6. Conclusion

How Middle Eastern and North African governments can address the necessary trade-offs in terms of agricultural production and food sovereignty, water preservation, and urban expansion deserves careful consideration. Efforts to consolidate fragmented agricultural plots and move away from water-intensive crop varieties will be critical to hedge against cropland losses. Fulfilling sustainability objectives will require a shift from the paradigm of self-sufficiency to be achieved at all costs to one of food availability and food security.

There is also a need for governments to rethink how they should fulfill the implicit social contract. Although using land to fulfill the social contract may have laudable social objectives, it has resulted in land inefficiencies and appears to be an inefficient second-best approach to addressing the fundamental problems that lack of economic inclusion causes.

Efforts to reduce vulnerabilities in land access must be pursued. Improving women’s land and property rights should be an integral aspect of efforts to reduce poverty and empower women in the region. A few steps in the right direction have been taken in the recent years, including Iran’s reform of the Civil Code to allow women to inherit land; Morocco’s Soulalyat movement, which obtained formal recognition of women as beneficiaries of compensation after transfer of collective land; Algeria’s modification of its personal family code to allow women to confer their citizenship on their children—with implications for inheritance of land and property—and Jordan’s introduction of a 3-month “cooling-off period” after registration of inheritance shares during which inheritance rights cannot be waived.

The housing, land, and property rights of refugees and internally displaced people must also be addressed for reconstruction and recovery. Conflicts in the region and resulting population displacements have given rise to the need for urgent legislative reforms, including support for access to land and housing in destination areas; legal protections for land and property assets; and dispute resolution mechanisms to address issues of forced sales, abandoned properties, and destruction of property documents in origin areas of refugees and internally displaced people.

6. Conclusion

Weak land governance not only prevents efficient use of land, but is also costly, holds Middle Eastern and North African economies back, and inhibits strategic decisions about trade-offs needed to ensure sustainable land use while responding to population needs such as housing and food security. Current economic and social inequalities are mirrored in the persistent difficulties that women and vulnerable groups face in accessing land.

Reforming the land sector should thus be a top priority for the region. Although progress in land governance is undeniable in some countries and for some aspects of the land sector, there is a need to lay out clear paths for reform. Reforms needed in the land sector are not limited to land administration and governance. They should also address questions of sustainability, strategic use of land assets, and access to land for vulnerable groups.

All these policy interventions have distributional impacts, with potential winners, but also losers, which makes such reforms difficult to implement. Sometimes, those opposing reforms in the land sector are the institutions themselves, out of fear that they would lose power and influence (involving, in some instances, loss of opportunities to extract rents or possibility of job losses). Addressing the political economy bottlenecks and the vested interests that have long prevented reforms will thus be key to success. One of the most serious obstacles to reform could be the lack of trust in the administration (and the government in general) that prevails in Middle Eastern and North African countries. It is a serious