Elasticity between the cadastre and land tenure: Balancing civil and political society interests in Poland

Abstract

The cadastre provides formal instruments for governments to administer land, theoretically assuring critical space and resources for economic activities in Western societies. The informal organization of access and control of land in any society, conducted often in parallel to the formal cadastre, is known as land tenure. The cadastre records land ownership and rights to land. It is also an important means for coordinating land governance, private activities, and public concerns related to land. The ongoing challenges for government use of the cadastre are largely administrative and political, no longer technical. In the case examined here of Poland, a country undergoing rapid post-Socialist socio-economic change, the challenges are evident in rural discrepancies between the cadastre and land tenure. They reflect historical tensions between colonizing formal government institutions and informal resistance institutions developed to allocate access and control of land for most of the past 300 years in Poland. During this period Polish political and civil society has worked out a number of complex delegations of control and authority to regulate these discrepancies and provide for a flexible balance between competing and conflicting interests. Much rural land ownership was secured through an array of informal arrangements involving actors with overlapping and conflicting interests. The formal cadastre, in these cases, is often reduced to a self-referential institution solely for use by government agencies. Verdery's concept of “elasticity” aids in understanding how discrepancies between cadastre and land tenure have been traditionally resolved in relations between Polish political and civil society. The current transformation of Poland to a capitalist economy beginning in 1989 is altering various aspects of these arrangements. Recent entry (May, 2004) into the European Union has additionally greatly accelerated the process of change. Based on literature analysis and the preliminary analysis of the different roles the cadastre plays in three Polish counties (powiat), the article presents some ideas for conceiving of the cadastre as part of a framework for the societal allocation and the coordination of access and control to land. It argues that the elasticity between rural formal de jure cadastre and informal de facto land tenure points to problems plainly visible in rural Poland yet relevant to cadastral information infrastructures occurring around the world. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.