An Interrogation of the Land Consolidation Traditions of the People’s Republic of China, Germany, The Netherlands and Rwanda

Land consolidation has in the past, been used primarily to support food security. However, its use has revolved into a multipurpose land management tool. It is used in different ways, and in different regions has been based on their land consolidation tradition – history, purpose, more importantly, the relationship between the people and the land. This paper therefore seeks to chart through the history, purpose, as well as other ancillary factors such as the land tenure system, the nature of the land market of four established land consolidation approaches – two from Western Europe (The Netherlands and Germany), from Sub-Saharan Africa (Rwanda), and from Asia (China). The paper finds that whereas food security seems to be a common theme throughout, rural development has gradually become synonymous with land consolidation in some areas, whereas, disaster risk, and climate change adaptation has been seen have a presence in the past few decades. Land valuation is further common for all four land consolidation traditions. The German and the Dutch traditions have similar processes of valuation, that is the use of the agronomic method in the determination of the soil value. The same is true of the PRC, however, the approach and factors used are not the same. There is a further difference in the use of the expropriation tool in all four countries, with the German and Dutch Land consolidation favouring a more participatory approach, which severely limits the use of expropriation, except in extreme cases, whilst the Rwandan and Chinese situations actively use expropriation in the land consolidation process at varying levels, but more frequently