 So, sitting next to me are Leon and Maya who are the two scribes who actually wrote these incredible cases and if you didn't get a chance to read them, hopefully you'll read them and share them after this and I requested that we do this session partially because I wanted to develop an appreciation for how much work went into these cases but also to take advantage of all the knowledge in their heads. So to jump in, if you could both just quickly introduce yourselves and give us a quick sense of your background. All right, sure. I'll start. So, I've been working at ISS for three years on land and property rights for the last year or so but before that on a wide variety of issues, everything from preventing deforestation to judicial reform to public works and prior to that I worked in Kenya for the International Rescue Committee and I studied comparative politics at Princeton. Great. So, I'm Leon Schreiber. I'm actually based in Cape Town, South Africa. Technology can do amazing things these days. Despite being based there, I've worked with ISS for about two years now. Prior to joining this project, also about a year ago, most of my work focused on the Ebola response in West Africa, specifically Liberia. So we did a series of cases on that fascinating story. I also worked previously on how to make power-sharing cabinets actually work together in post-conflict settings. So, that's very far from land administration but that's one of the great things about this job is that it really constantly challenges you to learn new things. Before joining ISS, I did a PhD in political science at the Three University of Berlin and prior to that I studied at Stellenbosch University in South Africa or in political science. Impressive. So, you both have rich backgrounds before getting into writing these cases and I'm curious from those different perspectives, when you got into land and property and you produced these documents, what struck you about this area of tenure and land reform? So, for me, having spent two years working on a whole range of different issues through the same process of writing case studies, what stood out when I started getting into the land administration side of things was how many components I was about to have to deal with, especially writing cases on managing land registries effectively. So, things like restructuring an institution or improving performance management or developing a digital system are things that we, you know, could write an entire case study about just one of them and so finding ways to cover all that ground and for me to wrap my head around it and then to make it accessible to readers was certainly an interesting and challenging process and I'm very grateful to all of the people who I interviewed who helped make that as smooth as possible for me. So, what's interesting is that practically Maya and I ended up sort of focusing on slightly different elements of this bigger story so she was working a lot on the setting up the registries and the agencies and I ended up working more on sort of the practical titling out in the field type cases and yet I share a lot of the same sentiments. I was really struck by how many issues are involved, you know, it's obviously focused and defined and that's the focus of the case but it really cuts across so many different elements and one of them is just how political all of this is. I think one of the key things to keep in mind is that land is often the most valuable resource in many of these especially poorer countries. It's the one thing that the state can leverage for different purposes, good or nefarious and therefore the political stakes are often very high in any sort of technical solution or proposal needs to sort of take that political reality into account when coming up with solutions so I think that's something that stands out. Right, can you just talk a little bit about the process so maybe just pick one case and give a sense of like how many interviews, how much research and how much in general review to get these? So I mean the process generally kicks off with sort of a background paper on what the series will focus on and then that involves sort of refining it down to how many cases, which ones we want to focus on. I know for this case Maya and Jennifer actually did a lot of that more than I did but I can certainly speak about once we've sort of zoomed in on a specific case or topic. Generally the preparation begins with what we call a pre-trip briefing so this is a meeting where we get together staff from all of the staff from ISS basically and we really dig into the background of this issue so if we take the Mozambican case you know what is in that beautiful law that the country has adopted, why are there certain challenges and why it's not perhaps being implemented as the government would like and then sort of teasing out what should be the key questions. Then obviously you go to the country, you interview, try to get to about 25 people in two weeks so it's quite a intense process and then I would say it's really quite organic in the actual discussions you have. You obviously have the issues you want to touch on but there's definitely a human touch. It's not a mechanical process when you speak with someone because people are different and I think something to keep in mind in this type of work is that you're going around the world, cultures are different, people are different, societies are different and finding your feet in that whole process during interviews I think is one of the great learning experiences and challenges of the job and then obviously the writing comes after those two weeks in the field again a very collaborative process we usually go through about six drafts where you know the whole team would have some input on that. I think Leon's given you a pretty comprehensive view of our process. So if I think about that, 25 interviews, all these topics, background papers and then we just have these nice beautifully edited 20-page cases, what's on the cutting room floor like if you had the time what are what are the issues that you would really relish the chance to jump into and push forward? So one thing that I think has come through a lot in the discussions today is how fundamental property rights are to a developing economy but the fact that it's not going to automatically transform your economy there's a lot of additional steps going forward in terms of accessing credit or capacity building so that people can use those rights as well as maintaining an effective register so that it stays up to date and people continue to be in the formal system after a titling project and so we've seen some of those efforts in that the speakers presented but I think that's an issue that it would have been fascinating to dive into where are there examples of sort of these linkages or what makes it difficult to run a program with that comprehensive of a view. That's one that I think is maybe someone can pick up the ball from here. Another specific one that was touched on in the discussion especially with Australia and Canada is the nature of indigenous land rights within sort of a western system. I found that discussion in Australia fascinating and I would have loved to get into that much more than I was able to. Yeah I actually think that that's one of the sort of shadows hanging over a lot of this is how do you actually accommodate, integrate customary law with what's on the statute books and I know there is research about this out there so it's not necessarily a novel idea but in writing these cases and trying to document current experiences you find that it's still something that in many places goes unanswered. It's a very political very difficult thing for many governments to find this social legitimacy of traditional customary systems of land administration and of basically broader administration in a local community and how you marry that with the statutory and with what are very often very progressive laws which make it tough to integrate systems where it's patriarchal sort of chieftainship. So I think these are issues that we need to confront head on. I think another one that links with that that came up is especially when it comes to communal titling efforts. There is this and I think in Mozambique it's very well, it's nicely illustrated. I think it does play a very big role when a community gets this ID card that says this is the community. You take up your citizenship. There is something really powerful to that. But I think we should also keep in mind this idea of ethnicity and to what extent are we asking people to self-define on some kind of ethnic identity saying we are the community, this is our land and you end up defining yourself perhaps in contradiction to neighboring communities. So it's just something that sort of came up that I think is really interesting. I'm not sure how much of that is currently being looked at. Interesting. I want to make sure the audience gets a chance to ask you questions so I won't dig into those right now. But future property rights, our focus is tech and property rights and the different ways we can use tech, I mean tech is not a fantasy yet, but how can we use tech to collapse the time and the cost to remove those barriers so we can spend more time on these other interesting media issues because there are so many things that touch it. So just any reflections on technology and land rights, things you saw that gave you hope, things you saw in country A where you're like oh maybe they should try that in country B, always curious to get people's perspective. Sure. So having worked on the set of cases where sort of computerizing systems played a major role, I think one of the lessons that all three of those speakers kind of drew out today was the importance of really preparing to do that, preparing your people, reviewing the business processes and not just slapping a new computer system onto something that still needs improvement as a manual process. And I think in all three of those cases people learned that that was fundamental and that there were major sort of efficiency gains in just doing those process reviews for instance with survey checking in Jamaica. The way it was described to me was it used to go from point A to point B back to point A, point C back to point A and so on and just making that process a linear one without introducing any technology drastically cut the time and then you can put computerization on top of that and make further gains but had you computerized this sort of spokes on a wheel process you'd still be contending with that now. And so I think while technology can do a lot it doesn't stand on its own. Yeah, I would agree with that. So on the positive side I think in the Tanzanian case we had this mass pilot project where basically people were using mobile phones, smartphones to do some of the surveying, physically walking the boundaries local people trained actually to do this. And that's one area where I do think that you really can save a lot of first of all time and potentially also money. Because something that came up across the cases is the lack of capacity when it comes to surveyors. You often have to wait for someone to be seconded or come in from the private sector. It's very expensive. You have to pay for per diems out in the field. You have to put them up in hotels. So to borrow a phrase from the Australian case I think this is ready for disruption. And obviously you'd have to think through very carefully sort of the standards and how you can counter and implement this. But that's one area where I do think there's a lot to be gained. On the other side though I agree with Maya that there are many areas where we should perhaps wonder first like are there other reforms we need to make before we go into the technology that could potentially be cheaper, easier and yield even greater results. And another issue that did come up is if you're going to build a digital register, if you're going to go that route, then you have to think through long term after that register is up and running who has the license for maintaining that software? What if something goes wrong? Because frankly in many of these countries you're going to need help from the private sector. They're going to need to be in a partnership to get these systems up and running. But then building the capacity within the government and making sure that there are no licensing issues that prohibit them from fixing an issue or updating that system as technology evolves, I think is something to keep in mind. So if you sit down and plan this I think you really have to be careful about thinking very long term. So you kind of anticipated by next question. If we think about the Tanzanian, Mozambique South Africa cases and they're figuring out rights to linearity them saying this person has this right to the space. And then you think about the registry case is much bigger, private enterprise driven off fees. How do you bridge that? How do you to make it simple? Is what we learned about in Jamaica and Australia and Canada applicable to the African context? Do you think it's imaginable you could take the software as a service from Australia? Not that I'm doing a sales pitch for Jodi. And the private enterprise and do a PPP in Tanzania or Kenya? Or if that's not appropriate today, maybe it is. What are the things they should be thinking about now and the way they design what they do have so that it can scale or digitize? Well one thing that I think has come out as Leon and I have sort of worked together on these cases is that the two are very fundamentally intertwined. You can't really think about registry and tenure separately. When we've looked at countries that have made a push to formalize tenure rights, in order for that to really be meaningful in the long term, you need an effective registry that people can access easily that's not unaffordable or too burdensome so that those rights will stay updated. That's been a challenge in a number of contexts where there's inheritance and people will split up their land or people won't go back to the registry to formalize a sale and so making registries easily accessible and technology can be a part of that especially in the longer term means that those tenure rights will be usable. And at the same time these sort of market driven registries that we found the Jamaica, Western Australia and Ontario cases really rely on the existence of a really active, formal real estate market. These agencies are supporting themselves through transaction fees so there need to be transactions and there needs to be a level of economic activity that supports the ability to pay those fees. And so I think integrating the formalization of tenure rights with broader economic development and infrastructure in the business environment then leads you to a point where the market can support the kind of registries that we looked at in Australia and Jamaica and Canada. I think that's very well put. Basically all I would add or maybe just emphasize again is that the technology or the partnership itself is in no way be seen as something that can substitute for sort of the grant work of building the institution. So if you want to have registry offices out in sort of main cities in rural areas of Mozambique or Tanzania you need to actually have the human capacity in those offices to manage whatever kind of system you decide to put in place to manage the partnership that comes with the private sector with the PPP basically. So all I would really add is to say that let's not sacrifice emphasis on building institutions and taking that long view of the training and the capacity building sort of as a price to pay for what may seem like easy fixes because I don't think they are up there. So I'm going to ask one more question and I'll throw it into the audience. One of the things that New America we like to do is get very smart people in as fellows maybe you too would be a fellow. And have them write things that as Ann Marie likes to say it are readable by anybody. Books you would want to read. So if you came in you passed all those cool books which were all written by fellows. And the challenge with land is that it's so nuanced and as Peter Bradley said this morning there's so many complexities. Exactly. Peter gets that a lot. So there's so many nuances that it's hard to write books and engage people and get people to really get excited about property rights until they lived it until they've heard some of the stories we heard today. I mean you're both very good professional writers. So if you were to write a book about this what would the subject be? How would you get people to realize that even though this does take decades not years but there are no quick fixes this is terribly important and it affects people's lives and it can change the course of a country and this is something we need to invest in and think about. So I think something that's really unique about the cases that ISS writes is this idea of putting the reformer sort of in the driver's seat so making the story about real people. And I think that's a technique or an approach that you could extrapolate but I don't know how far you could take it if you're going to write a really substantial book that gets into some of the technical issues but making it human and showing how these seemingly technical issues affect people in real life I think is one of the key things to get people interested because anyone can understand sorting out inheritance after a parent has passed away and if it's complete confusion about what this inheritance looks like who owns what, where is the land. I think that's something we could all very easily relate to and that's potentially one part of what such a book could be like so trying to humanize these stories I think is one key part of it. Yeah and I think the interview based approach personally I'm a very practical person I don't like getting into too much theory of getting concrete to draw people in and when I'm doing interviews one of the things that you hear someone say I'm putting that in the case is when people describe in very vivid terms the problem so we can say that land rights are fundamental to a functioning economy but like when I heard Elgin say we have people lined up intense outside the office it's just a lot more real and when you, we focus on solutions or progress and I think that too is something that maybe the space needs a little more of because I think we've all read enough way too depressing things recently. I would just add that I think going out and speaking to people and getting these stories is a great way to see just how real and human the impact is and I think that's the privilege of writing these cases is that we get these big concepts and these difficult topics and then you go out and you see wow this is what it really means and I'm sort of spontaneously reminded of all things the Arab Spring I mean in Tunisia the way this all began was someone who essentially had insecure property rights I mean to get his name was easier I think or something he ended up setting himself a light because he couldn't run his business he couldn't get a food in the door and that was all fundamentally because of insecure property rights and a story like that as a hook to get someone into this topic I think is important. Wow It reminds me a commercial break before we take questions there's a website called thisisplace.org that does these stories. They have reporters dedicated to a lot of these stories I'm sure this audience is familiar with it but if you're not as well with it, check me out. So are there any questions for these two diligent scribes I can keep going. Do we have a mic? Thanks Mayan Leon and it's really, I agree with you Mike that it's really interesting to hear the backstory of how these case studies were developed and kind of everything that went into them. My question is about dissemination so how do we get these amazing examples into the hands of the right people who can actually use them to make policy decisions or make business decisions or make political decisions what have you you know and I don't know if it's fair to ask you this question but I'm just going to go ahead and ask it anyway because I've been wondering this all day. Who do you think are the right people who should be reading these case studies and aren't yet and how do you think we can get them into those people's hands? So I don't want to completely step on our agenda for day two but one of the things that the cases you know other cases ISS has developed in the past have been used for is in teaching and universities and eventually training people who are going to be making these policy decisions and giving them some examples to think about as they start their careers and so that's one opportunity and of course this event is wonderful and this is a great audience of people who really are active in this space and can give us feedback and sort of this forms a basis of a dialogue but you know I don't have perfect answers I think we're also working on developing different types of content based on this because you know these days you have to have so many different options to meet different people's needs and how they want to consume information so everybody check out the DEVAC's basic live videos. Yeah I mean it is a really difficult issue, a difficult question but I would again agree and say it is a real privilege to have people in the room together here that you know we spoke to in their place of work looking at what is their passion in all these different countries and to bring them together and to see the interaction between these people is already I think something that will add value to everyone and second of all I mean there's a lot of people here today so maybe the interest isn't as low as we sometimes you know imagine it's more a question I think as Julia asked of getting it into the right channel I think there's opportunities on social media I think getting the stories out in a way that makes it clear that it's not gonna be you know the standard technical things although that's obviously very important I think sort of a strategy around that more generally for stories like this I think that we can pursue but yeah I don't think there are easy answers we're all competing with huge amount of media out there today so it's a question that goes well beyond I think the specific forum. There's a question about is there a book that you know could be you know very popular and easily read that one that comes to mind is The Mystery of Capital and none of the sort of but I and many other people are very critical of that because it provides the silver bullet but it oversimplifies everything and so I want to congratulate you guys you authors on taking this subject that's sort of out of your comfort zone and making it palatable and easily consumable but not falling into the trap the disorder trap somehow you managed to you know navigate your way through that and I think congratulations to the whole team here because I think it's very effective you got the simplicity of reading but you caught the complexity of the whole area so well done Hi I'm Scott Justo from Worcester Polytechnic Institute I want to echo the comment that was just made came to the case studies expecting to see something far less nuanced and sophisticated around the deep complexities and so I really appreciated that. I happen to have worked a lot in Monwood BC park so I was pleased to be returned to that story and one of the things that the cases bring forward to me is the difference between urban and rural areas and in rural areas the land often is the fundamental basis for livelihood in urban areas it sometimes is but it's much more complex people need a place to live and they need a place to conduct business but they and they want security of tenure in urban fashion but I wonder if you have thoughts about other bases for capital accumulation you know we have this you know long historical bases around land and and if we focus overly much on land are we sort of looking past some other forms of capital accumulation that we ought to be encouraging and that maybe in fact there might be some synergies between the two you know I think that's an excellent point and one that is maybe the next step for this because as Grenville very clearly pointed out I agree completely titling isn't a silver bullet when you just give someone a land title and say now you have the rights now you can you know form capital and invest you know that there are a lot of intermediate steps before you actually see the benefit and so I think the example that we heard about the sugar cane in Mozambique and some of the other sort of more comprehensive approaches you know I would like to see more work on that or maybe do more work on that and how you can you know develop a framework that is cohesive and doesn't have too many moving parts so that you can integrate not just land and then investment into the land but especially in an urban setting security of tenure and other opportunities but I don't have you know a clear cut answer for you unfortunately. Yeah I just think we talk a lot about debt capital but we should probably also mention human capital I think that's a huge part of this in so many dimensions so if we look at the institutions and actually managing a system it's about people I mean at the end of the day that's what it comes down to and having that relationship with communities and I think crucially whether it's technology or setting up a registry getting local people to buy in and to actually become part of the system I think is a hugely important step and that obviously applies beyond I think property rights or registration but it's something that does sometimes get overlooked I mean you can easily sit in an office and have all these grand schemes and plans but there could just be one small cultural or social nuance that you're unaware of and then your whole registry may collapse so I mean one more BC park I think is a good example of getting into the community trying as much as possible to learn from them about why is it that you know especially in South Africa there is a formal registry that's working the question is why are there so many people who are outside of it and I think tapping into human capital to human experiences I think is the way that we could sort of broaden perhaps our understanding of what the problem is even if you want to go that far and I think it's a good time to mention you know today it was live stream but we'll also be taking these talks and they'll be published up on the Princeton site and on the New America site I think so that if you were to use these cases and you wanted somebody to hear Katherine Ewing talk about the park and to show those before and after pictures think of all the great presentations we said just those slides of this I took this picture then three years later there's a playground or here's a crash this is working making a difference so those materials will be up and a question for you back to the cutting room floor are there other materials you would put up or that could be put up I mean I'm sure there's so much if I were to want to teach a class and want to give students background reading or preliminary reading before I introduce them to the cases yeah I mean it's hard to pull them off the top of my head having spent a lot of time with it but I think there's a lot of reports and laws and analysis that are not in the traditional academic literature just yet I think it'll be interesting to see where people will go with it but you know you spend several weeks reading everything you can get your hands on before you go into the field for these cases so a curriculum would ideally include elements of that as well and I also want to add that we do transcribe and publish selected interviews as well on the ISS website when there's someone in a key position who's just said one insightful thing after the next you know not everything always makes it into the cases and so in those instances there's a recording and a transcript where you hear someone telling their own story and so I think that's a nice compliment in a lot of instances to the cases that look at the big picture of an institution or a program and then you have the story of that through one person's eyes or their component of it I guess one piece of material that would be useful in a teaching context or maybe more broadly certainly something that I found difficult in every case is trying to get at what exactly is the theoretical system so what exactly does Mozambique's land law say what is the ideal scenario that it is actually painting and obviously if you go read the laws it's written as a law it's not an engaging or accessible thing so it's just something off the top of my mind that if you could at least understand what is the theoretical ideal that we want it could help when you go towards implementation so that everyone's sort of on the same page so something basic that says okay so in this country system if I have a registered piece of land what if I die how does inheritance work who's eligible for this sort of to inherit or can it be sold what does it mean when the president owns the land but I have a title you know hashing out these sort of legal issues in a way that can be understandable I think is something that could be helpful time for one more question is anybody got one? Todd and then Serpene yeah my name is Todd Miller I'm with Chrome away we're a blockchain software provider but I don't want to talk about the technology when I pick up something that Mike said about sort of contemplating systems that these sort of leading edge systems that we saw in Australia and Canada versus in the developing world and I guess I had a question about it's kind of about blockchain but about the notion of consensus and it seems that in these informal systems that are they are I think Mike was maybe intimating this that are they maybe incompatible with a computer system that's X or O or one or zero and is there a way that an informal system which we heard some fabulous presentations this morning about that we need to rethink about how our technology systems and things that are emerging now around consensus around our official intelligence but how we may be able to apply those to an informal system where it's really about consensus rather than the law of the land because we know in these countries that it's not as well defined and I don't know if you had any thought about were you hearing about in some of the case studies around well there is consensus about ownership but it's a moving target that we have to be able to capture in that way that was kind of a comment in the question so I would say that potentially technology could actually be so the question is whether you want to document that which is based on a social consensus and in a lot of these countries there is a movement towards at least sort of documenting what already exists even if it's not creating a new right and that's somewhere where I think technology can be more agile than a paper based system right because if you write down today this is who owns what and everyone agrees that could change very quickly and I'm not technology expert but you could potentially have something that's more flexible and could actually adapt to changing realities more but I would say that and this is actually something that comes from the Ebola cases where technology was also something that was being introduced to try to address it that just to give you an example there they used an application in Liberia at some point which was of course this is in the context of an emergency but this was the only sort of Ebola tracing application that was out there at the time but it was designed in Uganda so sort of importing the technology into this different context led to very basic problems like the name of the location where I'm at you start typing it and a place in Uganda pops up you know and that completely messes up any kind of data system that you want to build so again I would say I don't think that it has to only be yes or no I think there are a lot of smart people who can work with different options but the key is to really get into how these social networks really work and operate and how that consensus is generated on the ground as you're developing whatever product it is. Yeah and I'll just add so I'm also not an IP expert but having talked to the people who've developed some of these cutting edge systems I'm quite confident that they could put something together and you can envision a system that has multiple people with different types of rights to the same piece of land that are all entered into a system you know you can envision layers on a map where this is community land this is grazing land this is a parcel where someone's farming and they may overlap and I think to Leon's point you can even down the road see communities where someone's entrusted with allocating these rights updating things themselves but I would just add that you know access to the registry and making sure that there is social buy in and that it's easy for people to go and update things in the register whether it's you know digital or paper based is I think maybe one of the fundamental steps that we're seeing sort of being worked on in many of the developing world cases. I think social preparation is a concept that we can really take to heart in different contexts including this one. Great, now to end on. Do you want me to give them a round of applause?