In 2017, Cape Town, South Africa, was on a countdown to disaster. An unprecedented and wholly unforeseen third consecutive year of drought threatened to cut off water to the city’s four million citizens. Faced with the prospect of running dangerously low on potable water, local officials raced against time to avert “Day Zero”—the date on which they would have to shut off drinking water to most businesses and homes in the city. Cape Town’s government responded effectively to the fast-worsening and potentially cataclysmic situation. Key to the effort was a broad, multipronged information campaign that overcame skepticism and enlisted the support of a socially and economically diverse citizenry as well as private companies. Combined with other measures such as improving data management and upgrading technology, the strategy averted disaster. By the time the drought eased in 2018, Capetonians had cut their water usage by nearly 60% from 2015 levels. With each resident using little more than 50 liters per day, Cape Town achieved one of the lowest per capita water consumption rates of any major city in the world. The success set a benchmark for cities around the world that confront the uncertainties of a shifting global climate.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Cape Town, South Africa, in November 2018. Case published February 2019.

Following the 1994 transition from racial apartheid to democracy, South Africa’s government aimed to provide tenure security for the estimated 16 million black South Africans living in communal areas. But the lack of a clear legal framework applicable to most communal areas meant that progress was slow. In contrast, a viable legal framework did exist to guide tenure reform in smaller communal areas formerly known as “coloured reserves,” where a series of apartheid laws had settled people of mixed race. In 2009, land reform Minister Gugile Nkwiti designated one such area—Ebenhaeser, on the country’s west coast—as a rural “flagship” project. The aim was both to transfer land held in trust by the government to Ebenhaeser community members and to settle a restitution claim. Provincial officials from Nkwinti’s ministry, working with private consultants, organized a communal association to serve as landowner. They helped negotiate an agreement with white farmers to return land that had originally belonged to coloured residents. The community also developed a land administration plan that would pave the way for Ebenhaeser’s residents to become the legal owners of their communal territory.

Lessons Learned

• A legal framework to guide tenure reform in communal areas is vital. The lack of a law to guide the process in the former homelands made it nearly impossible to make any progress in those regions.
• In many of the communal areas of South Africa, the key question is whether traditional leaders should become legal landholding entities. Despite the lack of capacity that hampered many CPAs, Ebenhaeser’s experience offers an alternative to granting legal ownership to traditional leaders.
• A strong, high-level project steering committee was critical for driving implementation. The project required cooperation between a range of different stakeholders. And the creation of a central venue encouraged that collaboration.
• Providing communities with financial and human resources support after they obtain ownership over communal lands is crucial. Documentation proving they were landowners was not enough to immediately enable the Ebenhaeser CPA to use its land productively or access credit.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study with Professor Grenville Barnes of the University of Florida-Gainesville based on interviews they conducted in the Western Cape, Gauteng, and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa, in March 2017. Case published May 2017.

A 2017 workshop, Driving Change, Securing Tenure, profiled recent initiatives to strengthen tenure security and reform land registration systems in seven countries: South Africa, Canada, Jamaica, Kyrgyzstan, Mozambique, Australia and Tanzania.

Watch the video of David Mayson - Managing Director, Phuhlisani

When he won Indonesia’s October 2004 presidential election, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono found he had inherited a struggling land administration system that would block progress on some of his key policy initiatives. The National Land Agency (known by the abbreviation BPN, for Badan Pertanahan Nasional) managed records on landownership and transactions. But the organization was dogged by corruption, high costs, and delays. On average, it took 33 days, six visits to a local land office, and US$110 for landowners to register property transactions. In addition, the BPN held ownership records for only a third of the estimated 89 million land parcels on the thousands of islands in the sprawling archipelago. In keeping with his campaign pledge to spur rural development, Yudhoyono appointed a new leadership team to revamp the BPN and get the agency on track. The team partnered with the World Bank in a program to title unregistered land and then rolled out a new land database that digitally stored all new transactions, equipped vehicles to deliver mobile services in rural areas, and worked with other ministries to design a comprehensive OneMap for the country. Although the reforms improved efficiency and sharply increased the pace of property registration, 10 years after Yudhoyono’s election it remained clear that additional measures were still needed to reach the goal of a well-functioning, corruption-free, comprehensive, and sustainable land registry.

Leon Schreiber and Jordan Schneider drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, in March and April 2015 as well as in October and November 2017. Case published December 2017. 

In June 2012, Rwanda’s national land registry completed a nearly four-year project that mapped every one of the country’s 10.4 million parcels and prepared title documents for 8 million landholders. It was an unprecedented accomplishment in a country in which lack of land titling had weighed on the economy and led to escalating conflict over access to land. The mapping program promised to reduce tensions by establishing an orderly system for registering and transferring landownership. However, the system could work only if Rwandans registered every transaction, and in 2012, a survey found that only about one of every eight landowners had even bothered to pick up their official titles. The registry urgently had to both make it easier to register transactions and build public awareness about the importance of keeping the land database up-to-date. A registry team launched a nationwide campaign to raise awareness about the importance of titling and of reporting all land transactions. Managers simplified procedures and registration forms. And to provide greater access in rural areas, where titling was nearly unknown, the registry decentralized services and introduced a new software platform to speed transactions. By mid 2017, more than 7 million people had collected their titles, and registrations of sales, purchases, and other kinds of transfers had begun to improve. Still, the number of transactions reported in 2016 fell short of the registry’s target, indicating that further work lay ahead.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Kigali, Musanze, and Huye, Rwanda, in June and July 2017. Fortunee Bayisenge, Lecturer and Dean of the Faculty of Development Studies at the Protestant Institute of Arts and Social Sciences, collaborated on the research. The British Academy-Department for International Development AntiCorruption Evidence (ACE) Program funded the development of this case study. Case published September 2017.

In the early 2000s, deforestation accelerated in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, and global environmental groups began to raise the alarm. Greenpeace, one of the most vocal groups, published a report that placed the blame partly on the soy industry, which had grown rapidly in Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. In response, industry representatives joined with nongovernmental organizations, financial institutions, supermarkets, and others in the soy supply chain to form the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS). Following the model of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, which worked to transform the environmentally destructive palm oil industry in Southeast Asia, the RTRS wanted to implement a supply chain certification system to help identify whether harvests came from land deforested without regard for environmental impact and nudge soy farmers into a new era of sustainable production. The roundtable participants successfully developed a standard for responsible practices, and enrolled a number of large farm enterprises. But low demand for certified soy and the high cost of becoming certified slowed progress, especially among smaller producers. As of 2017, less than 1% of soy produced in Brazil was RTRS certified, and uncertified landholders continued to convert important natural ecosystems into soy farms. Although the RTRS succeeded in bringing together key players in the soy industry to talk about sustainability for the first time, it was clear that complementary efforts were necessary to shift the soy industry as a whole toward environmentally friendly production.

In the early 2000s, Tanzania struggled to protect the land rights of the 75% of its citizens who lived in rural areas. Rapid population growth and rising investment in commercial agriculture had increased land scarcity and created the potential for violent conflict in parts of the country. In accordance with the provisions of a new law, the national lands ministry launched a pilot project in 2004 to title 158 villages and more than 1,000 individual parcels. Building on lessons from the project, the government passed a new land-use planning act, created a new implementation program, and drew up a strategic plan to title rural land throughout the country. Starting in 2008, the lands ministry worked with community leaders to grant villages and their residents title documents that protected them from land grabbing. Villages also decided how they would use communal land and how they would set up committees to resolve boundary disputes. Officials constructed registry buildings in villages and districts to house title documents before surveying individual land parcels and handing over titles to village residents. By 2017, more than 11,000 of Tanzania’s approximately 12,500 villages had mapped their outer limits, and about 13% of villages had also adopted land-use plans. Of the approximately 6 million households located within rural villages, about 400,000 also had obtained individual title documents.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Dar es Salaam and Arusha, Tanzania, in April 2017. The British Academy-Department for International Development Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) Program funded the development of this case study. Case published June 2017.

A 2017 workshop, Driving Change, Securing Tenure, profiled recent initiatives to strengthen tenure security and reform land registration systems in seven countries: South Africa, Canada, Jamaica, Kyrgyzstan, Mozambique, Australia and Tanzania.

Watch the video of Seraphia Robert Mgembe - Program Coordinator, MKURABITA

In 2011, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), a global environmental group, launched a pilot project to help 349 Indonesian palm oil farmers reduce the environmental impact of their farms. The initiative was a first step towards ushering more than one million small-scale palm oil farmers into a new era of forest-friendly production that would help to save rain forests across Sumatra, Borneo, and other Southeast Asian islands. While some large plantations had already agreed to engage in sustainable practices, designed to improve yields while reducing social and environmental impacts, about 40% of Indonesia’s production came from growers who cultivated small plots—often in remote areas. Aiming to open the door to widespread adoption of sustainable practices in the palm oil industry, the WWF’s pilot project targeted a small group of farmers, introducing them to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a global organization of palm companies, retailers, financial institutions, and environmental groups. The RSPO operated a voluntary certification system for sustainable palm oil production. In July 2013, the WWF pilot group became the first independent small-scale farmers in Indonesia to get certified under RSPO standards. During the next three years, a handful of similar groups followed, but significant challenges remained ahead for efforts to shift the palm oil industry as a whole toward sustainability. 

Blair Cameron drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Jakarta, Bogor, and Riau, Indonesia, in October 2016 and in Bangkok, Thailand in November 2016. The British Academy-Department for International Development Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) Program funded the development of this case study. Case published January 2017.

In 2005, civic leaders in Xalapa, Mexico, sought to curb deforestation and unsustainable farming practices in the nearby Pixquiac watershed that threatened the quality and availability of water in their city. Xalapa’s 400,000 residents relied on the watershed—a 10,727-hectare area that channeled water into the Pixquiac River—to provide almost 40% of their water supply. SENDAS, a small nongovernmental organization, created a program that aimed to ensure the long-term sustainability of the Pixquiac watershed by paying landowners to conserve and restore the watershed’s forests. The program also helped farmers adopt more-sustainable management practices and increase their incomes. By building partnerships with the municipal water commission, the state government, the National Forestry Commission, and Mexico’s largest environmental foundation, SENDAS established a sustainable financing mechanism for the program. The organization also assembled a management committee with broad representation to ensure that funds were distributed appropriately and transparently. By 2015, environmental leaders were hoping to replicate SENDAS’s success in other important watersheds across Veracruz state.

Blair Cameron drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Xalapa, Mexico, in March and April, 2015. Case published January 2016.

In 2007, the tropical forests of Marqués de Comillas, a municipality in Mexico’s Lacandon jungle, were disappearing rapidly. Poor farmers who had migrated to the region during the 1970s relied on clear-cutting the forest to open up land for agriculture, and they were cutting more and more trees every year. After 1997, the average deforestation rate accelerated to 4.8% per year from 2.7%. By 2005, only 35% of the municipality’s forested area remained. In 2007, former environment minister Julia Carabias decided to take action. Carabias and her team at Natura Mexicana, a nongovernmental organization, joined with local communities to enroll participants in the National Forestry Commission’s payments for environmental services (PES) program and find economic alternatives to clearing the forest for agricultural use. PES, which remunerated landholders who preserved their trees, immediately slowed deforestation in the areas where it was implemented. Natura Mexicana’s work in environmental education, land planning, and ecotourism development helped change farmers’ attitudes about the importance of protecting the rain forest.

Blair Cameron drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Mexico in March and April 2015. The case was funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation in collaboration with the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy program at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Case published September 2015.

In 1994, Costa Rica's new minister of the environment, René Castro, faced a difficult task. The finance ministry was planning to cut the funding of a subsidy program that had started to reverse decades of forest loss, and Castro urgently needed a new policy that would sustain the program's progress. First, Castro built a broad-based coalition to press for a revamped national forestry law. The coalition persuaded the legislature to ban the conversion of forested land to other uses and to create incentives for landholder compliance. In 1997, Costa Rica implemented the world's first countrywide payments for environmental services program, which recognized the continuing economic contribution of forests in terms of greenhouse gas mitigation, biodiversity conservation, water protection, and scenic beauty. Funded by a new fossil fuel tax, carbon credit sales, and money from companies that benefited from the forests, the program offered landowners financial incentives to preserve and expand tree cover on their properties. The program helped reduce the destruction of primary forest and encouraged reforestation of degraded land. From 1997 to 2005 Costa Rica's forest cover increased to 51% of total land area from 42%.

Blair Cameron drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Costa Rica in December 2014. The case was funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation in collaboration with the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Case published July 2015.