Abstract
The research discusses land-based financing of sustainable infrastructure with land readjustment as an institutional innovation that might finance local sustainable infrastructure in an inclusive and democratic manner. Land-based financing with value capture describes tools with which land value increments deriving from public action can be used to finance infrastructure and public services at virtually no costs for the public. At a time of diminishing tax revenues from the export of oil in the face of continued demographic growth, the expected surge of migration towards cities, and pressure for infrastructure investments to mitigate the effects of climate change post-oil cities are in need of preparing for the expected fiscal stress. Multilateral development agencies embrace urbanization as an opportunity to tackle economic, social, and environmental problems in the ambitious global policy agendas, published as the Habitat III - New Urban Agenda (NUA) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) with, among other tools, the use of land-based financing. When cities prepare for this future it is not reasonable to expect a new income source to replace the oil industry and continue managing cities as before. Instead, there is a need to explore innovative, alternative financing tools that tackle local sustainability challenges with local resources and includes the residents in a democratic decision-making process, such as land readjustment. It is not for nothing, that the New Urban Agenda has promoted land readjustment as one of five principles that mark the shift towards a sustainable, equitable and inclusive policy thinking. However, it appears that the institutionalization of land readjustment policies has not been sufficiently understood from a distributional perspective. While land pooling policies are considered to be equitable land tools the experience with land pooling policies in practice might contradict the equity notion brought forward by the NUA and the international best-practice literature. We take the contradiction that we find between theory and practice in the Republic of Korea as a point of departure for an institutional analysis of distributional problems deriving from the embeddedness of land pooling policies in a larger context of governmental action, from which also post-oil cities can benefit. This adds a new level of scrutiny to the discussion of an equitable urbanization with land pooling policies that has not previously been discussed in the academic literature or the NUA. The findings of the research relate the experiences with land readjustment abroad to post-oil cities and formulate recommendations for the equitable implementation of land readjustment in practice.
