ABSTRACT
Land availability for new development and trends in the property market are influenced by a combination of physical factors (topographical and geological suitability of land for development), economic factors (demand and supply), administrative factors (the legal, institutional and procedural framework for land administration, and land policy formulation and implementation) and political factors (both the underlying structure of a country’s political economy and everyday political imperatives). In this chapter the aim is to illustrate the usefulness of a political economy approach developed at the micro-scale that is able to disentangle the variety of influences mentioned above and assess their relative importance as explanatory factors.
