Excerpt
LAND policy and planning depend on quality information. That dependency has long been recognized, and information gathering is a key step in the initial stages of problem definition, plan formulation, and policy analysis. Planners traditionally have focused on environmental, engineering, and economic data about land, such as soils, hydrological capacity, access to infrastructure, development costs, and constraints due to location (4, 7, 19).
But recently, some planners and researchers (1, 23, 24) have argued that land ownership information is a key to successful policy formulation and implementation. Information on who owns land, why they own it, and how ownership is structured has direct implications for design of land policy instruments (6, 11, 12) and resource management programs, such as soil conservation (9, 16, 17).
The importance of integrated land information systems for land policy and planning is gaining recognition in both developed and less developed countries (3, 21, 22). U.S. planners are developing computerized systems that bring together traditional resource, economic, and engineering data with ownership data. These experiments in upgrading land information data encompass all levels of government and are expected to continue into the future (8, 13, 15, 18).
Data about the composition and rate of land …
Footnotes
Harvey M. Jacobs is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison 53706. D. David Moyer, a state land information systems advisor with the National Geodetic Survey, U.S. Department of Commerce, is an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This research was done under cooperative research agreement no. 58-319V-4-00234 between the Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Center for Resource Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The authors would like to thank Kathleen E. Dickhut, Neil MacGaffey and Kevin J. Colson for their research and editorial assistance and Frank J. Popper and other reviewers for comments on an earlier, more technical version of this paper.
- Copyright 1986 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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