ALBERT

Description: Women are an underappreciated economic force who, when empowered by association with a female organization, can be a catalyst for development. To assess the status of Indigenous rural women, as well as the mechanisms and impacts of their empowerment, this paper presents a case study of a community development approach based on the Masehual Siuamej Mosenyolchicacauani organization in Cuetzalan del Progreso, Puebla. The methodology used is a mixed-methods approach involving a literature review of two regional instruments: The Federal Program “Pueblos Mágicos” and the Land and Environmental Management Program “POET” for Cuetzalan. It also includes geo-data collection from public sources, empirical data collection from open-ended interviews, and focus group discussions with key informants from the Indigenous organization. The research found that, despite an inclusive legal and institutional framework, weak policy implementation and certain federal programs tend to segregate Indigenous communities. Mechanisms such as cultural tourism and inclusive land management programs, capacity building initiatives, and female associations have proven useful for empowering women and have had positive socioeconomic impacts on the community. The research concluded that female Indigenous associations are a tool to empower rural women, grant them tenure security, strengthen their engagement in decision making, and consolidate them as key stakeholders in community development.

Description: The ejido system, based on communal land in Mexico, was transformed to private ownership due to neoliberal trends in the 1990s. Based on the theory of stakeholders being agents of change, this study aimed to describe the land policies that changed the ejido system into private development to show how land tenure change is shaping urban growth. To demonstrate this, municipalities of San Andrés Cholula and Santa Clara Ocoyucan were selected as case studies. Within this context, we evaluated how much ejido land is being urbanized due to real estate market forces and what type of urbanization model has been created. These two areas represent different development scales with different stakeholders—San Andrés Cholula, where ejidos were expropriated as part of a regional urban development plan and Santa Clara Ocoyucan, where ejidos and rural land were reached by private developers without local planning. To analyze both municipalities, historical satellite images from Google Earth were used with GRASS GIS 7.4 (Bonn, Germany) and corrected with QGIS 2.18 (Boston, MA, US). We found that privatization of ejidos fragmented and segregated the rural world for the construction of massive gated communities as an effect of a disturbing land tenure change that has occurred over the last 30 years. Hence, this research questions the roles of local authorities in permitting land use changes with no regulations or local planning. The resulting urbanization model is a private sector development that isolates rural communities in their own territories, for which we provide recommendations.

Description: The cadastral system is a land management and land administration tool to provide a safe and reliable real property registration system. In Ethiopia, however, the attempts to implement a reliable urban cadastral system have not been successful, which translates into a deficient land administration system. This paper is an evaluation of the performance of the urban cadastral system of Addis Ababa, based on the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) excellence model. The nine criteria of the model were used as independent and dependent variables. Data were collected through interviews, Likert-type questionnaires, and focus group discussions, and validated with method-to-method technique. Qualitative and quantitative data analysis techniques (ordinal logistics regression model) were employed. In order to ascertain reliability of the data, Cronbach’s alpha reliability test was performed in SPSS, and a coefficient of 0.883 was calculated, confirming that the items (questions) have relatively high internal consistency. According to the statistical result from the independent variables, the people result criteria estimated the achievement of cadastral organization at most (1.724). The societal result predicted with a coefficient of 0.281 less. This indicates that the people criterion determines more importantly than other variables. Overall, the independent variables scored the performance of the cadastral organization 24.92 out of 40 points. Findings from interviews and group discussion also confirmed that the most bottlenecks for the organizational achievement are the strategic plan, quality of leadership, bureaucratic processes, and supply of resources. Therefore, we suggest that the responsible authorities need to pay more attention to the enabler criteria (especially, the design of policy and strategy, quality of leadership, provision of resource and partnership, and the process), in order to improve the achievements of the urban cadastral system organization.

Description: Strong national institutional arrangements in the geospatial information management are essential for successful implementation of sustainable land administration system. However, it is not only the existence of institutions but also their effectiveness that leads to the intended goals and reaching of objectives. There are international calls to merge highly related land administration institutions, yet Ethiopia executes two related land administration tasks (landholding right provision and cadastral registration) by two different institutions, the Urban Land Development and Management Bureau, and the Urban Land Adjudication and Information Registration Agency. Thus, the objective of this article is to analyze the effect of merging cadastral information registration and urban landholding right providing institutions lead to effective and strong national land institution. To achieve this, we had a qualitative approach analysis based on desk review and case study research methods. We conducted semi-structured interviews with the directors of the two institutions, and a group discussion with professional experts from both institutions. The findings of this study show that institutional merger between the two institutions believed to unravel the challenges of failing to achieve institutional goals. Although these institutions design strategic plans every year, the level of achievement or operational performance is low. The major cause for this problem is the poor coordination between the institutions. In view of this issue, we recommend merging the two institutions in one since it: reduces the effects of data duplication; provides one-window services; reduces operational costs; fills communication gaps among the staff; reduces time of operation; improves customer service; increases efficiency within processes; and provides a more efficient operation of land markets.