Informal Rights Research Articles

The urban political ecologies of the green spaces of socialist housing estates: an analysis of green spaces in Bucharest, Romania

ABSTRACT This paper employs the Urban Political Ecology (UPE) framework in order to decipher the unequal geohistorical developments of the Green Spaces of Socialist Housing Estates (GSSHE) in Bucharest under socialist and post-socialist urban political economies. We respond to the call for provincializing and expanding UPE research beyond the Western world with our theoretically informed, empirically grounded study, as literature on socialist and post-socialist socio-natures is virtually non-existent. Bucharest’s GSSHE developed during the socialist era through an allocation of informal temporary land use rights that engendered practices of gardening and agriculture. During post-socialism, residents retained informal rights to use the land, engaging in activities such as gardening, temporary constructions, and house expansion. Simultaneously, patterns of both formal and informal privatization also began to emerge. The last decade brought strong institutional-led change, as district mayors of Bucharest redeveloped green spaces to serve the shifting conditions within the capitalist urban political economy. As some spaces have been completely destroyed, converted to parking spaces, bulldozed for temporary and illegal constructions, or placed under a green revitalization program, these more recent developments have come into conflict with, and partially into a negotiated relationship with, the past legacies of gardening, alternative welfare, and their preserved inequalities.

Engendering access to justice for development in Sub-Saharan Africa: a study of policy, programming and implementation

Building on the book "Gender, poverty and access to justice: policy implementation in Sub-Saharan Africa" (Lawson, Dubin and Mwambene (eds) (2020), this special volume of essays is the result of the Conference in Cape Town (October 2019), whose main objective was to investigate the intersection of gendered access to justice, poverty and disempowerment across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), and provide field-based research and discussions on what does and does not work to improve justice for women and girls in the region. Authors' contributions are designed to be practice and action oriented, drawing on lessons and experiences from programmes and policies that work, and show real potential for their sustainable scalability. In this regard, the essays in this volume reflect a broad spectrum of multi-disciplinary contributions, including from policy makers and development practitioners, as well as representatives from local and international civil society organizations, the private sector, academe and the general public. These contributions are structured around the following five key areas: Integrating Justice Programming into the Sustainable Developmental Goals (SDGs); Informal Institutions, Rights and Laws in Sub- Saharan Africa; Women, Children and Access to Justice for Sustainable Development; Policies and Practices for Engendering Justice and Empowerment for Poverty Reduction; and Gender, and Poverty and Justice Policies in SSA: Lessons from the Field? The central objective of all the contributions, however, is to profile recent developments and experiences in furthering gendered access to justice in the SSA context, and to distil from them future trends for SSA's access to justice, and the specific role stakeholders can play therein.

Governance and Informal Economies: Informality, Uncertainty and Street Vending in China

Abstract How can people who work in the informal sector protect property rights and address uncertainties? Street vending forms an essential part of urban economies in developing countries like China, and most street vendors operate outside state regulation. They encounter market-based uncertainties and uncertainties caused by unpredictable enforcement. Empirical data collected in Guangzhou and Guilin suggests that street vendors form private governance organizations to solve resource limitations, allocate pitches and resist government interference. Street vendors who cannot rely on effective private governance organizations may purchase protection from a third party (e.g. agents of the state) to secure informal rights to a particular spot and avoid confiscation of their wares and equipment. This study contributes to existing literature on private governance and informality by empirically examining private governance institutions in an informal economy.

Commoning the bloom? Rethinking bee forage management in industrial agriculture

Managed and wild bee populations are declining around the world, in part due to lost access to bee forage (i.e., nectar and pollen). As bee forage diminishes, the remaining acres become sites of contestation between beekeepers, land managers, ecologists, and regulatory agencies. This article applies a commons framing to contextualize these conflicts and attempts to resolve them. Drawing from the concepts of commons and commoning, I argue that nectar and pollen are common-pool resources for pollinators, beekeepers, and land managers, currently managed through varied access arrangements such as informal usufruct rights and pseudo-commoning practices. Like commoning, pseudo-commoning aims to collectively manage a resource through a set of protocols that involve equitable resource sharing and communication. However, because pseudo-commons are implemented from the top down, for example, from institutional actors driven in part by economic interests, they often do not result in widespread adoption on the ground. Through a case in California almond orchards, I make two additional arguments. First, because beekeepers are largely migratory and do not own the land they need for production, their subordinate position to landowners can challenge equitable bee forage management. Second, while floral pseudo-commons may aim to counter the negative effects of industrialized agricultural production (e.g., by limiting pesticide exposure to honey bees), they also provide a “fix” that supports and expands industrial agriculture by stabilizing managed bee pollination services. Increasing reliance on managed bee pollination services can thus disincentivize transitions to sustainable food production, such as adopting diversified practices that would support native bee populations and reduce the need for managed honey bees on farms.

Community‐based conservation strategies to end open access: The case of Fish Refuges in Mexico

AbstractSecure property rights are often seen as a precondition of incentives for long‐term sustainable use by communities dependent on natural resources. Securing formal property rights can be challenging in coastal small‐scale fisheries, which often operate under open access conditions. We argue that insecure, informal rights can offer one pathway for property‐rights regime change, and may also provide greater flexibility for developing sustainable fishing practices compatible with climate change adaptation, among other policy‐relevant outcomes. The process of establishing short‐term but renewable area‐based conservation tools, such as the Fish Refuges of Baja California Sur, Mexico, offers the opportunity to examine how community‐based strategies can generate incentives for conservation despite the lack of secure property rights. Using in‐depth qualitative methods, socioeconomic surveys, and ecological data from 2009 to 2019, we studied the process of engagement among fishers, civil society, and government. We focused on understanding the emerging transition from a scenario of open access and limited withdrawal property rights, toward locals' attaining of insecure defacto management and exclusion property rights and longer‐term visions of resource use and conservation. Altogether, this case illustrates the potential and limitations of Fish Refuges as an area‐based fisheries and conservation tool.

Conflicting Levels of Engagement under the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act and the Minerals and Petroleum Development Act: A Closer Look at the Xolobeni Community Dispute

The South African customary land tenure system is currently administered in terms of the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act 31 of 1996 (IPILRA). As the name suggests, this is a temporary measure to protect vulnerable customary land rights while awaiting permanent communal land tenure legislation. In terms of section 2(1) of the IPILRA, no person may be deprived of any informal right to land without his or her consent. This provision is subject to subsection (4) of the IPILRA, the Expropriation Act 63 of 1975 or any other law that provides for the expropriation of land rights. Accordingly, section 2(4) states that no one may be deprived of his or her informal rights in land unless it is through the Expropriation Act, any valid land expropriation legislation or through custom that is endorsed by a majority of the community members.
 Nevertheless, the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) and the mineral right applicants habitually contravene this consent provision by not including the beneficiaries of the IPILRA in the mineral right application process. The DMR awards licences without the communities' consent because the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act 28 of 2002 (MPRDA) authorises it to act as the custodian of mineral resources on behalf of all South Africans. When an application for mineral rights is received, it is the DMR's duty as a custodian to ensure that all the requirements of the MPRDA have been complied with. These levels of engagement, consent under the IPILRA and consultation in terms of the MPRDA, form the basis of the analysis of the decision of Baleni v Minister of Mineral Resources. Although the court decided that the acceptable level of engagement is consent in terms of the IPILRA, this article argues that consultation and consent are not mutually exclusive, and hence require reading the two pieces of legislation together.

Baleni v Minister of Mineral Resources 2019 2 SA 453 (GP): Paving the Way for Formal Protection of Informal Land Rights

In Baleni v Minister of Mineral Resources 2019 2 SA 453 (GP) the court, duly following the judicial guidance provided in Maledu v Itereleng Bakgatla Mineral Resources 2019 2 SA 1 (CC), made an important pronouncement on the rights of people who hold informal land tenure. The question in the Baleni judgment concerned the level of consent required to obtain a mining right over property held by a community with informal or customary land tenure. The court specifically considered provisions of the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act 31 of 1996 (IPILRA) and the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act 28 of 2002 (MPRDA), and concluded that the provisions of these Acts should be read together when determining the level of consent required. The court found that a community's consent, as required by IPILRA, and not merely consultation with a community, as required by the MPRDA, is necessary before a mining right can be obtained over a community's property. The Baleni and the Maledu judgments set an important judicial precedent protecting informal land owners against the potentially harmful effects of mining activities, and establish a higher standard for obtaining a mining right over such property. However, despite the success of the judgment, many questions remain regarding the longevity of IPILRA, in particular, and a long-term solution to informal land tenure and land security in general. This case note argues that final legislation should be enacted to provide protection for people who hold informal land rights, and consequently to formalise indigenous communities' land rights to ensure that these judgments act as the precursor for fundamental change in the current debate regarding informal land rights.

Incremental production of urban space: A typology of informal design

Informal settlement is a form of incremental urban design and planning that seems set to remain a primary mode of urban development in cities of the global South. Yet, we know very little about how incremental urbanism works. In this paper, we suggest a typology of increments as a conceptual lens for understanding the emergence of informal settlement morphologies. We consider the ways residents extend and renovate buildings at micro-spatial scales and identify typical increments of ‘extend’, ‘attach’, ‘replace’, ‘divide’, ‘connect’ and ‘infill’. We also explore the informal rights and codes that govern the ways in which some increments encroach on public space – ‘rights of way’, ‘air-rights’ and ‘the right to light and ventilation’. We engage with the paradox that while every increment is a form of upgrading, informal settlements often produce slum conditions. We suggest that the most effective knowledge base for slum upgrading practices lies in a better understanding of informal settlement as a mode of spatial production.

Women activists’ strategic use of the courts in Pakistan

ABSTRACTThe women's movement in Pakistan strategically used the courts to fight for rights-based empowerment over the last 40 years. Its demand to hold the state and judiciary accountable for delivering on its constitutional promise of fundamental rights has led to landmark public interest litigation jurisprudence. This paper presents for the first time the movement's full history of litigation in its key areas of concern: sexual and reproductive rights, protection from discriminatory laws and informal justice mechanisms, socio-economic and environmental rights and political rights. Achievements include positive verdicts, sensitizing judges, progressive legislation and increased public awareness.

THE INTEGRATION OF 3D SPATIAL AND NON – SPATIAL COMPONENT FOR STRATA MANAGEMENT

Abstract. Nowadays, due to rapid development and large populations especially in urban areas has caused indoor spaces of buildings becomes bigger and more complex. In most developing countries, the needs of advance cadastre systems and land administration are vital due to rapid development and large population area especially in the city centre such as Kuala Lumpur. More populations have caused more limited space, which explains the need to build a more vertical building. Due to this, an efficient strata management are required for managing the strata title. A study of country-based profile on cadastre domain standard has been conceptualized for land administration in Malaysia that allows integration of 2D and 3D representation of spatial units with supports of both formal and informal Rights, Restrictions and Responsibilities (RRR). Since this research used Malaysia cadastre management as a case study, the proposed model for the Malaysian land administration country profile was embedded in the integration model. Meanwhile, a new working item proposal for LADM Edition II has been introduced on the idea of encoding further integration of land administration with an existing standard such as IndoorGML. Hence, this paper proposes a conceptual model on the integration between both legal space (indoor) and legal object using LADM Edition II and IndoorGML standards for strata purposes. Three objectives had been recognized to achieve the aim of the study. Firstly, to identify the integration of spatial components and non-spatial components for strata management. The second is to develop a conceptual data model for strata with the integration of LADM Edition II and IndoorGML and lastly, is to develop a prototype to validate the proposed conceptual data model. Thus, the development of the conceptual model may provide insights or ideas for future work and land administration on strata purposes.

Real Estate Knowledge and the Development of a Real Estate Curricula for African Universities

Real estate education across the globe has, at its core, certain universal and value-neutral skills and knowledge. This knowledge has developed over decades to reflect the functions of specific market structures which characterise real estate markets. Moreover, it is reflective of the maturity of real estate markets, and as such, the tools developed reflect specific market structures. Real estate analysts are becoming increasingly interested in real estate markets in emerging economies. The challenge facing these analysts is that the dominant real estate theory is based on mature markets within an industrialised context and therefore do not accurately reflect real estate markets in emerging economies. The generic context of real estate markets in emerging economies tends to be characterised by a dual economy, a lack of transparency in the markets, high levels of uncertainty and the existence of communal/customary and informal rights in the ownership of real estate. Hence, this study examines the real estate academic syllabus taught by universities in Sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so this ongoing research aims to assess and understand the differences that exist between the real estate programmes and examine the direction that these programmes could take in an emerging country context.

Illegality and inequity in Ghana’s cocoa-forest landscape: How formalization can undermine farmers control and benefits from trees on their farms

Schemes to promote sustainable forest management have increasingly focused on addressing widespread informalities in timber production, based on the presumed links between formalisation, the maintenance of forest cover and local welfare. This trend is typified by the EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative and associated Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPA) aimed at eradicating the trade of illegal wood between partner countries and the EU. Yet there is concern that such initiatives might have detrimental impacts on the largely informal rights of local resource users. In order to inform the formalisation agenda, more detailed analysis of the operation of local rights, and how they might be affected by particular schemes is required.This paper focuses on Ghana as a country with a largely informal wood sector that has signed a VPA with the EU for the express purpose of rapid formalisation. Our analysis is guided by a framework for assessing which types of rights might be transformed by particular approaches to formalisation and the subsequent effect this might have on forests and people in particular local contexts. We then apply this framework to an in-depth local case study of on-farm timber governance within a cocoa-forest landscape in Ghana’s Central Region to examine how the operation of formal and informal and substantive and procedural rights shape who controls, and benefits from, on-farm timber production. We then analyse the content of the VPA in light of these local realities and assess its potential impacts.Our findings highlight how the substantive rights the state grants to companies are presumed to be balanced with the granting of procedural rights to farmers via the mechanisms of right of refusal to harvest on-farm timber, compensation for damage to cocoa crops and the negotiation of community-level Social Responsibility Agreements with private companies. Yet a comparison of these formal rights with farmers’ existing informal rights reveals that farmers’ control and access to benefits from trees on their farms are notably higher in the ‘illegal’ chainsaw dominated informal sector than in the ‘legal’ state-based system. Farmers choose to maintain trees on farms both to shade cocoa and in anticipation of benefits from their informal sale. The VPA, however, aims to eradicate all informal on-farm timber production and thus threatens existing local rights and benefit capture while diminishing incentives to maintain trees on farm. Rather than further criminalising local systems of timber governance, the maintenance of tree cover and local benefit-sharing would be better served by 1) phasing out timber concessions on farmland, 2) abandoning the distinction between planted and native trees on farms and, 3) understanding, recognizing and respecting the existing informal rights of farmers, traditional authorities and chainsaw loggers to negotiate among themselves patterns of access and control of on-farm trees and timber. In general, the case study challenges the assertion that formalisation is requisite for sustainable forest management and mandates a more nuanced and contextually informed assessment of the assumed costs and benefits associated with particular forms of legal and policy reform.

PERFORMANCE OF RIGHTS OVER NATURAL FOREST AND ITS IMPACT ON LOCAL PEOPLE’ LIVELIHOOD IN VIETNAM’S UPLAND: A CASE STUDY IN HUONG LAM COMMUNE, A LUOI DISTRICT, THUA THIEN HUE PROVINCE

For the upland people, especially ethnic minorities, forest plays a very important role in daily life. However, the implementation of the rights over the forest can be formal (legal rights) and informal (right in the practice) and it always affects the livelihoods of upland people. In this context, conceptual framework of this study considers the implementation of activities based on forests as the implementation of "bundles of rights" over forests and people’s livelihood activities consist of natural resources based and non-natural resources based. This study was conducted in a Ka Non 1 village, Huong Lam commune, A Luoi district, Thua Thien Hue province, is a poor and remote area village where the Kinh and ethnic minorities (Co Tu and Ta Oi) live together. The study found out some key findings as follows: the life of a villager in Ka Non 1 still depends much on forests. Local people still carry out activities relating to natural forests (perform informal rights over forests) such as shifting cultivation, logging, gathering non-timber forest products (NTFPs) and hunting wildlife even if they do not have any legal rights (formal rights) over those forest area. Ethnic minorities carry out shifting cultivation to mainly meet food needs for daily life, while the Kinh people tend to carry out shifting cultivation in the first year, and then switch to plant forest. Other forest based activities with the main purpose is income generation, especially logging.Key words: A Luoi, Bundles of Rights, Ethnic Minority, Livelihood, Natural Forest

The right to move: informal use rights and urban practices of mobility

ABSTRACTEveryday urban practices are enabled by both formal and informal rights regimes. Researchers often focus on the effects of formal rights; informal rights to use urban spaces have been less widely examined, particularly in North America. This article examines practices of intra-urban mobility in a gentrifying area of Portland, Oregon. We find that rights regimes regarding movement in urban space importantly shape who uses particular transit strategies and infrastructures. Specifically, we identify rights regimes rooted in explications of a city ideal and a neighborhood ethic. We suggest that Portland’s widely admired transit planning process has not sufficiently engaged with informal use rights in transit spaces, leading to uneven adoption of a transportation infrastructure that re-inscribes historic racialized injustices. An examination of informal use rights complicates common rights analytics, including those leveraging Lefebvre’s right to the city, emphasizing how all urban rights are contingent, contested and negotiated.

The right to space production and the right to necessity: Insurgent versus legal rights of Palestinians in Jerusalem

The major problem with theories of the right to the city is that they inherently assume that states are the sole provider of rights and that, in liberal–democratic countries, legal rights are conceptually universal and apply to all individuals equally. I challenge these assumptions and maintain that in some situations, when the state and its governing apparatus violate or deny the very basic rights of a social or ethnic collective, the group itself becomes an alternative source of informal rights. I conceive this violation of basic needs as a necessity state of affairs, which constitutes a true and proper source of law and it makes the right to space production and the right to necessity. Thus, the state of necessity is the source of these informal rights and law, and necessity gives them the legitimation they needs. The disadvantaged groups, the community, not the State, give it the legitimation they need. As Agamben suggests in his State of Exception, that necessity has no law and necessity creates it own law. From this perspective, the right to the production of space is a plane of contradictions and struggle over the distribution of resources and rights among people in general, and between the state and its local government and planning and development institutions in particular. Seen in this light, it is clear that the right to the production of space entails not only formal legal rights but also the informal rights, the right to necessity, generated and invoked by disadvantaged groups.The production of space, then, is born and reborn at the heart of the contradictions between formal and informal rights, and between the state’s planning apparatus and spatial agenda on the one hand and the status of disadvantaged groups on the other. The conceptual framework offered here seeks to resolve and overcome these contradictions through its contingent relations between legal rights, which are produced and distributed by the state, and the rights of necessity generated and invoked by the collective. From this perspective, the right to the production of space offers a normative framework for illuminating the relationship between the production of space, structure, and power relations at the state and city level and their relations with collective groups, as well as a means of struggle for basic rights of recognition and of the reorganization of urban society.

A Coasian perspective on informal rights assignment among waste pickers in the Philippines

This paper examines in light of the Coase Theorem how delineation of a degree of enforceable rights for a previously open-access dumpsite in the Philippines would affect market transactions of waste pickers. It shows that a simplistic exclusion solution was not enough to constrain rent dissipation of recyclables in the primeval land fill. Some intervention of non-government organisations backed by some initial government assistance were found helpful in reducing transaction costs to sustain operations and promote innovations and initiatives from the scavengers themselves despite obvious external economic difficulties.

Teleodynamics and institutional change: The hardship of protecting the Amur tiger, big-leaf mahogany, and gray wolf

The global biodiversity is in decline because modern societies are organized for that purpose. The design, implementation and enforcement of international, regional and national environmental policies have not helped to reverse the trend. In our paper, we analyze the hardship of protecting the gray wolf in Finland, the big-leaf mahogany in Peru, and the Amur tiger in Russia. Our comparative approach is based on the old institutional economics, and our key concept – the unit of analysis – is a transaction, i.e. enactment, practice and transfer of formal and informal rights to future benefits. Transactions challenge, disturb and re-organize the existing institutional scaffold. William Connolly (The Fragility of Things, 2013) and Terrence Deacon (Incomplete Nature, 2012) have recently argued that teleodynamics, the purposeful and end-directed behaviors and the reactions and disturbances in other related ententional behaviors are key to understand not only the dynamics of institutional change per se but also, and especially so, the emergent patterns of behavior resulting from resistance and adaptation. These teleodynamic consequences reveal the problems in institutional fit, i.e. how the institutional arrangements, particular customary circumstances and habitual actors fit together. We abduct three types of emerging order springing from the reactions to national biodiversity policies: (i) the practice of faking the institutional fit, (ii) the practice of disobedience; and, (iii) willingness to take part in the making of new institutional arrangements. These vary according to the purpose, working rules (set of rights) and motivation. We explain the interrelated meaning of purpose, working rules and motivation in the context of institutional fit in detail. In our cases, the fit is not exactly the one envisioned through the authoritative rules and the purpose of institutional conservation, but it is an order nevertheless, and that order is not necessarily good for endangered species.

A comparative analysis of the effects of institutional property rights on forest livelihoods and forest conditions: Evidence from Ghana and Vietnam

Effective institutional property rights are increasingly becoming an important part in the allocation of scarce forest resources and to combat the “tragedy of the commons” thesis. Our paper outlines conceptual, analytical and theoretical aspects of forest institutional property rights and an empirical synthesis of main findings from institutional property rights effectiveness in a cross-country comparative context. The paper employs property rights based framework coupled with some New Institutional Economics (NIE) debates as a diagnostic framework for understanding forest property rights. The Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) provides empirically insights into how “forest institutional property rights” impact on forest communities' livelihoods and management. Our analysis provides support for the argument that forest institutional property rights play important role in the livelihoods of forest dependent communities and in forest management, but that can be context specific as showcased in our findings. Finally, the paper makes some recommendations in institutional analysis of forest property rights, such as strong and clearly defined property rights, integration of formal and informal rights and suggests strong linkage between institutional property rights and sustainable livelihoods as a “panacea” for sustainable forest livelihoods and management in developing countries.

Samuel Roth: Discourteous Reprinter

This article offers an in-depth view of the lawful piracy of foreign works in the United states in the early twentieth century, a practice that was made possible by protectionist features of U.S. copyright law in that period. The focus is the New York publisher Samuel Roth, a “pirate” who, paradoxically, abided by U.S. copyright law while filling his magazines with unauthorized foreign material. Roth built his career on the resources of this unusual feature of the American public domain. U.S. copyright law in 1925 was isolationist and protectionist; its technicalities were a constant worry to foreign-domiciled authors like James Joyce who could not always satisfy the rigid statutory conditions for copyright protection. Among those conditions was the requirement that English-language books be typeset, printed, and bound on American soil within a fixed number of months after publication abroad, on pain of loss of U.S. copyright forever. Confronted with these legal hurdles and shadowed by a reputation for indecency, Joyce made no attempt to secure U.S. copyright for the book version of Ulysses or for the early published extracts of what eventually became Finnegans Wake. These works lay in the American public domain, where Roth found them.Even though Roth’s publishing activities were lawful in the United States, he was called a “pirate” during his lifetime and probably always will be. This is because he violated the principles of what had been known since the nineteenth century as “the courtesy of the trade,” an informal, norms-based practice voluntarily engaged in by American publishers which restored a precarious order to the publishing scene by imitating the main features of copyright law and permitting both publishers and authors to benefit, though inconsistently, from the wholly informal exclusive rights that trade courtesy recognized. In its simplest form, courtesy awarded informal rights to the first publisher that announced plans to reprint an unprotected foreign work — a kind of makeshift copyright grounded on tacit trade agreements and community-based norms. According to this communal fiction, competitors were required to resist the temptation to exploit a free literary resource once it was claimed by the first comer. Participating publishers often paid foreign authors an honorarium or royalty and sought their permission for reprinting works — all in the name of self-interested honor. But courtesy was always threatened at the margins by upstarts or renegades in the trade who saw no reason to observe a code that could bring them no immediate, tangible benefits. Deviants from courtesy were called “pirates” by the reputable houses. Samuel Roth was one of those deviants. This article tells part of his story.

Slum Planning Schemes

Public agencies and NGOs in India have been pursuing slum-improvement projects since a long time, often with remarkable success. However, though political resolve, finances and basic institutional capacity are not a constraint today, scaling-up has become a formidable challenge. This article argues that officers in government agencies are unable to rapidly structure and implement slum-improvement projects because they lack an effective slum-improvement-specific statutory framework within which to operate. Moreover, lacking overriding legal powers, they are unable to cut through accumulated revenue and planning related regulatory tangles. In addition, they are unable to adjudicate between and compensate claimants and to grant secure tenure so that public officials may deliver basic infrastructure on formerly disputed land and slum dwellers can access finance and invest into their homes in a then safe environment. Therefore, the key to scaling-up—as the ambitious Rajiv Awas Yojana proposes to do—is to institute a comprehensive statutory process enabling agencies to concurrently deal with technical, financial, organizational and tenure complexities. The introduction explains the need for the statutory framework. Section I proposes the process. ‘slum Planning Schemes’ strengthen participation, enable collaboration with NGOs and the private sector, promote transparency, encourage professional excellence and support fiscal prudence. The tool acknowledges the importance of tenure history and upholds formal and informal rights of landowners, communities and the government. The process is pragmatic and promotes fairness. Eschewing a one-size-fits-all policy approach, it allows flexibility in structuring slum-specific improvement projects while assigning tenure rights. Section II briefly describes a network of local, state and national agencies for rapidly structuring and implementing SPSs, promising rapid and sustainable improvement and integration of slum communities within the formal city.