Resource information
This review of land tenure in West Asia and North Africa (WANA or the Near
East region) places contemporary developments in their historical context. Land
tenure in the region has its origins in state, customary or religious law, or more often a
combination of the three. With the ascendancy of the nation state over the past
century, official legal systems has sought to entrench sovereignty over land with the
abolition of customary law and the evolution of
Shari’ah to deal with modern needs of
economic development. Often this has meant a degree of secularisation in property
rights law with western legal concepts gaining influence across the whole of the region.
With rapidly rising human populations across the region, the area of arable land and
pasture per capita has decreased in all countries during the past thirty years. These
growing pressures has prompted a policy shift in most counties in the region towards
finding new, adapted or novel combinations of property rights alternatives to enhance
productivity, technology adoption and better resource management practices.