The role of the Bolivia Land Titling Project (BLTP) was to provide financial and technical assistance to four government institutions involved in the process of regularizing property rights and in establishing a municipal cadastre. INRA and the Office of Derechos Reales are the key institutions in the regularization of property rights. These two institutions, as well as the Municipal Government and the Vice-Ministry of Urban Development are involved in the development and installation of the municipal cadastre.
Through a bilateral agreement supporting alternative development in the Cochabamba Tropics, the Bolivian Government and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID/Bolivia) partnered to manage a project focused on the fast, large-scale regularization of property rights in the Cochabamba Tropics. This project served as an additional component to the integrated development focus offering economic development alternatives in the region.
Results-oriented management was used with these institutions as a mechanism for efficiently allocating resources based on concrete goals and the achievement of agreed-upon results. In order to facilitate results oriented management, a monitoring and evaluation system was designed and implemented to allow both employees and the concerned public determine where and in what stage one’s paperwork was. For its users, this system dispelled the mystery and frustration of cumbersome legal paperwork that characterize many public services in Bolivia and that encourage informality in issues such as property rights.
When the Project concluded in May 2008, 467,259 hectares of land, corresponding to 37,073 properties had been incorporated into the property rights regularization process in the Cochabamba Tropics, and the Municipal Government of Villa Tunari had completed the installation of the first integrated municipal cadastre in the country. Both achievements have a nation-wide impact since, on the one hand, the tools that were developed and validated by INRA have been included in the new INRA Law and the National Land Ownership Verification and Titling Plan (Plan Nacional de Saneamiento y Titulación) and, on the other, the Bolivian Federation of Municipal Associations (Federación de Asociaciones Municipales de Bolivia, or FAM) has adopted the integrated municipal cadastre as a national model for its members.