Policy Issues in Land Administration

Land administration strategies and processes need to be structured within a broad policy framework, the shape of which will depend on the jurisdiction concerned. A common thread between systems will be the promotion of economic development, social justice and equity, political stability, and environmentally sustainable development. The processes of re-engineering, total quality management, and other management reforms discussed in Chapter 9 were originally designed for use in the private sector so that organizations could respond better to the demands of the market place. More recently, they have increasingly been adopted by public sector administrators who have been forced to respond to the market oriented approach and hence have been required to upgrade land administration systems. In the United States the processes of re-engineering have been packaged under such labels as ‘entrepreneurial government’ and ‘reinventing government’ and were addressed in the National Performance Review (known as the Gore Commission) which had a mandate to ‘re-invent and to reinvigorate the entire national government’. The ideas were picked up by many other governments—from Australia to the UK (Butler 1994), the Netherlands to New Zealand, and Singapore to Sweden-regardless of party or ideology. Although reinventing government means different things to different people, it has generally entailed: 1. restructuring the way government services are organized; 2. developing new strategies and processes for managing government services (for instance, simplifying administrative programmes); 3. empowering the recipients of public services. As with the private sector, a crucial component of reinventing government has been the effective use of information technology (IT). Governments in general have only recently begun to review their national information strategies and to develop new ways in which they deliver services to citizens and businesses. Over the past few years, IT has changed the way that many people live through the creation of new products and services. Examples include the use of credit and debit cards, the ability to withdraw cash from a ‘hole in the wall’ even in a foreign country, the mobile phone and fax machine, and access to information on the Internet. Information technology now makes it possible for citizens and businesses to deal directly with government agencies if they so wish (UK Government 1996).