Floss in Cadastre and Land Registration

Grassroots realities

However land administrations commonly fail to secure land tenure rights of the 

poor and the vulnerable. Their services are not affordable and their staff incentives 

work against serving the needy. Weak governance as well as technical and institu-

tional shortcomings reinforce the failures. The systems are inefficient, poorly struc-

tured and geared for serving a well paying client rather than a poor peasant. Land 

administrations’ poor performance results partly from the lack of adapted and 

flexible software tools to standardise, structure and maintain the cadastre and the 

land registration. As a result, land administration operations remain unfeasible 

and only those that yield significant informal incomes survive.

The weak governance of tenure has most severe impact to the livelihoods and 

 survival of people in developing countries, but it is important to notice that issues 

of governance of tenure are not country, region or development level specific, 

which for example the Global Corruption Barometer 2009 

2

 has confirmed, high-

lighting the fact that corruption in land issues is a common-place throughout the 

world.