http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/21866 http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/22003 Re-entering African-American farmers : recent trends and a policy rationale Wood, Spencer D. Gilbert, Jess Carr Today, there are only about 15,000 black farmers in the United States. Declining by 98 percent since 1920, black farmers have suffered losses attributable to public policy, economic pressures, and racial oppression. All of these factors must be addressed if African-American farmers are to survive. In this paper, we use Census of Agriculture data and a follow-on survey in one Mississippi Delta county to review the current situation of black farmers. We introduce the concept of "re-entering farmers" to suggest that a significant number of black farmers, who are not defined as "farmers" by the Census, still own land and want to farm again. The first section of the paper provides a brief overview of the historical and current trends of black farmers in the United States. The second section discusses Delta County, drawing upon our survey and the Census of Agriculture. The third section discusses the implications of civil rights violations by the former Farmers Home Administration of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Finally, we conclude with a policy recommendation to slow the drastic decline of African-American farmers. iv, 19 p. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/22001 Past and present land tenure systems in Albania : patrilineal, patriarchal, family-centered Sabates-Wheeler, Rachel University of Wisconsin--Madison. Land Tenure Center. Albania. Immovable Property Registration and Market Action Plan (Project). Project Management Unit. This paper attempts to evaluate whether Albanian rural social structure has changed to the extent that individual rights and protection of those rights have become important policy questions. If the evaluation suggests that rural Albanians retain the set of family-oriented norms and beliefs that are based primarily on patriarchalism and patrilineal inheritance, we must address the following questions: How appropriate is the mixture of western law that emulates individualistic notions of property rights with the customary family-tenure system of rural Albania? What are the likely problems that could emerge during the transition given a potential conflict between family notions of ownership and individual notions of ownership? This paper discusses five broad issues: the contemporary importance of family ownership, the role of the patriarch, the contemporary inheritance procedures, the vulnerability of specific groups of women, and the structure of the Albanian family. iii, 31 p. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/21997 Recent reforms of the urban housing system in central and east Europe Thiesenhusen, William C. The urban housing system in most of Central and East Europe (CEE) is undergoing decentralization, deregulation, and privatization together with other basic changes due to the fall of the iron curtain, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the reinstitution of democracy. In most of the CEE, the urban housing sector is economically important, accounting for 10-20% of total economic activity. In view of its implications for land use, energy consumption, waste generation, and water pollution, it also has a significant effect on sustainability of development. A prime development need in the CEE, according to the World Bank, is to improve the performance of the urban housing sector for economic, social, environmental, and political reasons. This paper describes the urban housing model of the CEE before reform and analyzes changes to that model that began with the privatization reforms in the early 1990s. The paper details the strengths and weaknesses of the reforms and suggests that there are some resource distribution inequities that are accentuated under reform. It discusses the pricing issues in urban housing reforms, as well as the financing of urban housing, and briefly recounts matters related to mobility of labor, spatial issues of urban housing development, urban infrastructure, peripheral urban growth, and titling and property registration that have come about as state socialism is replaced by a more open market. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/21999 Legal transfer and the legitimation of law : implications of farm family property provisions in Albanian legislation Sabates-Wheeler, Rachel This paper discusses the relationship between transfer of laws from one country to another and legitimation of the law associated with the transfer. Drawing lessons from the legal transfer experience of Latin America in the 1960s, the paper attempts to ascertain what relevance, if any, legal transfer has in the context of the emerging market economies and democratic societies of the former communist countries of East Europe and the Soviet Union. It is argued that attempts at exporting laws have failed when little or no attempt is made to understand the processes of how law is legitimized within a specific country. The cultural orientation of a particular country or section of society at a particular point in time will determine how legal culture is formed and sustained and will thus affect the degree to which law is legitimized. Drawing on the theoretical discussions of section one, a short case study of law related to rural property rights in Albania is presented in section two. iv, 20 p. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/21995 Etude : sur la problématique foncière dans les périmètres irrigués au Mali Tall, El Hadj Oumar Today, the processes of decentralization and democratization are fundamental aspects of sustainable human development in Mali, and have a considerable impact on all strategies and policies involved in agricultural development. The role and responsibilities of the state are limited to missions of protection and of public administration. Most activities related to economic management and development programs have been transferred to civil society and local populations. The aims of the new Plan for Rural Land Development are to encourage greater flexibility and to make the related strategies and policies more consistent. Of particular interest are the following: National environmental protection policy Strategy for poverty reduction and accelerated growth National strategy for irrigation development The institutions responsible for implementing these policies are handicapped by lack of skilled and experienced personnel, uncertainty, and financial constraints. All of these problems must be urgently dealt with. Inappropriate land law and weakened traditional management regimes also make it particularly difficult to solve the numerous land conflicts that arise. This problem poses a significant threat to attempts to establish sustainable natural resource management and land tenure security in irrigated areas. The authors assess these problems and recommend strategies for addressing them. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/21993 Liberal contracts, relational contracts and common property : Africa and the United States Tabachnick, David The core thesis is that Western neoclassical economics and law (particularly Anglo-American) have a peculiar cultural history that biases Western-trained economists and lawyers against common property systems like those found among Africans and American Indians. This Western cultural bias is expressed through the recurrent focus on individuals as atomistic and independent of each other in contract and property law, as well as in economic theory. The bias derives in part from the historical suppression of community property rights that once overlapped individual property rights, as in the case of the enclosure of the commons in England. Well-meaning Western advisors may depart for foreign communities that possess common property systems and year after year, decade after decade, century after century, propose the replacement of existing legal and economic ideas and institutions with Western imports-not realizing the limited utility and contested history, even in the West, of these imported forms. While many of these issues are not new, the oldness of these debates becomes an issue in itself. How does one break the repetitive cycle, the cultural reproduction of bias, by provoking self-assessment? iv, 42 p. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/21991 Challenging conventional wisdom : smallholder perceptons and experience of land access and tenure security in the cotton belt of northern Mozambique Strasberg, Paul J. Kloeck-Jenson, Scott A new land law went into effect in January 1998 in Mozambique. The impetus behind these actions was the belief that a new legal and regulatory framework was necessary to reduce the frequency of land conflicts between largeholders and smallholders while simultaneously promoting much-needed investment in the agricultural sector. With empirical evidence presented in this report, based on smallholder survey data collected from 1994 to 1996, we challenge widely held beliefs about land tenure and access in the smallholder sector in Mozambique. Although the new land law may improve tenure security for smallholders who experience conflicts with largeholders, two key areas of policy concern have been neglected. First, while provisions in the new legal framework to safeguard local community land-use rights vis-à-vis outsiders are important, they will not be sufficient to eliminate and/or adjudicate land conflicts between smallholders themselves. Second, while much attention has been devoted to the legal and regulatory component of land tenure in Mozambique, research results reveal significant variation in the size of household landholdings even when controlling for household size. Further, land access was found to be closely linked to key welfare indicators such as income and calorie availability; a weak nonfarm economy heightens the importance of land for the welfare of rural families. These results are surprising and contradict views held by many in the policy community in Mozambique that land access is unconstrained for smallholders. xii, 58 p. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/21989 Creation of land markets in transition countries : implications for the institutions of land administration Stanfield, David Gibbard, Roger Markwell, Susan This paper describes (1) the processes of privatization of land management in selected transition countries and (2) the post-privatization changes in land administration institutions which are being crafted to establish land markets. It begins with the proposition that there are similar land market institutional problems which most "transition" countries are facing, due largely to common experiences in creating command economies during the past 50-80 years and the almost simultaneous decisions of these countries to move toward market political economies in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Each country has had unique historical experiences, but this paper proposes that there is enough similar institutional history among the transition countries to venture into comparative analysis. In this regard, the Albanian experience with land market institutional development is presented as being potentially relevant to experiences in other transition countries of Europe and the former Soviet Union. The broad question is: How can countries construct the institutions of immovable property markets once they have made the political-economic decision to "go market"? iii, 20 p. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/21987 Immovable property markets in metropolitan Tirana, Albania Stanfield, David Childress, Malcolm Dervishi, Artan This paper uses information from three empirical studies to describe, after seven years of privatization and real estate market transactions, how the physical space of the city of Tirana is presently organized, and how active real estate markets have been. The first empirical study, fielded in December 1997 (completed in January 1998), was based on an "area sample" of the city of Tirana. One-hectare grid squares were overlaid on the city's 3,060 hectares within the municipal boundary, and a random sample was taken of these grids. Eighteen grid squares within the ring roads (an area of 340 hectares) and 14 grid squares between the ring roads and the outer municipal boundary (an area of 2,720 hectares) were randomly selected. Within the selected grid squares of 1 hectare each, research teams visited each property and questioned the holders about its use, who owned it, when it was constructed, and other characteristics of the property. The sample values obtained from the questionnaires were then "expanded" by the sampling ratio to describe the physical space of Tirana within the city's municipal boundaries. The second study of the transactions recorded in the Hipoteka Office of Tirana was done in early 1998. All documents from 1993 through 1997 were classified according to type of property involved, and the number of transactions were tabulated. The third study of real estate prices from 1993 to 1997 was done based on the data of one real estate agency in February 1998. This database represents approximately 70 percent of all offerings of real estate for sale done through real estate agencies in Tirana. iii, 19 p. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/21985 Albanian immovable property registration system : review of legislation Stamo, Lida Singer, Norman J. University of Wisconsin--Madison. Land Tenure Center. Albania Albania. Immovable Property Registration and Market Action Plan (Project). Project Management Unit. The registration system of immovable property in Albania was chosen for four basic reasons: (1) it protects the right of immovable property owners by providing strong and reliable evidence about ownership and other interests in immovable properties; (2) it is simple and inexpensive to administer and maintain; (3) it provides the public with easily accessible information which they need to buy and sell, mortgage, and rent immovable property, thereby providing the basis for a market-oriented economy; and, (4) it permits the building of a Geographical Information System with property information as an integral and fundamental segment. The registration system is similar in concept to what is used in Nordic countries, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Croatia, Macedonia, the United Kingdom, and the northern provinces of Italy. It is different from other European countries in that it is expressly "property" or "parcel" based and not simply a recording of transactions. It is an improvement over both types of European systems in that it combines property mapping with the recording of legal rights into a single administrative system. This paper describes Republic of Albania's Law on the Registration of Immovable Property and includes a copy of the law as an annex. iii, 25 p., Annex A. Law on the Registration of Immovable Property. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/21983 An insider's view on establishing an immovable property registration system in Albania Sherko, Romeo University of Wisconsin--Madison. Land Tenure Center. Albania. Immovable Property Registration and Market Action Plan (Project). Project Management Unit. As will become clear in this article, the author's position shifts from pessimist to optimist as this writing progresses. The first section presents some of the difficulties that Albania is experiencing with respect to the immovable property registration system (IPRS) project (pessimist's position). The next section offers some of the advantages to be found in the Albanian system (optimist's position). The last section considers several plans used to deal with the problems; these programs are both tactical and strategic and, in my opinion, require careful coordination to resolve the difficulties encountered. iii, 6 p. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/21981 Property registration in Albania : an information management issue Sherko, Romeo Sula, Naim University of Wisconsin--Madison. Land Tenure Center. Albania. Immovable Property Registration and Market Action Plan (Project). Project Management Unit. This paper presents the plans being made in Albania to establish an immovable property registration system in the most efficient way. It considers not only technically modern equipment and computer-related problems but also social and economic feasibility. In Albania, the immovable property registration system is necessary in order to face successfully the new conditions of the free market-oriented economy. For about 50 years, property ownership in Albania was restricted to the State. The 1991 land reform in Albania advanced quickly, and at present over 90 percent of agricultural land is distributed to farmers, though in highly fragmented holdings (totaling an average area average of 2 hectares), creating about 1.8 million new parcels registered in the cadastral district offices. In urban areas, housing privatization was also completed quickly, creating about 300,000 new properties in cities, which are being registered in the Hipoteka (deed registry) district offices. Although market transactions in agriculture land are not yet allowed (though enabling legislation is expected to be passed soon), many land transactions have taken place. The housing market is already very active. Conflicts exist, especially in urban areas, between ex-owners of the land and buildings, and the state or present occupants. Therefore, it is highly desirable to establish a property registration system in Albania quickly and yet with careful planning. This paper presents the registration information system model. iv, 8 p. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/21979 Land and population on the Indian reservations of Wisconsin : past, present, and future Sandefur, Gary D. Ceballos, Miguel Mannon, Susan E. The historical relationship between land use and population change among Wisconsin's Indian groups has been strikingly emblematic of the larger American Indian population. The ingredients of this rich relationship include the state's natural resource base, as well as the major engines of demographic change, namely fertility, mortality, and migration. In addition, federal policies have played a critical role in mediating this relationship. These policies have figured prominently since the earliest contact between Europeans and Wisconsin Indians and have continued to exert substantial influence. This paper discusses the past, present, and future relationship between the land and the state's Indian populations, paying particular attention to reservation populations. The reciprocal relationship between land and population among Wisconsin's Indians has evolved in an environment of changing social and political forces. Hence, the paper treats these issues in a chronological manner. It begins by reviewing the early period of contact between Europeans and Indians in the area known today as Wisconsin. Then, it discusses the creation of the state of Wisconsin and various Indian reservations, as well as their implications for Indian populations in the state. Next, it discusses federal land policies of the 19th and 20th centuries, and their effects on Wisconsin reservation populations. Finally, it describes current land tenure issues and the implications of future population growth. iii, 17 p. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/21977 Mediation in the Norwegian land consolidation courts Rognes, Jørn Sky, Per Kåre In Norway land consolidation is organized entirely within the judicial system. This paper describes how land consolidation courts work, and examines mediation activities in the courts. Questionnaires were used to get data on 727 cases in 1996, and in-depth interviews with 23 judges were used to get information on mediation behavior. The results indicate that mediation is a frequent activity. Many cases are settled through mediation rather than by verdicts. Mediation activities vary with case type, complexity, significance and conflict level. Mediation activities reduce conflicts even in those cases where final decisions are made through verdicts. Cases that have a mediated settlement are generally less complex, less significant and have lower conflict levels than cases ending with verdicts. Judges use a large number of mediation techniques, and there are large variations in mediation styles between judges. The results are discussed in terms of future research needs and in terms of the practice of mediation in land disputes. iv, 26 p. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/21973 Nonprofit and resident collaboratives : an alternative model for community participation in planning? Pothukuchi, Kameshwari Attempts to encourage and institutionalize citizen participation in planning are fraught with tensions between democratic participation and professional expertise; the reconciliation of local or group interests with larger, citywide interests; process versus outcome; and so on. Who participates, why, on whose terms, how, and with what consequences for themselves, their neighborhoods, the decision process, and outcomes, have been the subject of numerous studies. In this context, a distinction has emerged between mere citizen involvement in planning initiated by public agencies to grassroots and bottom-up planning that originates from within neighborhoods and citizen groups and whose decisions are adopted by public agencies. Through a case study based in Madison, Wisconsin, this paper identifies an institutional alternative that addresses some of the tensions related to community participation in planning and the problems associated with collaboration: a resident-nonprofit collaborative within a larger urban context facilitative of neighborhood planning. The paper provides a brief overview of the process, identifies lessons from this process for community participation and grassroots planning, and places this experience in the larger debates on participation. It discusses the value of resident-nonprofit collaboratives within the comparative framework of alternative forms of community participation. A concluding section discusses the implications of these findings for planning practice. iv, 24 p.