Enhancing Security of Tenure Through Land Administration

This policy brief examines the gap between registered and off-register land rights in South Africa, defining land administration as the management function that executes land governance policies. It contrasts the formal common-law property system with customary and informal rights, noting that the latter lack formal registration, precise demarcation, and integrated information management. The brief evaluates two international models for bridging this gap: the World Bank and UN-Habitat's 'Fit-for-Purpose' approach, which emphasizes flexibility and affordability, and the 'Talking Titler' evolutionary design approach, which focuses on social networks and context-specific adaptability. While the Fit-for-Purpose model saw success in Rwanda, critics argue it may overlook local power dynamics in South Africa, suggesting that a more flexible, adaptive system may be necessary to address the country's complex land-rights situation.

• Land administration is defined as the management of land tenure, land valuation, land use, and land development, serving as the mechanism that "actualise" land rights and land use to balance individual and societal interests.
• There is a stark dichotomy in South Africa between registered rights, which are precisely recorded in the Deeds Registry and integrated into the cadastre system, and unregistered rights (including customary and statutory rights), which are largely unrecorded and not capable of recording in the deeds registry.
• Off-register rights in South Africa typically lack formal land-use regulation, falling outside the regulated valuation, taxation, and compensation systems, with land use often determined by local traditional or community structures.
• The 'Fit-for-Purpose' land administration approach, promoted by the World Bank and UN-Habitat, aims to provide solutions for the estimated 75 per cent of the global population lacking formal registration through flexible, inclusive, and affordable systems.
• Rwanda successfully implemented the Land Tenure Regularisation programme starting in 2009, registering 10.4 million parcels of land and issuing 8.8 million land-lease certificates over five years using a participatory 'para-surveyors' approach.
• Critics argue that the Fit-for-Purpose approach may be unsuitable for some South African communities because it can gloss over entrenched power relations and fail to capture the local mechanisms people use to defend their interests.
• The 'Talking Titler' evolutionary design approach proposes a flexible model based on four classes—media, person, land object, and reference—to allow context-specific land administration designs to emerge from empirical testing.

APA

Wicomb, W. (2025). Enhancing Security of Tenure Through Land Administration. Public Affairs Research Institute. https://pari.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20250124_Land_LRCPolicyBrief_Wicomb.pdf

Chicago

Wicomb, Wilmien. Enhancing Security of Tenure Through Land Administration. Public Affairs Research Institute, 2025. https://pari.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20250124_Land_LRCPolicyBrief_Wicomb.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Wicomb |first1=Wilmien |title=Enhancing Security of Tenure Through Land Administration |publisher=Public Affairs Research Institute |date=January 2025 |url=https://pari.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20250124_Land_LRCPolicyBrief_Wicomb.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{wicomb2025enhancing, author = {Wicomb, Wilmien}, title = {{Enhancing Security of Tenure Through Land Administration}}, institution = {Public Affairs Research Institute}, year = {2025}, month = jan, url = {https://pari.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20250124_Land_LRCPolicyBrief_Wicomb.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }