The United Nations - International
Federation of Surveyors Bathurst Declaration on Land Administration
for Sustainable Development – A Challenge for Surveyors
by Ian Williamson and Don Grant
Key words: Land administration, sustainable development,
cadastre, land tenure, United Nations.
Abstract
"Sustainable development is just rhetoric
without appropriate land administration systems"
The changing humankind-land relationship and current global and
local drivers such as sustainable development, urbanization,
globalization, economic reform and the information revolution, demand
land administration responses. Of the global drivers, sustainable
development may be identified as having overall significance because
of its dynamic economic-political, social, and environmental
dimensions. At the heart of the challenging opportunity-cost decisions
for sustainable development is the pressing need for land
administration systems to evolve speedily and appropriately to support
the sustainable development imperative.
Current land administration systems are the product of 19th
century paradigms of land markets, which have a narrow cadastral (land
parcel) focus. As a result they have failed to properly support these
global and local drivers. The evidence of the failure includes issues
of poverty, access to land, security of tenure, development rights and
environmental degradation.
World opinion on aspects of sustainable development, as represented
by United Nations (UN) global summits and declarations (for example UN
Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1994; UN City Summit, Istanbul, 1998; UN
Food Summit, Rome, 1998), have highlighted the importance of land
administration to support sustainable development, but have provided
few practical implementation strategies. This ad hoc approach has
resulted in rhetoric, rather than reality, in developing land
administration systems to accommodate sustainable development
objectives. Governments, on the other hand, have generally been
willing, if not anxious, to reform land administration for sustainable
objectives, but there are no clear directions or models to adopt.
As a preliminary step towards overcoming the uncertain relationship
between land administration and sustainable development, a joint
United Nations – International Federation of Surveyors Workshop on
Land Tenure and Cadastral Infrastructures for Sustainable Development
was organised in Bathurst, Australia followed by an international
conference in Melbourne, Australia in October 1999. These initiatives
resulted in The Bathurst Declaration on Land Administration
for Sustainable Development. The workshop brought together 40
leading experts and researchers from around the world, from a wide
range of disciplines, including six UN agencies, the World Bank, and
the UN Director of Sustainable Development. They confirmed the
pressing need to re-engineer land administration systems to manage the
competing economic, environmental and social priorities that
constitute sustainable development as described in the UN’s Agenda
for Development.
The Declaration built on the FIG’s Statement on the Cadastre produced
in 1995 and the UN-FIG Bogor Declaration on Cadastral Reform produced
in 1996. These initiatives, as well as the Bathurst Workshop and
Melbourne Conference, were part of the work programs of Commission 7
(Cadastre and Land Management) of the FIG.
This paper discusses these trends to reform land administration
systems in the light of the findings and recommendations of the
Workshop and Conference. The paper overviews The Bathurst Declaration,
and appends the Executive Summary and the Recommendations. The full
program of the conference, the 25 position papers and The Bathurst
Declaration can be found at http://www.sli.unimelb.edu.au/UNConf99/
The development of The Bathurst Declaration confirms the critical
role of surveyors and the FIG in pursuing sustainable development
objectives. However this is only the start. There is now a clear
challenge for surveyors and the FIG to pursue the objectives of the
Declaration to move sustainable development from rhetoric to reality.
Professor Ian Williamson
Director FIG-UN Liaison
Professor of Surveying and Land Information
Department of Geomatics
The University of Melbourne
Victoria 3010
Australia
E-mail: i.williamson@eng.unimelb.edu.au
URL: http://www.geom.unimelb.edu.au/people/ipw.html
Professor Don Grant
Australian Delegate to Commission 7 FIG
Surveyor-General of New South Wales
Professorial Associate
Department of Geomatics
The University of Melbourne
PO Box 143
Bathurst, NSW 2795
Australia
Email: grantd@lic.gov.au
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