Policy Effects and Tenure Security Perceptions of Peruvian Urban Land Tenure Regularisation Policy in the 1990s

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ABSTRACT

Massive land titling and registration, with the aim to formalise 1 million urban land parcels in informal settlements have been carried out in Peru since the mid-1990s by a land titling agency called COFOPRI (Comisión de Formalización de la Propiedad Informal). Today, COFOPRI claims to have achieved its objective of providing 1 million titles. This paper examines the effects of the formalisation process to identify whether it has had an impact for the informal settlers.

Themes revolving around urban land tenure regularisation policy can be extensive, from the macro perspectives of legal and institutional framework, urban land and property markets leading to capital markets, to micro perspectives such as the social and economic effects for the urban poor. This paper focuses on the latter, how the policy of land tenure regularisation affects the urban poor by examining empirical findings of policy effects and perceptions of tenure security amongst the urban poor in Metropolitan Lima.

A questionnaire based household survey and interviews were carried out in informal settlements in Metropolitan Lima in 1999 and 2000. Based on the different consolidation aspects of legal, social, physical and economic developed in the conceptual framework, variables were collected and indicators were generated. The main finding through this household survey was that whilst there is a strong link between legal and physical consolidation, there is a weak link between legal and economic, especially that of access to credit. The survey highlights the need to create a follow-up mechanism that can accentuate the consolidation process after legal consolidation. Furthermore, the results of the survey suggest the need for more information in a longer time span. From the interviews which treated the perceptions of tenure security identified that households in regularised settlements see their status as "informal urban dwellers" have progressed to "formal urban dwellers".

The paper will close by reviewing the relevance of the proposed conceptual framework to the empirical findings in Metropolitan Lima to identify the impact of land tenure regularisation policy for the urban poor and examine future policy implications for the Peruvian government.

ESF/N-AERUS: International workshop - Leuven and Brussels, Belgium, 23-26 May 2001

N-AERUS: Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanisation in the South
http://www.naerus.net