An Overview of Land Tenure in the Near East Region
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AAnn OOvveerrvviieeww ooff LLaanndd TTeennuurree iinn tthhee NNeeaarr EEaasstt RReeggiioonn Part 1 (Part 2: Individual country profiles to follow) Jon Rae INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................ 4 SECTION 1: LAND TENURE IN THE SETTLED AREAS ............................. 6 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 6 Islamic Law ............................................................................................................................................. 7 Inheritance ........................................................................................................................................... 9 Leasing ............................................................................................................................................... 10 Custom and Agricultural lands ........................................................................................................... 10 Rights in agricultural land .................................................................................................................. 10 Maintaining territorial integrity ......................................................................................................... 11 Tenure in the modern era .................................................................................................................... 12 State lands .......................................................................................................................................... 14 Agricultural lands the independence era ............................................................................................ 15 Land Markets ........................................................................................................................................ 17 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 17 Land Markets: Opportunities and constraints .................................................................................... 17 Fragmentation and consolidation ........................................................................................................ 21 Leases ..................................................................................................................................................... 23 Leasing on the Steppe Margins .......................................................................................................... 25 SECTION 2: RANGELANDS ......................................................................... 31 Past State policy .................................................................................................................................... 31 State tenure on the rangelands ........................................................................................................... 33 Custom ................................................................................................................................................... 37 The basis of territoriality .................................................................................................................... 38 Regulation of access .......................................................................................................................... 41 The Hema system ............................................................................................................................... 42 Contemporary situation ....................................................................................................................... 43 Titling to Groups ................................................................................................................................ 45 Long-term Leasing ............................................................................................................................. 47 Partnering Customary institutions ...................................................................................................... 47 This work was produced for FAO and is published with the permission of the author Introduction This review of land tenure in West Asia and North Africa (WANA or the Near East region) places contemporary developments in their historical context. Land tenure in the region has its origins in state, customary or religious law, or more often a combination of the three. With the ascendancy of the nation state over the past century, official legal systems has sought to entrench sovereignty over land with the abolition of customary law and the evolution of Shari’ah to deal with modern needs of economic development. Often this has meant a degree of secularisation in property rights law with western legal concepts gaining influence across the whole of the region. With rapidly rising human populations across the region, the area of arable land and pasture per capita has decreased in all countries during the past thirty years. These growing pressures has prompted a policy shift in most counties in the region towards finding new, adapted or novel combinations of property rights alternatives to enhance productivity, technology adoption and better resource management practices. New land tenure reforms must contend with considerable disturbance of landholdings by previous reforms, both those failed and fully implemented. Coupled with an often-chronic cynicism towards reforms amongst supposed beneficiaries, uncertainties in tenure in the steppe and sown are significant barriers to further reform. The current trend is the privatisation of property rights. International donor agencies and governments in the region have modified their objective of promoting equitable access to land, typical through (re)distribution, to that of privatising property rights, rationalising that private ownership of agricultural land facilitates access to factor markets thus increasing agricultural production. Improved agricultural production will eventually result in the efficient allocation of landed resources among producers, including smallholders. This privatisation trend is also reflected in the numerous projects and programs to title and register land rights and to create or activate land markets. Titling and registration programs are often accompanied by legislation that regularises private land rights and more often than not extends individual private property rights for previously public, state, or customary land. This review examines the recent evolution of land tenure in the WANA region. It does so in three parts. The first section examines broad themes in land tenure for the agricultural areas of the region. It was here where Islamic property rights within the context of the state has had its focus and evolved, and more recently where western concepts have been introduced. The second section deals with the steppe and desert regions where state or settled rule has historically been limited or non-existent. Here, custom prevailed. With the ascendancy of the modern state, customary tenure was initially accommodated before being widely abolished if in official law if not in practice. The final section addresses the changing situations of land tenure within each of the modern states. The diversity of tenure systems across the region in the pre- modern period and the way these have changed within the constructs of colonialism and the nation state, underscores the limitations of generalities and the importance of individual country studies. As a review of land tenure in the region this study is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Given the review is a product of a desktop study there has been some serious limitations on access to up-to-date information. Indeed, information on the tenure situations for some countries is more generally sparse though efforts have been made to collate what is available. The bibliography found at the end of section three details the sources that have been accessed. Section 1: Land Tenure in the Settled Areas INTRODUCTION Amongst rural populations of the region access to natural resources is not only an important means of generating livelihood security but often also to accumulate wealth and transfer it between generations. For pastoral populations, the latter role is shared or dependent on the herd but here to, access to land-based resources remains a central theme to livelihood strategies. How land rights are perceived therefore will have a significant baring on the family's ability to meet subsistence, supply income, in cases establish status, make non-observable effort and make investments. Local people live in a complex legal universe and will often derive motivation from a variety of legal sources other than "official" law, such as religious law and customary law. "Locality" and the conceptual framework of "legal pluralism" are key notions of an emerging paradigm adopted here, on the relations between law and social behaviour. Historically, property rights in official law in the WANA region have coupled Islamic principals and custom with the demands of the state or ruler to secure rights, and extract surpluses. State power tended to dissipate beyond the seat of governments so for a long time the formal legal system of the state, the qanun, co-existed with customary law, `urf. Whereas the qanun was by definition written,