Planning Innovations in Land Management and Governance in Fragmented Rural Areas: Two Examples from Galicia (Spain)

Abstract

Land fragmentation can be an important drawback for the development of rural areas. Due to the small size of the units, land management and planning are difficult from both the private and the public point of view. In some regions of Europe, land fragmentation can lead to the collapse of land-based activities such as agriculture and forestry. This process triggers land abandonment, which causes social, economic and environmental problems. Traditional interventions such as land consolidation have not worked because of the scale of land fragmentation, which leads to huge transaction costs. New planning instruments and governance structures for land management that balance the relations between property rights, management and labour force can be developed, in order to avoid the problems of land fragmentation. In this paper, we present two innovative examples of land management and governance structures for dealing with land fragmentation in rural areas of Galicia northwestern Spain. They were able to combine the use of individual and common property rights to make land use more sustainable, instead of trying to change land ownership. The new governance structures helped to increase efficiency and sustainability of the land use by, for example, increasing labour productivity, clarifying property rights and diminishing land abandonment.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Marie Curie Fellowship from the European Commission, which provided the funds to the stay of Jose A. Puppim de Oliveira at LaboraTe/USC, where the paper was developed.

Notes

Property rights are institutions (Feder & Feeny, 1991) as defined by North (1990): “the humanly devised constraints that shape human interactions”.

Law 9/2002 of Town Planning and for the Protection of Rural Areas and Decree 330/1999 for establishment of Minimum Farming Unit in the Autonomous Region of Galicia. Each municipality has a value called minimum farming unit, under which one parcel cannot be sub-divided. The value depends also on the type of use (forest, grassland, arable land, irrigated or not). However, sub-divisions are made through informal agreements.

See, for example, Coase (1960), Demsetz (1967), Alchian (1965) and Hart (1989).

See Libecap (1989), Feder and Feeny (1991), Agarwal (1994) and Gonzalez (2007).

A review and discussion of the effects of physical and land-use fragmentation are provided, for instance, by Gajendra and Gopal (2005) or van Dijk (2003) and most recently by Hung et al. (2007) and Sengupta (2006), the latter highlighting the benefits. There are also studies that analyse the cases of land fragmentation and land consolidation in Portugal and Galicia (Monke et al., 1992; Coelho et al., 1996; Crecente et al., 2002).

Galicia has 26,610 villages or around half of the villages of Spain.

OECD classifies rural areas as communities with a population density below 150 inhab/km² (OECD, 1994).

Average of 14 ha per holding.

It is devoted mainly to improve cattle production: development of new grasslands, fencing and other facilities. The government finances several types of materials (seeds, fertilizers, etc.), and the community acquires the compromise of carrying out the works by themselves.

Measure integrated in Galician Rural Development Program Supported by EU Rural Development Funds related to modernization of agricultural holdings. Nowadays, regulated by Council Regulation (EC) No 1698/2005 of 20 September 2005 on support for rural development by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD), but already present in previous periods.

The selected legal figure is a sort of agriculture corporation (“Sociedade Agraria de Transformación”), whose activities must be related to agro-forestry (production, transformation, etc.) and where at least part of the partners must be farmers.

This is also caused, in part, for the situation of abandonment and migration processes. Updating of land registers becomes more difficult, sometimes almost impossible (e.g. unknown heirs after two or three generations); boundaries of parcels unrecognizable in the field, etc. In Galicia, registration of properties in the land book is voluntary; when parcels are so small and they are abandoned, the owners, who are not managing nor getting profit from their parcels, do not want to pay the fee of registration.

This measure is also integrated in Galician Rural Development Program supported by EU Rural Development Funds, but this case was the first time it was implemented.