There is a strong and growing international donor
interest in land issues. The SDC supports country and
regional programs, including the MRLG project that
has supported a state of knowledge review on which
this analysis builds. GIZ has a longstanding involvement
in land use planning and land administration in the
region. Australian Aid has historically played a key role,
alongside the World Bank, in land titling programs in
Southeast Asia, first in Thailand from 1984 and more
recently in Laos. The World Bank has been involved
in land titling programs in both Laos and Cambodia,
but both of these programs were aborted. This was
largely due to the incompatibility between the program
principles on the one hand, and the governance arrangements
and political economic systems through which
they were being administered, on the other. The former
was geared at promoting transparent market-based
property rights in land devoid of State interference and
formalising existing smallholder usufruct. The latter
saw unsurveyed land as being reserved for State projects
to be handed over to wealthy investors (see Bugalski &
Pred 2013). As noted earlier in the paper, there is a
tense and challenging relationship between some of the
international principles of “good land governance” on the
one hand, and domestic political economy on the other.
Particularly in the case of land, sovereign prerogative is
a sensitive issue for the governments concerned, and
donors have to take a cautious approach in imposing
universalistic solutions.