HOW MAPPING LAND RIGHTS ADVANCES PEACE

BY BRENT JONES

By the time the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Force of Colombia (FARC) finally brokered a peace agreement in 2016, their 50-year-old civil war had claimed 260,000 lives.

Land reform was always at the heart of the conflict. As in many Latin American countries, most land in Colombia is concentrated among an elite group. Just 14 percent of all landowners control 80 percent of the land, a strong indicator of inequality.

During the war, some rural areas were effectively cut off from the rest of the country, as government troops, paramilitary groups, and the FARC fought over territory. So many people were driven from their land over the years that today Colombia’s displaced population—nearly 8 million—is the world’s largest.

Even for rural Colombians who have remained on their land, property rights are highly contingent in the post-conflict era. People who possess small plots of land have no official recognition of their ownership, or even the exact dimension of their plots.

“Without having a proper land administration system in place, the government doesn’t know about the relationships between the

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brent Jones oversees Esri’s worldwide strategic planning, business development, and marketing activities for land records, cadastral, surveying, and land administration. As a recognized innovator, Jones specializes in modernizing existing land administration systems and designing new GIS-based cadastral management systems for small and large governments globally. He is a member of the URISA board of directors, past president of the Geospatial Information and Technology Association and a current member of the United Nations Committee of Experts on Geospatial Information Management sitting on the Expert Group on Land Administration and Management. Esri creates systems that drive all components of land and cadastral administration, including addressing, registration, taxation/valuation, planning, and development.