Aspects Of Land Use Governance On Pangkor Island

Abstract

The growth of world’s population directly causes depletion of natural resources, including land resources to meet the demand for food, house and other human needs. Limited land resources and rising demand in turn lead to conflicts in land use. In the context of developing an island, scarce land resource is often an important issue that becomes the public concern. Governance of land use in an island is different from the mainland where it is influenced by factors such as limited land resources, population growth, sectoral competition for land use and carrying capacity. Challenges that exist on Pangkor Island today are mostly centered on the issue of housing, infrastructure, utilities and waste management where the efficient and effective land use planning and development is indispensable to solve these issues. This study discusses the aspects of land use governance with specific reference to one of the famous tourist islands in Malaysia. In Malaysia, an institutional actor is a dominant actor in the governance process of land usage while the private sector and civil society have its own function in the entire network of governance. For each existing proposal of land use, a complete information system will have data on its type, location, amount, condition, quality, timing, and cost. In the traditional land information system, at least up-to-date type, location and amount data are required for accurate land planning. Land use can also be classified into five different dimensions; namely general site development, economic “over-use”, activity characteristics, site adaptation and actual use.