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.