Title: Using Cadastres to Support Sustainable Development
Abstract: An important government activity for all nation states is building and maintaining a land administration system (LAS) with the primary objective of supporting an efficient and effective land market. This usually includes cadastral surveys to identify and subdivide land, land registry systems to support simple land trading (buying, selling, mortgaging and leasing land) and land information systems to facilitate access to the relevant information, increasingly through an Internet enabled e-government environment. For most countries a cadastre is at the core of the LAS providing spatial integrity and unique land parcel identification in support of security of tenure and effective land trading. For many cadastral and land administration officials and for much of society, these are the primary, and in many cases the only roles of the cadastre and LAS. However the role, and particularly the potential of LAS and their core cadastres, have rapidly expanded over the last couple of decades and will continue to change in the future. Cadastres provide the location or place for many activities in the built environment through the cadastral map. This in turn provides the spatial enablement of the broader land administration system. Cadastres permit geocoding of property identifiers and particularly street addresses that then facilitate spatially enablement government and wider society. While the land market function of cadastres is essential, the ability to spatially enable society is proving to be just as important as or even more important than the land market function. In particular spatial enablement allows governments to more easily deliver sustainable development (economic, environmental, social and governance dimensions), increasingly the over-arching objectives of government. This paper describes the role that cadastres play in land administration systems and also the provision of the spatial dimension of the built environment in national spatial data infrastructures (NSDI). The paper then explores how the cadastre supports spatial enablement of government and wider society to pursue sustainable development goals. It concludes by challenging land administration officials to capitalize on the potential of LAS and cadastres to improve the achievement of these goals.
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 6
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