Towards a Cadastral System Adapted to Haiti: Contributing to Land Security in the Les Cayes Jurisdiction

The argument of this paper is that a cadastre for Haiti cannot be a standard registration system dropped onto the country, because the tenure it would have to record does not have the shape such systems assume. It sets out the broad features of Haitian land structure: the predominance of small private property and minifundium, so that the unit to be recorded is very small and very numerous; a state domain that is undefined and poorly located, so the boundary between public and private claim is itself unresolved; and particular forms of undivided co-ownership, in which a single parcel carries the simultaneous claims of many heirs, none of them separately titled. Presented at Les Cayes in August 2015 as part of a workshop on how to make the cadastre succeed in that jurisdiction, it is one of a set of CIAT papers approaching land security as a practical administrative design problem in a specific place, rather than as a legislative aspiration.