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Communal Land Titling and Tenure Systems in Mexico
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| The Mexican Real property
regime, in the eyes of the World Bank and many other governments
and multilateral institutions, offers enormous potential as a model
for other countries that confront the transition of from traditional
and historic land tenure systems to one that is more individualized.
It is believe that the example of Mexico, in particular, through
its PROCEDE program offers enormous potential to reduce social conflict
on the ground, and to open land markets and development possibilities
that did not exist before. And as such, offering new economic possibilities
to local populations in distinct jurisdictions and reducing the amount
of rural-to-urban and transnational migration. Preliminary observations
suggest, however, that this is not the case. The research proposed
here will evaluate Mexico’s real property regime to determine
the strength of the contract between society and owners that recognizes
the preferential rights and correlated duties associated with the
legal land tenure.
Today, lands under these tenure
systems are being privatized under the neoliberal reforms
to the constitution and agrarian law, allowing private property
rights to be incorporated into these social ownership systems,
especially through the PROCEDE program. |
Situating our analysis at the título (title) level, we will sample
a diverse group of communal land titling practices combining geography
and anthropology with participatory research mapping, GPS and GIS applications,
and a comparative approach to understanding communal land titling practices.
Our primary research objective is to demonstrate the extent to which
communal land titling practices influence tenure stability, social conflict,
and the conservation in Mexico. We hypothesize that modern applications
of communal land titling practices most often exacerbate social conflict
and the destruction of natural resources. While these practices certainly
protect some lands, they may open the rest of a given community’s
land use or geographical area for exploitation, resulting in resource
degradation and land conflict.
We will test our hypothesis by determining how communal land titling
practices actually influence natural resource use and tenure stability.
Our specific research objectives are to: |
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Community produced sketch
maps |
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a. Produce an
inventory and overview of communal land titling practices used among
indigenous/peasant communities in Mexico and the Huasteca
region.
b. Document and evaluate how communal land
titles are defined, delimited, and demarcated in the study area.
c. Map and determine how the actual
land use relates spatially to the titled area (titulo) for 20-40 sample
communities.
d. Assess how the titled areas (titulos)
relate to other outside forces of land cover change and to the conservation
of natural resources.
e. Map and determine the relationships
among the communal land title, land conflict, and land tenure stability
of the sample communities.
Examine existing state policies concerning the communal titling of indigenous
land and make future recommendations through the dissemination of our research
results. |
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Local and student investigators
locate parcels and other important geographic and land tenure
features with GPS. And Student investigators conduct parcel/household
questionnaires
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Property title map from a
county cadastral office
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Mexican Open Source Geographic Information Systems
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Our specific research objectives are:
1) Construct a detailed metadata base concerning the information used and
collected during the MOS-GIS project that will describe the content and
quality of the unclassified FIS and digital spatial and statistical information
in Mexico.
2) Identify and acquire the best available open source spatial and statistical
georeferenced digital information, or in some cases build the relevant
layers, to construct GIS base maps to show the interrelationships between
indigenous settlement areas and topography, hydrology, climate, winds,
geomorphology, soils, vegetation, protected areas, and land cover for display
at community, multi-community, municipal, state, regional, and national
levels. |
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Georeferenced community maps,
converted to shapefiles
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3) Construct a GIS inventory and overview of how communal land titles are
defined, delimited, and demarcated the study area and how communal land
titling and it privatization under PROCEDE is occurring among indigenous
communities in Mexico with statistical and spatially specific examples
at the local, regional, state, and national levels.
4) While Mexican public policy officials and administration pundits exclaim
the benefits of neoliberal land privatization through the government PROCEDE
program, we hypothesize that the recognition of individual land rights
in indigenous communities exacerbates social conflict, out-migration, land
transfer, and natural resource degradation, having broader potential consequences
related to international security and defense issues. To test this hypothesis,
we will use unclassified spatial and statistical information, together
with results from the MPDS and participatory research projects mentioned
above, to build the relevant layers for examining the interrelationship
between PROCEDE privatization of land rights in indigenous communities
and distinct social, economic, and environmental variables using GIS analysis
by moving from a very large scale to a very small scale, from individual
parcel polygons to the community, multi-community, state, regional, and
national levels. The specific variables will be related to the privatization
of indigenous communities’ lands will include, but not be limited
to, land transfer, population size, migration, ethnicity, land use/land
cover (forest, secondary regrowth, pasture, settled area), and other variables
related to security and defense issues.
5) Examine existing state policies concerning the legalization of communal
lands in indigenous areas of Mexico and make future recommendations through
the dissemination of the MOS-GIS Project results |
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