Home > GIS Middle East > 2006 > March - April

Land aministration system: A tool of e-Governance

The vision of a fore guard Moroccan cadastre
In 2001, a study was conducted to modernize the cadastral system in Morocco (Chakir, 2001). The Author proposed three levels: national, regional, and local level. The national level is concerned with questions related to regulation, coordination, supervision, and technology. The regional level supervises and coordinates the regional activities. The local level is responsible for producing cadastral data and maps. The study requires the creation of Regional Directories and Local Delegations as the basis for the modern system. At the local level, the former structure will be transformed radically to set up the new administration. The new structure, as inspired from the model of Australian Land registration in Victoria, includes four units (Figure 1). The structure at the local level as recommended (Chakir, 2001) did not preview the multipurpose aspects of land administration. It's only dealt with cadastral aspects. It is also proposed to create a regional directory to coordinate regional tasks and supervise the local activities. This will be time consuming especially if the system deals only with titling and registration matters. In Morocco, the development of a new vision is needed to implement a multipurpose system to meet user needs in several domains requiring land and cadastral information.

Strategic vision 2006
The vision 2006 proposed a new strategy, which aimed to simplify the organizational procedures to enable the achievement of surveying activities by private companies and allow the ANCFCC to control and maintain the quality of its services and products. It provides a framework of improving national, regional, and local activities by unifying the former components, decentralizing responsibilities, and concentrating practical actions at local levels. The vision reinforces the process of computing all administrative, procedural, and technical tasks of entities of the ANCFCC. The objective is to generalize the establishment of geographical information systems dealing with geodetic, mapping, and cadastral information. The conducted projects as template solutions will be analyzed to adopt and generalize convenient solution. This strategy will not be realized without making new technical and procedural standards to unify processes and facilitates the control and maintenance of its products.

New conceptual framework for new strategy

Analysis of international experience
A multipurpose cadastre was defined as a real world environment gathering parcels data and implemented according to three steps (Mclaughlin, 1975). It should establish a cadastral survey base consisting of two interrelated elements: a spatial control framework and a graphical base. Secondly, a cadastral survey system is built to allow creating and maintaining a series of cadastral maps showing the size, shape, and location of parcels.


Fig. 2 Components of the multipurpose system model

Thirdly, a cadastral records system must be developed to contain two kinds of information concerning public and private ownerships legally recognized in lands and historical development of these rights. In 1980, the Committee on Geodesy of the National Research Council asserted that there is an urgent need to implement a multipurpose cadastre for USA. The established report defined the system as a framework supporting continuous, readily and comprehensive land information at the parcel level. At the European level, the diversity of the developed systems illustrates the richness of the various experiences of land administration systems.

Analysis of the Moroccan context
In order to develop a new approach of modernization, we examined opinions of the principal operators in land administration. Several studies are undertaken and supervised to achieve this goal. The studies concerning the effect of the land structures on national economics in the fields of agriculture, urban and regional planning have permitted to raise three needs. First need is to use a unique framework for reinforcing partnership among various institutions involved in land management (Bouraza and Hagouni, 1999). Second crucial need is to establish a National Council of Standardization to promote and supervise technical aspects of a modern land administration system (Boukbech and Essaadi, 2001). Finally, there is a need to create a National Agency of Land Promoting to ensure long-term reconstitution of real estate belonging to the State (SEH, 2003). Other researches were conducted to analyze the contribution of the new technologies in modernizing the Moroccan system (Amine and Elboulmani, 2001; Ouiouf and Bni, 2002). These studies are undertaken within the Urban Agency of Casablanca city, the Service of Cadastre of Anfa (Casablanca), and many private companies (Elfatihi and Mjouel, 2002).

A survey was remarkably required to illustrate the different visions of various partners. The questionnaire examined three principal elements, which are the cadastral specificities and missions, the organizational aspects, and the modernization strategy. The results of this survey were very interesting in terms of a series of emerged suggestions and requirements. A conceptual framework concerning organizational and technical aspects were designed.

Summary analysis of the survey results
The survey has the aim to examine the attitude of various actors in the field of land, cadastre, and mapping. A summary analysis of the survey results allowed us to affirm that the commitment of several partners is an obvious condition for any approach of reforming and modernizing land and cadastral frames. Any reform based on an organizational transformation of a supervising institution such as the ANCFCC cannot satisfy the objectives of developing our cadastre. Any solution proposed in this way can make improvements inside a concerned institution but cannot solve the overall problems related to the land administration and management. In the same way, initiatives taken alone from various administrations aiming to overcome their problems always remain inefficient.

The survey permits to conclude that there is a need to process for a large co-operation gathering various actors to conceive legal and technical tools as essential requirements for developing the country. Thus, it is not necessary to adopt a vision of change of an organization or an administration or proceed to the implementation of new structures without designing a convenient strategy and solution. The future solution should be made together ensuring the commitment and agreement of various partners. One may conclude that the concept of cadastre was largely dominated by the concepts of titling and registration as introduced by the settlers. The description of the whole land to develop a public inventory serving for several interests and purposes is far from being conceived for Morocco (El Ayachi, 2005).

An integrated land administration system for e-governance purposes

Paradigm of an integrated multipurpose model
From the analysis of the visions and scenarios developed in Morocco, the two approaches in North America, the statements of the new visions cadastre 2014, and the current, nature, and needs of the Moroccan system, the following components are proposed to serve as the basis of a new vision to develop and implement a multipurpose land information system (Figure 2). Developing the system requires contribution of many departments to perform fundamental components of the system. Both governmental and private institutions are involved concurrently to integrate all items of the new system. The implementation of each component belongs to a specific institution at national, regional, and local level.