provincial capitals, where registration offices operate, but not the poor, who lack awareness and, given the high transaction costs, the resources to access the system. Efforts to secure property rights may be seen not only to bypass the marginalized, but also actually to increase their vulnerability, especially for Amazonian indigenous communities, which are subject to pressures from neighbors, colonos, private investors, and land speculators. Similarly, provisions for land use planning and property tax collection are operational in most affluent areas but are out of reach for most local governments. A key consideration is that land policies must bring together the efforts of land management agencies operating at various levels of government. Such effort should be joined not just by central, regional, and local government agencies, but also by land governance experts, academics, and civil society organizations. Completed Formalization of Property Rights in Urban and Rural Areas For urban areas, continued extension of deadlines for formalization—a favored government response so far—will increase incentives for new invasions, play into the hands of informal developers, and be socially inefficient.25 Encouraging new housing strategies for the neediest Peruvians seems a more efficient and peaceful way to provide adequate, safe housing to the poor. For example, instead of the typical public housing programs, which offer brand-new homes reachable only by the middle classes, funds for densification of already formalized settlements could allow individual title holders to receive credit to build second-floor apartments for rental or sale in areas where public services are available. Planning new settlements for progressive development, that is, offering plots with services and minimum infrastructure rather than finished housing, may be less effective as a political advertisement but better for the poor than the current pattern of invasions by speculators, resistance to eviction, and long waits for infrastructure and service provision. In rural areas, enforcing the rights of Andean peasant and Amazonian native communities requires acting quickly to formalize their land rights, clearly defining the boundaries of their territories, and improving the representation of these groups with the outside. To that end, an important step is to ascertain whether existing land tenure types (comunidades campesinas and comunidades nativas, legally defined in terms of their historical and ethnic bonds to the land) are sufficient to capture the dynamic realities of the rural areas or, if they do not, to devise new types. For assurance that progress is achieved and monitored, one suggestion is to create, within COFOPRI, indicators about the remaining demand for formalization according to land tenure type and to then monitor progress over time in coordination with local governments. Effective Decentralization To make decentralization effective, to assist poor municipalities in building capacity to collect property tax (including mechanisms for service provision to
APPLYING THE LAND GOVERNANCE ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK IN PRACTICE
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