Land Law Reform

Drawing on a considerable body of experience across a wide variety of country contexts, this volume is a contribution to comparative thinking on land law reform and its use in achieving development policy goals.

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Land Law Reform examines the wide-spread efforts to reform land law in developing countries and countries in transition, drawing in particular upon the experience of the World Bank and the Rural Development Institute. The book considers the role of land law reform in the development process and analyzes how the World Bank has sought to support these legal changes in client countries. It reviews the experience with reform of laws affecting land access and rights in achieving gender equity, identifies opportunities for reinforcing environmentally sustainable development through land law reform, and examines from both growth and poverty alleviation perspectives the effectiveness of reforms to formalize property rights and liberalize land markets. The concluding chapter recommends some basic priorities for land law reforms. John W. Bruce is a senior counsel in the Legal Vice-Presidency of the World Bank, and a former director of the Land Tenure Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published extensively on land law and land policy in developing countries. Renee Giovarelli, David Bledsoe, Leonard Rolfes, and Robert Mitchell are staff attorneys with the Rural Development Institute of Seattle, Washington, a nonprofit organization that promotes and advises on land-related policy and legal reform in developing and transition countries. All have done fieldwork and advised extensively on land law reform and have published widely on this topic.