Europe, even in China and
India, but not in the United States, has soft power entered into political
debate, and that the global attractiveness of the U.S. has been squandered
by a singular hard power (military) approach to foreign policy.156 Current
and future conflicts, labeled Fourth Generation Warfare, Irregular War-
fare, Insurgency, or Asymmetric Wars, require a great deal of soft power to
achieve an agreed-upon end state: “the imposition of law and order to gen-
erate regional stability, development, peace, and effective sovereignty.”157 To
meet these future challenges, Dr. Max Manwaring of the U.S. Army Strate-
gic Studies Institute theorizes that a national executive-level management

104 | 154 Jon Unruh, Postwar Land Tenure in Liberia: Lessons Learned from Other Post-Conflict Coun-
tries (2007), 3.
155 Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, 1st ed. (New York:
Public Affairs, 2004), x.
156 Joseph S. Nye, “After Rumsfeld, a Good Time to Focus on Soft Power,” Daily Star (Beirut,
Lebanon), 11 November 2006.
157 Max G. Manwaring, “Defense, Development, and Diplomacy (3D): Canadian and U.S.
Military Perspectives,” paper presented at the Defense, Development, and Diplomacy (3D):
Canadian and U.S. Military Perspectives, 21-23 June 2006 (Kingston, Ontario, Canada), 3.
Cited hereafter as Manwaring, 2006 conference paper.
structure and an international coordinating entity are essential for ensuring
vertical and horizontal unity of effort.
Dealing with these kinds of national and global threats involves the
entire population of affected countries, as well as large numbers of
civilian and military national and international governmental and
nongovernmental organizations and agencies — and sub-national,
indigenous actors. As a result, a viable unity of effort is required to
coordinate the many multidimensional, multi-organizational, and
multilateral/multinational activities necessary to play in a given security
arena.158
The Pentagon has already anticipated this new role by incorporating sta-
bility operations into the war colleges’ curricula, thereby preparing regional
combatant commanders for their expanded role.
Some Western nations are increasing the allocation and training of mil-
itary forces for peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and stability, known col-
lectively as “military operations other than war.” Canada, for example, has
implemented a Defense, Development, and Diplomacy (3D) approach “in
developing a new external conflict and internal catastrophe/disaster paradigm
in which traditional military and police organizations continue to play major
roles, but are closely coordinated with all the other instruments of power
under the control of the civil authority. The 3-D concept is rapidly growing
into a broader and more effective strategic whole-of-government and grand-
strategy whole-of-alliance paradigm.”159

The Next Phase in Land Crises: Civil-Military

Cooperation
These new initiatives in the military emphasize collaboration with relief
and development organizations. Recent post-conflict scenarios have at times
forced military forces to assume the unconventional (and perhaps uncomfort-
able) roles of humanitarian aid providers and nation-builders. Although the
military is there, ready and able to assist, these roles ultimately are best served
by neutral civilians. Military and civilian organizations must learn how to coo-
erate, especially how to effect the transfer of the military’s short-term responsi- | 105
bilities to civilian specialists. Ideally this hand-off would occur a month or two
following the end of hostilities, and the military would play a supporting role
until its presence is no longer required. In recent operations a smooth transfer
of those responsibilities has been difficult to achieve.

158 Manwaring, 2006 conference paper, 3.

159 Manwaring, 2006 conference paper, 1.
 To understand why the military-to-civilian hand-off of nation building
tasks is problematic, consider the experience of Deborah Alexander. In spring
2002, USAID sent Alexander to Afghanistan to build relations with the U.S.
military and prepare the way for agency experts to aid in that country’s
reconstruction. “Alexander would land at a clandestine airfield and then
hitch a ride with a passing United Nations convoy to get to a military base.
Once there, she would find the civil-affairs unit: ‘Hi, I’m from the govern-
ment and I’m here to help.’ Civil-affairs soldiers were always happy to see
her, even if they didn’t know she was coming, and they would quickly brief
her on the local water, agricultural, and health challenges. She made friends
and learned about the needs to be filled by the USAID experts —who arrived
18 months later.”160 Alexander explains:
It takes a while to get them recruited, trained, and out there. Unlike
the military, neither USAID nor State has a standing reserve of civilian
experts ready to deploy. They can send a few people quickly, but for
such substantial operations as those in Afghanistan or Iraq, both have to
recruit staff, write and sign contracts, and conduct training — a time-
consuming process for which the situation on the ground can’t wait. In
an ideal world, the military would be a supporting partner to a broader
civilian-led operation. But that’s challenged by the very real fact that
the civilian agencies are under-resourced. Even if they started building
capacity today, it would still take a long time. As a result, in the short
term, the burden falls on the military.161
Clearly, transition and cooperation need to be better coordinated.
The U.S. Congress is now pursuing reforms that would better integrate the
departments of Defense and State and the U.S. Agency for International
Development. First, the National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD)
44, issued in December 2005, promotes the security of the United States
through improved coordination, planning, and implementation of recon-
struction and stabilization assistance for foreign states and regions of, in, or
in transition from, conflict or civil strife. NSPD-44 provides some much-
needed vitality to the newly created State Department Offi ce of the Coor-
dinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS). Regarding policy,
106 | NSPD-44 states that “the United States should work with other countries
and organizations to anticipate state failure, avoid it whenever possible,
and respond quickly and effectively when necessary and appropriate to

160 Corine Hegland, “Pentagon, State Struggle to Define Nation-Building Roles,” Gov-
ernment Executive, 30 April 2007, URL: <http://www.govexec.com/mailbagDetails.
cfm?aid=36760>, accessed 5 May 2007. Cited hereafter as Hegland, “Pentagon, State
Struggle.”
161 Hegland, “Pentagon, State Struggle.”
promote peace, security, development, democratic practices, market econ-
omies, and the rule of law.”162 In another significant reform, the National
Security Council in 2007 approved models for interagency cooperation
for the next country collapse. It also agreed on an idea to create a National
Security Education Consortium to provide joint education and training
for civilians and the military.163

Addressing Land Crises in the Long Term: Building

Land Administration Expertise
Outside of a few Civil Affairs and legal specialists, neither active duty
nor reserve military members can realistically develop cadastre and land
administration expertise. The long-term needs of a post-conflict country are
best served by deployable civilian experts who are well trained and equipped
with the resources needed for lengthy stays. Unfortunately, this is one of the
greatest deficiencies in the fledging U.S. R&S apparatus. Zimmermann iden-
tifies the worldwide dearth of human resources and cadastral frameworks to
meet future crises:
International experts and national professionals are confronted with
a huge task that requires specific professional knowledge in terms of
building an enabling framework, tackle critical governance issues,
institutional re-engineering, situation-specific sequencing and
prioritizing and the design of a long term program in the land sector....
The international community is short of governance responsive “post-
conflict” land experts and can not yet sufficiently meet the challenge on
the ground.164
The international community is unprepared to address the scale of the
problems posed by land crises. And the U.S. is the least prepared, despite hav-
ing the most resources. Unlike in Europe and Canada, in the U.S. the disci-
plines of land administration and geomatics (engineering-surveying spatial
data management) are scarcely known. The author visited officials of the S/
CRS and USAID officials and contractors working to improve land tenure
and property rights work (LTPR) in Afghanistan. The paucity of American
know-how was evident—and waning further as the few remaining USG LTPR | 107
experts approach retirement age. The USAID relies largely on private consult-
ing firms who acquire their experience from short-term contracts. The con-

162 The White House, NSPD-44 Management of Interagency Efforts Concerning Recon-
struction and Stability (Washington, DC: 2005).
163 Hegland, “Pentagon, State Struggle.”
164 Zimmermann, 2006 conference paper, 12.
 tracted employees, with increasing frequency non-U.S. citizens, do not always
have a sophisticated, broad-based understanding of property rights issues. And
because USAID employs few LTPR experts, on-the-ground oversight of con-
tractor performance by at least one USG official is increasingly rare.
This situation has arisen partly due to underestimating the role land
administration plays in R&S, and partly due to changes in government prac-
tices that have not been sufficiently scrutinized. The idealistic 1960s image
of American government employees, Peace Corps volunteers, and academics
engaged in exchanges and international development has long since disap-
peared. Stanfield outlines the changing nature of American foreign aid over
the last 60 years, and, from his observations in Afghanistan, concludes that
something has gone terribly wrong:
The years following World War II witnessed the emergence of the United
Nations, the dissolution of many aspects of colonialism, and the emphasis
on state investments in core industries and infrastructure to move
countries into the “development” stream. The assistance of developed
countries in this process was often government-to-government, or in
the form of people-to-people programs (such as the Peace Corps and
exchange programs), or involved voluntary organizations which shifted
their post war humanitarian relief efforts to development investments,
and even got universities involved, which encouraged their faculty and
students to undertake international development programs.165
In recent years, a fundamental shift has occurred in assistance to devel-
oping countries. What was once handled by the USG is now managed by for-
profit corporations. Instead of government or intergovernmental employees
conducting the work, or, in several cases, even overseeing the work, organiza-
tions such as the USAID, but also the European Union, Inter-American Devel-
opment Bank, Asian Development Bank and the World Bank, have contracted
with corporations to deliver development assistance to countries in need. “Since
2000, the value of Federal contracts signed by all U.S. agencies each year has
more than doubled to reach $412 billion dollars.”166 Stanfield notes the unfor-
tunate effects and unintended consequences when foreign aid reflects not the
face of a donor country, but that of a company. “I have witnessed in Afghanistan
108 | the rapid loss of Afghan support for the international development assistance

165 J. David Stanfield, “Land Administration in (Post) Conflict Conditions: The Case of
Afghanistan,” paper presented at the World Bank Conference on Land Policies & Legal Empow-
erment of the Poor, 2-3 November 2006 (Washington, DC), 14.
166 Georgie Anne Geyer, “’Outsourcing’ Is Not the Answer to Our Foreign Policy Woes,” 23
August 2007, Yahoo! News, URL: <http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucgg/outsourcingisnotthean-
swertoourforeignpolicywoes>, accessed 29 August 2007.
programs being run by foreign corporations. Afghans deeply resent seeing the
often ostentatious and counter-productive results of such programs.”167
Afghanistan is the proving ground for American R&S in the 21st century.
Others familiar with what is happening there echo Stanfield’s sentiments. First,
the incentive for millions of refugees to return to Afghanistan was the billions
of dollars in promised foreign aid, which was perceived by returnees as a hedge
against homelessness and unemployment. “Unfortunately, the Government of
Afghanistan (GoA) did not directly receive the aid which donor countries had
promised to give for the reconstruction. Instead, a number of NGOs and indi-
viduals in key positions received everything.”168 Next, Afghan Finance Minister
Anwarul Haq Ahady occasioned some uneasiness in a 2007 U.S. Congressio-
nal forum on Afghanistan when he too suggested that foreign aid should be
routed through the GoA, and not directly to the NGOs. He decried the lack
of any discussion on the “output” of foreign aid and pointed out that projects
not routed through the GoA were being done at a much higher cost. Ahady’s
insight was supported by two other eminent experts who participated in the the
panel discussions, Barnett Rubin, Director of Studies and Senior Fellow, Centre
for International Cooperation, and Marvin Weinbaum, Scholar in Residence,
Middle East Institute. Referring to an instance where nearly $100 million was
transferred to the bank account of a consultant in Washington to carry out a
project in Afghanistan, Rubin said, “This may sound too harsh. But if we give
the money directly through the Afghan government, USAID would be much
more effective...Money in Afghanistan is not being used effectively; funding is
being dispersed, but is not delivered.”169 The previous year Rubin wrote, “more
than seventy-five percent of all aid to Afghanistan funds projects [were] directly
implemented or contracted by donors. This mode of delivery, although initially
inevitable, is ultimately self-defeating. If prolonged, it undermines—rather than
builds—the state”170 Lastly, a former NGO operative, 17 years in Afghanistan
with Norway Church Aid, Mohammad Ehsan Zia, now Afghanistan’s Minister
of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, asks: “Do non-governmental agen-
cies really want Afghanistan to get off its knees, no longer reliant on the interna-
tional humanitarians bountiful? It is a loaded question. After all, that would put
them out of business, redundant to Afghanistan’s emerging—as hoped—self-
| 109
167 J. David Stanfield, Privatization of International Development Assistance Stirs Resentment
in Afghanistan (Mount Horeb, WI: Terra Institute, Ltd., 2006), 1. Cited hereafter as Stanfield,
Privatization.
168 ANIS, “Expulsion of Afghan Refugees: A Wave of Poverty and Unemployment,” ANIS
(Companion) State-Run Daily Newspaper (Kabul, Afghanistan), 3 March 2007.
169 Lalit K. Jha, “Minister’s Call for Aid Effectiveness Upsets U.S. Official,” Pajhwok Afghan
News, 21 April 2007, URL: <http://www.afghanistannewscenter.com/news/2007/april/
apr212007.html#19>, accessed 14 September 2007.
170 Rubin and Hamidzada, “From Bonn to London,” 23.
 determination... NGOs seem very much in competition with the government.
Why? Because business as usual suits them very well.”171
Behind all these changes in foreign aid lies the simple notion that govern-
ment is less efficient than private companies, which, in competition with each
other for contracts, develop agile, cost-effective structures. Thus, goes the logic,
taxpayers’ money would be spent more effectively through contracted firms.
But in reconstructing Afghanistan, flaws in the principle have been exposed.
Businesses are in business to turn a profit; NGOs, too, must justify their contin-
ued existence. Public service is not the priority. Stanfield, who understands the
negative effects of corporate privatization of development assistance, fostering
paternalism, undermining the legitimacy of the GoA, and slowing the country’s
reconstruction, also suggests a way out of the conundrum:
This model is also defective from an effectiveness perspective. The corporate
managers of development assistance under this privatized corporate
model determine “what is better to do” about development problems by
calculating “what is better for their foreign corporate profits,” and not what
is better for the countries which should be benefiting from development
assistance...A drastic re-thinking of the structure of foreign assistance is
urgently necessary. One direction of this re-thinking is for development
assistance to build the capacity for its own administration in the local
governmental and non-profit sectors, including local universities.172
For this to happen, two major developments must occur in U.S. R&S
efforts. First, the United States must recognize that R&S is inherently a govern-
ment function and designate and resource branches of government to special-
ize in R&S. Second, the USG should begin to aggressively train and maintain
a cadre of R&S expertise: civilian and military, full- and part-time (reservists),
with a robust emphasis placed on land administration skills.

110 |

171 Rosie DiManno, “Aid Groups Wearing out Welcome,” The Star (Toronto, Ontario,
Canada), 23 April 2007.
172 Stanfield, Privatization, 2.
Mobilizing Government to Respond to Land Crises
To project American soft power throughout the world, the State Depart-
ment must take the lead. In 2004 then-Secretary of State Colin Powell created
the S/CRS, but it has been only partially resourced. For example, in 2004 the
Office requested $350 million to build a Civilian Reserve Corps, similar to the
Pentagon’s military reserve, which would deploy civilians with critical nation-
building skills. Congress remitted $7 million. The Pentagon came to the res-
cue; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, offered $100
million out of Defense’s 2006 budget.173 In 2007, the Office asked for $25 mil-
lion to create a smaller Civilian Reserve Corps, which Congress again denied.
Oddly, “President Bush mentioned the [Civilian Reserve] Corps in his 2007
State of the Union speech, but his fiscal 2008 budget request to Congress the
following month included no money to pay for it. Political experts who are
watching this process say that the Corps is the key, and that its creation comes
close to a make-or-break deal for a partnership between the civilian and mil-
itary wings of the government. It would represent the first real investment
in desperately needed civilian capacity.”174 The Special Inspector General for
Iraq’s reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, “urged the [USG] agencies to focus on
clearly delineating authority and procedures in multi-agency operations and
singled out the S/CRS as an appropriate leader on interagency efforts, and
urged Congress to fully fund it.”175
What would this Civilian Reserve Corps look like? S/CRS can look to
a partner country, Norway, for a model of how to recruit, train, and deploy
“stand-by” civilians to troubled areas of the world. Established in 1991, the
Norwegian Refugee Council’s (NRC) stand-by force of 650 is larger than the
initial 500-person Civilian Reserve Corps planned by S/CRS. NRC emergency
stand-by forces aim to strengthen the UN capacity in emergency situations
and have become one of the most important suppliers of personnel to the UN
and to other humanitarian organizations. Nearly one-third of the NRC stand-
by force is assigned to Special Forces for Human Rights, Democratization,
and Disaster Relief or NORDEM. The proposed U.S. Civilian Reserve Corps
could adopt a model similar to NORDEM. See Appendix D for the tentative
skill mix of the Civilian Reserve Corps, which includes three positions for | 111
cadastre/land administration experts. This may be a start, but realistically it
should be ten times that number to begin a U.S. LTPR community of prac-

173 Hegland, “Pentagon, State Struggle.”

174 Hegland, “Pentagon, State Struggle.”
175 Jenny Mandel, “Reconstruction IG Urges Interagency Coordination,” Government Execu-
tive, 22 March 2007, URL: <http://www.governmentexecutive.com/dailyfed/0307/032207ml.
htm>, accessed 12 April 2007.
 tice. Some NORDEM characteristics to consider in establishing a U.S. Civil-
ian Reserve Corps include:176
• NORDEM Stand-by force is a co-operative project of the Norwegian
Centre for Human Rights and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
The Norwegian Centre for Human Rights is professionally responsible
for assessments, reports, training, briefing, and debriefing. The NRC
carries overall administrative responsibility, including budgeting,
accounting, practical arrangements for deployment, and security in
the field. Recruitment is a shared responsibility.
• NORDEM Stand-by force now includes 250 members within the
above-mentioned categories ready to take on six-month international
assignments on short notice.
• Recruitment takes place annually through advertisements in national
and regional newspapers, written applications, and group interviews.
• All newly recruited members are required to attend the NORDEM
Basic Training Course. This is a six-day course that consists of three
components: first, education focusing on international and regional
mechanisms for the protection of human rights, and the UN’s mandate,
structure, and human rights operations; second, skills training in
the field of human rights and democratization work; third, practical
aspects of international fieldwork. Basic training is organized once a
year and is seen as a prerequisite for international assignments.
• Prior to a given assignment secondees (participants) are briefed about
the assignment and the situation in the country of assignment. The
secondees have already received relevant written documentation and
briefing materials.
• After the completion of an assignment, debriefings are organized and
the secondees submit a written report. These are regularly published,
both in print and in web editions as NORDEM Report.

Training in Land Administration

Where will the needed land administration experts come from? In the S/
112 | CRS, personnel will require a unique skill set to execute the immediate tasks in
any post-conflict arena:177

176 The University of Oslo, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and the Norwegian Centre for
Human Rights, “Norwegian Resource Bank for Democracy and Human Rights (NORDEM)—A Brief
Presentation,” (Oslo, Norway: 18 May 2005), URL: <http://www.humanrights.uio.no/english/
research/programmes/nordem/>, accessed 15 September 2007.
177 Augustinus and Lewis, Handbook, 9.
 • Retrieving and assessing land records.
• Determining the degree of validity of the land records.
• Getting the registry and cadastral services running again.
• Launching mechanisms for the resolution of land disputes.
• Informing the population about the above.

“These tasks require expertise in land records from the twin points of
view of land registries and cadastral registries or maps. More specifically, such
expertise ranges from legal-administrative to survey-technical.”178 Coincidently,
these are the two components that compose the LADM. Astonishingly, training
in the first component is not readily found in U.S. institutions of higher edu-
cation (the Land Tenure Center at the University of Wisconsin—Madison no
longer offers coursework, but focuses on policy analysis). The only aspect of the
legal-administrative side of cadastre that most Americans are familiar with are
real estate valuation and property taxes, and that due only to homeowner expe-
rience. Thus to be effective in land-related R&S operations, USG personnel will
need skills difficult to acquire in the U.S., but obtainable abroad.
Several European programs, at reasonable tuition rates and with English
as the language of instruction, offer specific training in land administration
with field research conducted in developing countries.
• The International Institute for Geo-information Science and
Earth Observation (ITC) is a United Nations University. The
campus in Enschede, the Netherlands, offers 3-week to 18-month
certificate, diploma, and Master of Science degree programs
in Land Administration. See www.itc.nl/education/courses/
landadministration.aspx
• The Technical University of Munich, Germany, offers an
International Master’s Program in Land Management and Land
Tenure as well as short-term training. Three semesters are spent
on campus and conducting field research. The thesis can then
be written from the student’s home country. See http://www.
landentwicklung-muenchen.de/master/index.html
• The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida)
offers advanced international training in urban land administration
| 113
in two phases. A four-week training session in Sweden is followed by
distance education from the student’s home country. Months later a
second phase is conducted in a city of the developing world. See www.
swedesurvey.se/files/pdf/Invitation%20Brochure.pdf

178 Augustinus and Lewis, Handbook, 24.

 A number of foreign institutions offer higher education in geomatics and
other fields with a land-tenure emphasis.
• University of Glasgow, U.K. offers a Master of Science in
Geoinformation Technology and Cartography, in 6 month modules.
See www.ges.gla.ac.uk:443/degrees/postgraduate/courses/MScGTC
• Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology, the Unit of Real Estate
Planning and Land Law, with a focus on property law and property
economics, offers a Master’s programme in Land Management. See
www.infra.kth.se/FV/lm/new/index.php?&M=1&MENU=1
• The University of Melbourne, Australia, offers degrees in geomatics.
See www.geom.unimelb.edu.au/
• The Institute of Social Science, the Hague, the Netherlands, offers
short courses and graduate degrees in various international
development topics, to include LTPR. See www.iss.nl/
• The University of New Brunswick, Canada, offers a Geodesy and
Geomatics Masters degree in Land Administration/Land Information
Management. See http://gge.unb.ca/HomePage.php3

Although higher education in the U.S. has few comparable programs (see
Appendix E for the syllabus of Dr. Grenville Barnes’ graduate course in Land
Tenure and Administration at the University of Florida), there are distinct signs
of such courses becoming available. In March 2007, legislation was introduced to
“establish a 5,000-person undergraduate academy, on par with the nation’s [five]
military academies, to inject prestige into public institutions and highlight the
importance of public service.”179 Soon thereafter, Kathy Newcomer, president
of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration,
responded with a less expensive alternative, a “virtual academy” that utilizes
existing universities’ resources. The debate is likely to continue for years as to
whether it makes sense to offer an elite civilian counterpart to young people
who want to serve their country outside of the military.180 The further ques-
tion remains: if a civilian service academy were established, would there be
a department or faculty of Foreign Policy/Foreign Assistance? Existing cur-
ricular resources could lay the foundation for new programs, or they could be
114 | immediately implemented by programs of those universities that are already
preparing future civil servants. The new USAID three-day short course, Land
Tenure, Property Rights, and Natural Resource Management-Constraints and

179 Brittany R. Ballendstedt, “Universities Propose Alternative to Public Service Academy,”

Government Executive, 21 May 2007, URL: <http://www.governmentexecutive.com/
dailyfed/0507/052107b2.htm>, accessed 4 April 2007. Cited hereafter as Ballendstedt, “Uni-
versities Propose Alternative.”
180 Ballendstedt, “Universities Propose Alternative.”
Figure 48. A Post-Conflict Land Issues Training Scenario. What to do when
informal land tenure systems emerge much faster than formal institutions?
Source: Courtesy of Dr. Jon Unruh, 2007.

Best Practices,181 and the spectrum of land tenure manuals and studies182 pub-
lished by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, could easily form
the basis for a series of one-semester-hour seminars. Within a Foreign Policy/
Foreign Assistance department, might sequenced LTPR-related courses be
molded into a curriculum? Quite possibly, but those courses must first be
developed.
Perhaps the time needed to establish a civilian service academy, or a
virtual university equivalent, will allow the most-experienced R&S operator,
NATO, to compile the lessons it has learned and develop much-needed R&S
training standards. Despite more than a decade of experience with R&S opera-
tions, NATO has yet to incorporate R&S into its defense planning process and
force requirements planning. Aware of this deficiency, the Atlantic Council of
the United States published a timely policy paper in 2006, How Should NATO | 115
Handle Stabilisation Operations and Reconstruction Efforts? One key recom-
mendation from the paper is the establishment of an explicit NATO R&S mis-
sion, which would, in turn, stimulate the development of appropriate planning

181 USAID, “Land Tenure and Property Rights Vol. 1,” Framework (2007).
182 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Access to Rural Land and
Land Administration after Violent Conflicts 8, FAO Land Tenure Series (Rome: FAO Publishing Man-
agement Services, 2005).
 and organizational changes. Another recommendation is for NATO to improve
its R&S planning and coordination with civilian organizations: “The Alliance
should build familiarity, trust, and habits of cooperation with relevant non-mil-
itary institutions prior to operational deployment.”183 Regarding civil-military
cooperation and training, many an alliance member government looks to
NATO for leadership. Especially by inviting civilian participation and obser-
vation in R&S exercises, NATO is uniquely positioned to “lead an effort to
develop uniform standards for all military forces participating in R&S opera-
tions, and to assist in designing the necessary training.... Also, by sharing the
process for creating military standards, NATO may be able to contribute to a
similar effort to establish standards for civilians engaged in R&S.”184
Certainly, NATO’s lessons will play a central part in new initiatives in
the training of LTPR specialists. Possibly more important to the success of
these ventures is the reinstatement of geography as a pillar of the American
education system. If American children are not learning geography in pri-
mary and secondary schools, they are unlikely to understand spatial problems
or to have an interest in geography or related disciplines in either college or
their professional lives.
In August 2007 President Bush signed the bipartisan America COM-
PETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in
Technology, Education, and Science) Act. The Act helps to “bring back geog-
raphy” by adding the social sciences to the disciplines considered a priority at
the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF’s Geography and Regional
Science Program falls under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sci-
ences Directorate, and the COMPETES Act specifically targets the social sci-
ences as a priority.185 This federal initiative coincides with a renewed interest
in human geography at the high school level. The Association of American
Geographers (AAG) reports:
Advanced Placement (AP) Human Geography test rates for 2006
are up 49% from 2005. This year 20,003 students sat for the exam
which measures performance in college-level AP human geography
courses offered in high schools...The AP Human Geography course is
structured around a syllabus that meets college standards and follows
116 | an outline that parallels college course content, including themes and
models such as globalization, cultural diffusion, and central place
theory...Recent world events combined with the development of

183 C. Richard Nelson, How Should NATO Handle Stabilisation Operations and Reconstruction
Efforts? policy paper (Washington, DC: The Atlantic Council of the United States, 2006), 21.
Cited hereafter as Nelson, Stabilisation Operations.
184 Nelson, Stabilisation Operations, 21.
185 John Wertman, “AAG Washington Monitor,” AAG Newsletter 42, no. 8 (2007): 5.
 geographic technologies turned around a decline in geography in the
United States during the latter half of the twentieth century. A holdover
from this decline though was difficulty in recruiting majors, due to
the lack of geography knowledge of incoming freshman...AP Human
Geography has opened up a new world for over 50,000 students in the
past six years, and we expect an increasing number of these students
to continue their geography education in college.186
AAG President Kavita Pandit desires more geography majors to study
abroad. “As a discipline we still have not embraced study abroad as a key com-
ponent of geography undergraduate education. Yet there are compelling rea-
sons for us to do so, not the least of which is that study abroad vitally connects
to two long-standing traditions in geography: area studies and field work.”187
Indeed, in 2003-04, fewer than two percent of enrolled U.S. students studied
overseas. Pandit pitches the benefits of studying geography abroad by describ-
ing the exciting field work and by noting the importance of the global service
learning projects. For faculty members, she touts the opportunities to include
students in their field research. And such opportunities abound: a 2007 NSF
study revealed that 69% of geography departments in the U.S. offer some kind
of international field course for their students.188 Pandit concludes, “study
abroad programs can, therefore, reconnect geographers with our field-based
tradition and help students to develop into truly well-rounded geographical
scholars.”189 The Bowman Expeditions discussed earlier in Chapter 4 ideally
lend themselves to this purpose.
Overall, the growth of geography in secondary and higher education
suggests that America has the potential to become once again, as in Wood-
row Wilson’s day, the envy of the world and a story of success in foreign affairs.
The international community’s efforts in post-conflict nation building are con-
tinually hampered in much the same way as the noble ideals of the UN elude
implementation. The rights-based approach to repatriation and resettlement of
refugees and IDPs must give way to a rule-of-law approach if results are to be
achieved and maintained. For the part of the U.S., civilian and military agencies
must embrace R&S partnership roles that ensure a speedy, effective recovery
in post-conflict societies. Now is an ideal time to change the course of foreign
policy, when geography is on the verge of a return to the center of American
education and culture.
| 117
186 Donald Ziegler and Barbara Hildebrandt, “Advanced Placement (AP) Human Geography
Testing Surges,” AAG Newsletter 41, no. 11 (2006): 4.
187 Kavita Pandit, “Integrating Study Abroad into Geography Higher Education,” AAG News-
letter 41, no. 11 (2006): 3. Cited hereafter as Pandit, “Integrating Study Abroad.”
188 Patricia Solis, Results from Advancing Academe: A Multidimensional Investigation of Geog-
raphy in the Americas (AAMIGA), unpublished report to the National Science Foundation (Arling-
ton, VA: NSF, 2007).
189 Pandit, “Integrating Study Abroad,” 3.
CHAPTER 8:
Conclusion
According to U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) figures, the
conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have been costing the United States about $70
billion per year, and by 2007, over 4,000 Americans had died in the conflicts.
The loss of life and resources has placed an economic and emotional drain on
Americans. A strategy that can stabilize the Afghan and Iraqi governments and
allow the United States to depart would be beneficial to the American people.
Creating stable, legitimate governments in these and other volatile states is a
goal of American foreign policy.
Though ending conflicts will require many forms of action, one method
that can help to create stability is to place more emphasis on political, economic,
legal, and educational aid. One very specific aspect of this aid is to have selected
U.S. government (USG) agencies focus on land tenure and property rights
(LTPR) in the developing world. This would, possibly more than any other kind
of foreign aid, transform a volatile state into a capable one. Capable, that is, of
maintaining stability by resisting and deterring the violent extremism of non-
state actors through the strength of its civil society.
On January 8, 2001, USAID and the Woodrow Wilson International Cen-
ter for Scholars jointly sponsored a conference in Washington, DC titled The
Role of Foreign Assistance in Conflict Prevention. Eighty experts from USAID,
the State Department, the National Intelligence Council, Congressional staff,
academic institutions, the business community, and non-profit organizations
gathered together “to shape a new vision for foreign assistance by develop-
ing a long-term strategy keyed to conflict prevention and building capable
societies.”190 The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, followed by the ongo-
ing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, threaten to make conflict pre-
vention a quixotic ideal in foreign policy circles. Yet the accuracy with which
the 80 conference participants presaged, prior to September 11, 2001, how U.S.
foreign assistance in the 21st century must change is most remarkable. The con-
| 119
ference’s six themes were:191

190 USAID and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, “The Role of Foreign
Assistance in Conflict Prevention,” conference report (Washington, DC: 8 January 2001), URL:
<http://www.usaid.gov/pubs/confprev/>, accessed 6 September 2007. Cited hereafter as
USAID, “The Role of Foreign Assistance.”
191 USAID, “The Role of Foreign Assistance.”
 • Recognize the importance of conflict prevention.
• Expand the definition of national security.
• Construct capable states.
• Build local capacity.
• Engage multiple actors.
• Develop better mechanisms for collaboration.

This book, by offering a rationale and a model for registering the human
terrain, a key, singular application of American soft power, gives much-needed
impetus to the 2001 conference’s purpose: to re-examine “traditional concepts
of national security to embrace a broader spectrum of political, economic, and
social issues that will have a direct impact on the core needs of the American
people.”192 The following recommendations enhance the conference’s leitmotif
by specifying a whole-of-government effort to strengthen LTPR in volatile areas
of the world instrumental to U.S. national security.
• Recognize the importance of land in conflict prevention. As
should be clear from this book, land issues are often at the epicenter
of violent conflict around the world, a dimension at times lost on
U.S. policymakers. For half a century American institutions of
secondary and higher education have not emphasized geography
and have all but ignored land issues. The post-Cold War period has
been marked by few foreign policy, and fewer post-conflict nation-
building, successes. The USG must recognize anew the importance
of registering the human terrain. A land registration system, with
its dispute resolution component, can prevent or lessen conflict
by bringing simmering land and property disputes into the public
forum and recording the resulting local adjudications.
• Expand the definition of national security to include security of land
tenure. Under the feudal king described in Chapter 3, holding land,
not necessarily owning it, enabled the rise of stable nation-states that
understood that peace is more conducive to prosperity than is war. By
the same token policymakers must understand that a nation will never
be secure as long as its citizens’ LTPR are not, and the insecurity of
120 | other nations erodes U.S. national security.
Specifically, commit to win the peace as much as to win the war by
aiding other countries to build land information systems and the
human resources capacity to maintain them. Where a cadastral
system is in use, rule of law is evident, and, according to International
Federation of Surveyors (FIG) President Stig Enemark, “the system

192 USAID, “The Role of Foreign Assistance.”

 acts as the backbone of society.”193 This change is optimal to the
projection of U.S. soft power.

• Construct states capable of administering land. Capable states are

characterized by:194
° Representative governance based on rule of law.
° Market economic activity.
° A thriving civil society.
° Security, well being, and justice available to all citizens.
° The ability to manage internal and external affairs
peacefully.

Chapter 3 suggested that registering multiple rights and interests

in land and property is the missing foundation to six years
of reconstruction and stability (R&S) efforts in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s overlapping and poor governance of land matters is
not an isolated occurrence. Most developing countries have far too
many institutions involved in land matters. Where land information
exists, it is housed not in a single system but in several government
ministries, which makes access exceedingly difficult. Without proper
standardization and agreements, a multipurpose, interoperable
cadastral system cannot be realized.

The infusion of technical assistance in the cooperative Afghan

Mapping Initiative is an example of how a government’s capacity
to register its human terrain is improved. A Basic Education and
Cooperative Agreement signed in June 2007 by the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the Afghan Geodetic and
Cartographic Head Office (AGCHO) outlines how NGA will provide
hardware and technical assistance to AGCHO: training in using
GIS software, archiving geospatial data, standardizing geographic
names, creating boundary databases, and in geodetic surveying and
management topics.

• Build local capacity in resolving land conflict. Stanfield noted that | 121
in rural Afghanistan “a local consensus exists about the rights people
have to land, and that local definition is the starting point to define

193 International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation ITC, “Land
Administration: The Path Towards Tenure Security, Poverty Alleviation and Sustainable Develop-
ment,” paper presented at the ITC Lunstrum Conference: Spatial Information for Civil Society,
14-16 December 2005 (Enschede, The Netherlands), 17.
194 Stanfield, “Community Recording.”
 rights and rules.”195 The Rural Lands Administration Project, the
International Land Coalition, and the first Bowman Expedition were
three cited examples of soft power wielded by a government foreign
aid agency, an NGO, and academia that facilitated local capacity and
spread goodwill. Exciting new tools are being developed that facilitate
these works. The Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) is
the first viable cadastral model to incorporate informal, customary
land claims and records into a comprehensive land registry so that the
institutions of civil society, even the shuras and jirgas of Afghan society,
can apply the rule of law. The LADM’s distributed data environment
offers communities the opportunity to record land rights and interests
and resolve disputes themselves. When the central government
develops the capacity for a regional or national land information
system, local communities can be confident that their land records
will integrate into the larger system.
• Engage multiple actors in land-related R&S. Intervening military
forces must be prepared to retrieve and assess land records, and in
some cases, begin determining the degree of their validity. Within 30
to 60 days, a hand-off of land administration tasks from military to
deployed R&S civilian personnel must occur. The transition from post-
conflict R&S to long-term sustainable development will require years,
if not decades, and thus a host of civilian specialists (USG employees,
contractors, NGOs, academics and students) to work the legal issues
and, as in the case of post-conflict Cambodia from Chapter 5, train
nationals in cadastral surveying and land administration.
• Develop better mechanisms for collaboration. National Security
Presidential Directive 44, mandating civil-military cooperation in
R&S, is in early development. But without resources, this directive’s
ideals cannot be realized: the State Department Office of the
Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) must
be fully funded immediately and assume its whole-of-government
R&S coordinating role. The number of property law/cadastre experts
within S/CRS’s Civilian Reserve Corps must increase tenfold from
three to 30.
122 |

195 USAID, “The Role of Foreign Assistance.”

 The LADM is the first viable land administration model for whole-of-
government and whole-of-alliance use. For multinational R&S efforts and
for multi-component organizations, such as the UN and NATO, cadastral
interoperability is absolutely essential. The LADM should be populated,
tested, and further developed for suitability in a variety of post-conflict
and post-disaster environments. For this to occur, land administration
must become an essential USG civilian occupation and a community of
practice must be established.

In the key area of training, this book goes beyond the themes of the confer-
ence. Much of the world’s current LTPR expertise resides in Europe, and those
resources need to be tapped immediately. USG agencies should aggressively
recruit from, and offer training and related experiences abroad to their current
employees to build geographic expertise, especially in land administration.
For example, agencies should offer recruitment bonuses to graduates of
the International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation
(ITC), the Technical University of Munich, and participants in Swedish Inter-
national Development Cooperation Agency (Sida)-style experiential programs
who enter USG service. Many USG agencies offer long term graduate school
training to competitively selected employees. The parochial mindset that lim-
its long-term training to classrooms in U.S. institutions must end. Agencies
should send their R&S personnel to foreign institutions for long-term train-
ing in LTPR and on field-based geographic research and Bowman-type expedi-
tions abroad. Just as U.S. colleges and universities responded to a government’s
need for homeland security degree and certificate programs following the ter-
rorist attacks of September 11, 2001, once the need is articulated, LTPR educa-
tion programs will likewise be established in the U.S. A whole-of-government
emphasis on LTPR enables a new direction in U.S. foreign policy to focus on
conflict prevention and the construction of capable states. With an agile, well-
trained, highly coordinated set of USG agencies aiding other nations to register
the human terrain, American foreign policy can contribute to building a stable
world where more people enjoy the benefits of secure property rights.

| 123
ACRONYMS
First
Chap. w/
Acronym Term term
3-D Defense, Development, and Diplomacy 7
AAG Association of American Geographers 4
ADB Asian Development Bank 5
AFREF African Geodetic Reference Frame 6
AGCHO Afghan Geodesy and Cartography Head P*
Office
AGS American Geographical Society 4
AP Advanced Placement 7
AREU Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit 3
CARE Cooperative for Assistance and Relief 4
Everywhere
COHRE The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions 2
COMPETES Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully 7
Promote Excellence in Technology, Education,
and Science
CRA Cooperation for the Reconstruction of 5
Afghanistan
CREST Contingency Real Estate Support Team 7
DfID U.K. Department for International 5
Development
DNI Director of National Intelligence 2
DW Development Workshop 5
EMG Emerging Markets Group 5
ESRI Environmental Systems Research Institute, 4
Inc.
EU European Union 7 | 125
EU-INSPIRE Infrastructure for Spatial Information in 6
Europe
FAO Food and Agriculture Organization of the 5
United Nations
FARC Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia 4
FIG International Federation of Surveyors P*,1
*In third column P is for Preface.
 ACRONYMS (Continued)
First
Chap. w/
Acronym Term term
GGE Geodesy and Geomatics 7
GoA Government of Afghanistan 3
GOTL Government of East Timor 7
GPS Global Positioning System 4
GTZ Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit 2
HLP Housing, Land, and Property 3
IC Intelligence Community 4
ICLA Information Counseling and Legal Aid 5
IDB Inter-American Development Bank 7
IDP Internally Displaced Persons 1
ILC International Land Coalition 4
ISO International Standards Organization 6
ITC International Institute of Geo-Information P*
Science and Earth Observation
KCLIS Kosovo Cadastre and Land Information 5
System
KU University of Kansas 4
LADM Land Administration Domain Model 1
LAS Land Administration System 5
LIS Land Information System 5
LMAP Land Management and Administration 5
Project
LTERA Land Titling and Economic Restructuring of 5
Afghanistan
LTPR Land Tenure and Property Rights P*
126 |
MNF-I Multi-National Force-Iraq 4
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization 1
NGA National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency P*
NGO Non-Government Organization 1
NORDEM Norwegian Special Forces for Human Rights, 7
Democratization, and Disaster Relief
*In third column P is for Preface.
ACRONYMS (Continued)
First
Chap. w/
Acronym Term term
NRC Norwegian Refugee Council 5
NSPD National Security Presidential Directive 1
NWIP New Work Item Proposal 6
OAS Organization of American States 1
ODNI Office of the Director of National Intelligence P*
OGC Open GIS Consortium 6
PROCEDE Program for Certification of Ejidal Rights and 4
Titling of parcels
PRT Provincial Reconstruction Team 3
R&S Reconstruction and Stability 1
RLAP Rural Lands Administration Project 5
S/CRS State Department Office of the Coordinator 7
for Reconstruction and Stabilization
SBE Social, Behavioral, and Economic 7
Sida Swedish International Development 7
Cooperation Agency
TFR Total Fertility Rate 3
U.S. United States 3
UML Unified Modeling Language 6
UN United Nations 1,2
UNDP United Nations Development Program 2
UNECE United Nations Economic Commission for 2
Europe
UN-HABITAT United Nations Human Settlement Program 5
UNHCR United Nations High Commission on 2
Refugees | 127
UNMIL United Nations Mission in Liberia 7
USAID U.S. Agency for International Development P*,1
USG United States Government P*,1
WB World Bank 7
WWII World War II 4
*In third column P is for Preface.
APPENDIX A:
México Indígena Project Cycle

Source: México Indígena website, http://web.ku.edu/~mexind/methods.htm.

| 129
APPENDIX B:
AGCHO Cadastral Survey Forms

| 131
 APPENDIX B (Continued)
(Revised Form 6)

132 |
APPENDIX C:
Engineer Safar’s Three-Level
Strategy
Engineer Safar suggested a three-level strategy for establishing a land administra-
tion system in Afghanistan:
1. Improve the technical capacity for mapping property
Introduce the teaching of modern information and
°
communication strategies in technical institutes. The FIG could
be asked to design the content of the new curricula.
Provide equipment and working tools for training with these
°
technologies and encourage their acquisition by the private and
public sectors

° Digitize the existing maps and records of the Cadastre and

Amlak archives. A unified and compatible technical effort can
begin following an analysis of the archived information
2. Decentralization of Property Records Administration
The present practice is for transaction documents to be validated locally by village
elders and leaders. Copies of these documents are kept by the parties to the trans-
action. The basic idea is to add to this present practice in two ways:
Create the capability to record and archive the transaction
°
documents at the local level in villages or combinations of
villages, where local elders and respected people can oversee and
verify the continuous accuracy of the locally archived property
information. Documents so recorded would be given in law a
preferential legal status over documents not recorded.
Provide the village shuras with satellite images with sufficient
°
precision to show boundaries of villages and sub units of villages
in the larger villages. Through agreements with the Judiciary, | 133
these “tax units” would be referenced in the transaction deeds
showing the approximate location of the properties involved in
the transactions.
3. Build a national technical and financial property information infra-
structure as support for this local property information infrastructure.
Establish National Land Agency (NLA) for land administration
°
as distinct from State Land Management which would be a
separate administrative unit.
 a) Land Registration and Cadastre Support Unit (Provide support to the
local recording offices, to monitor their operations, and provide archive
services if desired by the local recording offices.)

i. Rural
ii. Urban
iii. Combine Cadastral Survey and Amlak property informa-
tion of Cadastre and Amlak into land registration information
system for support of local recording offices.
b) Property Tax Unit for supporting the local assessment and collection of
property taxes, urban and rural land parcels.

c) Training Unit for Land Registration and Cadastre and Property Tax
Units

d) Legal Unit for Drafting Legislation and Organizational Structure

e) Judiciary Liaison Unit to build capacity of Judiciary to incorporate

cadastral information, at a minimum the Tax Unit location of the
properties, into deeds and provide copies to NLA.

f) Land Inventory Unit, which will work with priority areas to estimate the
approximate areas of different types of land: irrigated, orchard, cultivated
rain fed, pasture, forest.

Establish priority Provinces and Woluswalies (rural districts of

°
Afghanistan)
Acquire satellite images of these priority areas
°
In consultations with village elders and leaders, establish
°
boundaries of Tax Units [villages and combinations of
settlements] and establish claims to pasture and forest land
within these units.
Prepare cadastral maps and updated Amlak ledgers of property
°
owners for Tax Unit for those villages and woluswalies which
want to participate in community legitimization of rights to
134 | agricultural, pasture and forest lands.

° Prepare forms and procedures for community property

legitimization program.
Establish Support Units for assisting communities conducting
°
community property legitimization programs.
APPENDIX D:
500-Person Civilian
Reserve Corps Skill Mix
Composition of the first 500

SKILLSET YEAR 1

SECURITY/RULE OF LAW 350

Justice Sector/Rule of Law Coordination 9

CJS planner/Coordinator (system analysis) 3
Independent CJS inspections and complaints specialists 4
Justice Sector Public Information Specialists 2

Policing 38
Police/Police Advisers 228
Crime Prevention Function 0
Command and Control [Including senior ministry advisor(s)] 9
Criminal Investigations Function 21
Emergency Services Experts (SWAT, Civil Disorder) 12
Evidence Collection Experts 2
Evidence Analysis Experts 2
Information Management Function 3
Internal Investigations Function 3
Police Legal Advisor Function
Maintenance Function 6 | 135
Narcotic Interdiction/Investigation Function 6
Operational Communications Function 6
Patrol Function (including some border patrol)/mentor 120
Personnel Administration Function 3
Planning Function 3
Public Information/Outreach Function 3
Purchasing and Supply Function 3
 APPENDIX D (Continued)
Records Function 3
Traffic Function 7
Training Function 12
Weapons Registration Experts 2
Forensic Laboratory Function 2
Explosive Incident Response
Firearms Proliferation and Interdiction
Counter-terrorism Function
Special Investigative Function
Intelligence Based Development

Border Integrity 10
Border Patrol (enforcement) advisors 6
Customs (regulatory) advisors 2
Immigration (regulator) advisors 2

Corrections 28
Senior Ministry Advisors (organizations, system, capacity experts) 3
Physical security expert and Prisoner Classification 3
Logistical expert 2
Records/legal expert (sentence calculation, court hearing
schedule, access to legal counsel, treatment of prison) standards) 2
Medical expert 2
Facilities, planning, construction 3
Security threat group/Riot Control 3
136 | Finance/human resources training 2
Training director 2
Transportation administrator 2
Security/prisoner management supervisor 4
APPENDIX D (Continued)
Justice System 75
Prosecutorial Function 9
Prosecutors (general practice- likely local and state backgrounds) 5
Senior Ministry Advisers 4
CJS integration specialists (see top)
Specialized Prosecutorial Functions 15
Money laundering 3
Terror Related-Financing, etc 3
Organized Crime 3
Trafficking in Persons 2
Narcotics interdiction and investigation 2
Anti-corruption experts (criminal and civil penalties) 2

Court Functions 29
Magistrates (trial and investigative) 3
Judges (trial and appellate) 11
Senior Ministry Advisor 3
Court Administrators (incl Senior organizational court experts) 4
Adjudication training experts, etc 2
Judicial Security/Witness Protection 1
Personnel Security/ Judges 1
Facility Security-Courthouses 1
Mediation/Alt dispute resolution experts 3

Defense 4
Defense/Advocacy attorneys 4
| 137

War Crimes 6
War Crimes Forensic Experts 2
Remediation/Reparations experts 2
Human Rights/Anti-Corruption Experts (10) under DG
 APPENDIX D (Continued)
War Crimes/Crimes against humanity/genocide 2

Other Rule of Law 12

Bar Association Advisors 2
Comparative law specialists (incl. traditional systems
of justice, alternate dispute resolution) 3
Legislative/Code drafters/Constitutional 3
Training curriculum 2
Trial advocacy skills trainers 2

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL WELL BEING 100

Essential Services/Business Development 50
DDR Expert 3
Property Law/Cadastre Expert 3
Commercial Law Expert 2
Business Development Adviser (Private Sector Development) 3
Senior Ag Adviser 3
Senior Ag Economist 3
Rural Development Advisor 3
Social Services
Finance
Microcredit Expert
Public Utilities 8
Transportation 6
Water and Sanitation 6
Telecommunications
138 |
Civil/Construction Engineering 10
Natural Resource Management Advisor

Monetary/Economic Stability 11
Monetary Policy Advisor 4
APPENDIX D (Continued)
Banking Advisor 5
Tax Policy Advisor
Fiscal Policy Advisor
Budget Formulation/Execution Advisor 2

Health 27
Public Health/Med Reconstruction Team Leader 1
Public Health/Med Reconstruction Deputy and Donor Coordinator 1
Public health service delivery 5
Surveillance, epidemiology, HIS 4
Pharmaceuticals, commodities & equipment 4
Human Resources assessment/planning 1
IDP & Refugee and Humanitarian Assistance Coordinator 2
Inspection-food, water and environment 1
Medical Service: capability assessment, planning and management 2
Health System Financial management 1
Security and Safety Officer 2
Public Information Officer-Communications Liaison 1
Logistics 2

Education 12
Institutional Capacity Building Expert 3
Vocational/Life Skills Education Expert 3
Refugee/IDP Education Expert 3
Social Service Support Coordinators 3
| 139
DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNANCE 50
Elections Advisors 3
Urban Planning/City Management 12
Human Rights and Humanitarian Protection 6
Anti-Corruption (Advocacy, disclosure, transparency, ethics) 2
 APPENDIX D (Continued)
Conflict/Transition Officers 4
Public Administration 4
Leadership Development Specialists 2
Civil Society Advisor 3
Legislative Advisor 2
Media Advisor 4
Security Sector Reform 4
Rule of Law Advisors 4
Political Party Development Advisor
TOTAL 500

Source: Suggested skills mix courtesy of Interagency Civilian Response Task Force, Office
of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), U.S. Department of
State.

140 |
APPENDIX E:
University of Florida
Land Tenure and Administration
Course Syllabus
University of Florida

SUR 6427 LAND TENURE AND ADMINISTRATION

http://www.geomatics.ifas.ufl.edu/courses/SUR6427/index-6427.htm

Instructor: Dr. Grenville Barnes

Room No: 406 B Reed Lab
Phone: 352 392-4998
Email: [email protected]

Land (and resource) tenure provides a unique window into both social and eco-
logical systems and is recognized as a key element in the battle for sustainability.
In this course we will examine the historical origins of the idea of property and
explore current land tenure and property issues in various parts of the globe.
Students will be required to read assigned references, review certain films, and
attend and actively participate in class discussions.
COURSE OBJECTIVES
• To familiarize students with the range of current land tenure and
property issues that are being faced in Latin America and elsewhere
with respect to conservation, development, indigenous territories,
common pool resources, natural resource management and gender
equity.
• To critically examine development policy as it is reflected in approaches
to land tenure and administration. | 141
• To understand non-western approaches to property and how these are
accommodated within western legal systems
• To familiarize students with processes used to formalize land tenure
into modern property systems

CLASS PERIODS AND MEETING TIMES

 APPENDIX E (Continued)
PREREQUISITES AND REGISTRATION
This is a graduate level course that is designed to be interdisciplinary. No
specific prerequisites are required, but students should have an interest in
land and resource tenure issues. For registration questions contact Grenville
Barnes at [email protected].
GRADING (SUR6427)
Class Participation.................10%
Short Assignments.................10%
First Draft of Term Paper......5%
Final Term Paper....................75%

CONTENT
1. Review of Major Schools of Property Theory
2. Roman Law, Civil Law and Common Law Systems (TA)
3. Overview of Land Tenure Issues in Latin America
a. Indigenous Land Rights (JMR)
b. Social Function of Land (TA)
c. Human Right to Property (TR)
d. Gender Issues (CDD)
e. Poverty alleviation
f. Conservation (Amazon)
4. The Mabo Case and Australian Native Title
5. Customary Tenure in Africa
6. Formalizing Property Rights
7. Evolution of Common/Communal Property Systems
142 |
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Douglas Batson is a political geography analyst at the National Geospatial-
Intelligence Agency (NGA), and is a staff member to the Foreign Names
Committee of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. He holds a Master of
Education degree from Boston University, the German Language Diploma of
the Goethe-Institut, and a Bachelor of Science in geography, earned entirely
by examination, from Excelsior College in Albany, New York. He is a National
Certified Counselor and previously worked in human resources capacities
with the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Department of Justice. Batson
retired from the U.S. Army Reserve in 2004 following a career in which he was
awarded the Bronze Star during Operation DESERT STORM and the War
on Terrorism Service Medal following the attacks of September 11, 2001. His
military schools include the Mapping, Charting, and Geodesy Staff Officer
Course and the Defense Language Institute for Turkish. He has keen interests
in the regional geography and toponomy of the Turkic-speaking world. This
book is the product of his work as a 2006 ODNI Research Fellow. The author
can be contacted at [email protected].

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ABSTRACT IN FIVE LANGUAGES
English
Land is often a significant factor in widespread violence and is also a critical
element in peace-building and economic reconstruction in post-conflict
situations. This book examines how cadastral information (land and property
records) can predict threats to regional stability, world peace, and national
sovereignty. Beyond its application to the refugee situation six years into
Afghanistan’s reconstruction, cadastral data can also aid in recovery from natural
disasters or wars. The book considers how causes of 21st century conflicts are
related to land questions, and it introduces a new land administration tool.
Significant inventiveness on the part of Lemmen, Augustinus, van Oosterom, and
van der Molen has resulted in the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM).
The LADM is compelling because it makes explicit various types of land rights,
restrictions, or responsibilities. It is flexible enough to record both Western-style,
registered land rights and customary, informal socio-tenure relationships typical
of the developing world. In a word, the LADM aspires to address the myriad
land issues faced by civil-military Reconstruction and Stability personnel in post-
conflict societies. It merits close attention by NATO, the U.S. State and Defense
Departments, and USAID because it represents one of the most important tools
for countries where land administration has been weak or totally absent.

German
Land ist oftmals ein wesentlicher Faktor für das Aufkommen gewalttätiger
Auseinandersetzungen und bildet ein wichtiges Element für friedensschaffende
Maßnahmen und den wirtschaftlichen Wiederaufbau unter Bedingungen einer
post-Konflikt Situation.
Dieses Buch untersucht in welcher Weise ein Kataster über Landbesitz die
Bedrohungen für regionale Stabilität, nationale Souveränität und den Weltfrieden
vorhersagen kann. Darüber hinaus wird gezeigt wie ein derartiges Kataster
auch die Regeneration von Naturkatastrophen und Kriegen unterstützen kann, | 159
verdeutlicht am Beispiel der Rückkehr von Flüchtlingen nach Afghanistan.
Das Buch betrachtet die Zusammenhänge zwischen Land und den Konflikten
des 21. Jahrhunderts. Zu diesem Zwecke wird auch ein neues Analyseinstrument
eingeführt: die innovativen Bemühungen von Lemmen, Augustinus, van
Oosterom, und van der Molen haben das so genannte “Land Administration
Domain Model” (LADM) hervor gebracht. Dieses Modell betritt neue
 Ufer indem es die vielfältigen Arten von Landrechten, Restriktionen und
Verantwortlichkeiten explizit integriert. Darüber hinaus beweist es Flexibilität
und kann sowohl für westliche Systeme offizieller Landtitel nutzbar gemacht
werden als auch traditionelle und informelle Systeme, wie sie vornehmlich in den
Ländern des Südens auftreten. Anders formuliert, das LADM strebt danach den
zahllosen Landproblemen mit denen der zivil-militärische Wiederaufbau weltweit
konfrontiert ist mit einer zentralen Lösung entgegen zu treten. Das Modell
verdient die ungeteilte Aufmerksamkeit von NATO, den US-amerikanischen
Verteidigungs— und Entwicklungsbehörden (USAID)—weil es eines der
wichtigsten Werkzeuge für den Aufbau von Landverwaltungen überhaupt
darstellt, und das insbesondere in Ländern wo diese nicht funktionieren oder gar
nicht vorhanden sind.

Dutch
Land is enerzijds vaak een wezenlijke factor in het ontstaan van gewelddadige
conflicten maar is anderzijds een kritiek onderdeel bij vredesonderhandelingen
en economische wederopbouw in de omstandigheden na een conflict.
In dit boek wordt onderzocht op welke wijze kadastrale informatie gebruikt
kan worden bij voorspelling van bedreigingen in regionale stabiliteit, nationale
soevereiniteit en de wereldvrede. Verder wordt getoond op welke wijze een
dergelijk gebruik van kadastrale data kan helpen bij herstel na natuurrampen
en oorlogen. Dit wordt verduidelijkt met een voorbeeld van de situatie van
vluchtelingen de afgelopen zes jaar in Afghanistan.
In deze verhandeling wordt nagegaan op welke wijze de oorzaken van conflicten
in de 21e eeuw landgerelateerd zijn. Voor dit doel wordt ook een analyse
instrument geïntroduceerd. De intensieve bemoeienissen van Lemmen,
Augustinus, van Oosterom en van der Molen hebben geresulteerd in het “Land
Administratie Domein Model” (LADM). Dit model is aantrekkelijk omdat het
de veelzijdigheid van landrechten, restricties/belemmeringen in landrechten
en gekoppelde verantwoordelijkheden omvat. Verder is het model flexibel
genoeg om zowel de in de westelijke landen gebruikelijke landrechten als ook
de gewoonterechten en informele rechten - zoals traditionele rechten in minder
160 | ontwikkelde landen te registreren. Anders geformuleerd: het LADM wil een
gedeelde bewaarplaats mogelijk maken voor de talloze landgegevens, waarmee
de civiel-militaire wederopbouw werkers wereldwijd worden gekonfronteerd.
Het model verdient de aandacht van de NATO, het Amerikaanse Ministerie van
Defensie en de Amerikaanse ontwikkelingsautoriteit (USAID), omdat het een
van de belangrijkste hulpmiddelen van landadministratie vertegenwoordigt,
en wel in het bijzonder in landen waar deze administratie niet funktioneert of
afwezig is.
French
Le terrain joue souvent un rôle important pour la violence répandue; c’est aussi
un élément critique de l’établissement de paix et de la reconstruction économique
post-conflits. Ce livre traite comment les informations cadastrales (les documents
de terrain et propriété) peuvent prédire les menaces à la stabilité régionale, à la
paix mondiale, et à la souveraineté nationale. Au-delà de son application à la
situation des réfugiés après six ans de reconstruction en Afghanistan, les données
cadastrales peuvent également aider à la récupération de catastrophes naturelles
ou de guerres. L’argument examine comment les causes des conflits du 21ème
siècle sont liées au terrain, et il introduit un nouvel outil pour l’administration
du terrain. Une créativité significative de la part de Lemmen, Augustinus, van
Oosterom, et van der Molen a produit le Model de la Domaine de la Gestion
Foncière (Land Administration Domain Model - LADM). Le LADM est
irrésistible parce qu’il spécifie les types différents de droits, des restrictions ou des
responsabilités de terrain. Il est suffisamment souple pour enregistrer aussi bien
les droits de terrain inscrits de style occidental, que les relations socio-titulaire
coutumières et simples, typiques du monde en développement. Tout simplement,
le LADM aspire d’être un répertoire pour les problèmes innombrables de terrain
rencontrés par le personnel civil-militaire de Reconstruction et de Stabilité en
sociétés de post-conflits. Il mérite la plus grande considération par l’OTAN, les
Départements d’État et de la Défense des Etats-Unis, et par l’USAID, parce qu’il
représente l’un des outils les plus importants en cours d’élaboration pour faciliter
la gestion de terrain dans les pays où elle a été faible ou tout à fait absente.

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