Piloting Resilience: Insights from the VARS Project in Vanuatu’s Urban Recovery

On 17^th December 2024 around midday, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck just 30 km away from Vanuatu’s capital city of Port Vila. No stranger to disasters, the nation has weathered three major cyclones in 2023 alone. But recovery from this impact has felt a little different. 14 people tragically lost their lives, and an estimated 80,000 people were impacted nationally. Some six months on, parts of the CBD still remain closed to the public as the reconstruction effort continues: many roads still require repair and demolition of unsafe buildings is ongoing. And new urban paradigms are emerging, with many businesses relocating ‘to the suburbs’ – with no intent to return. 

Such an event had LEI’s Vanuatu Affordable and Resilient Settlement (VARS) consulting team reflecting on our role and impact. Fundamentally tasked with identifying how to unlock affordable housing in Port Vila’s urban periphery, we questioned: how could people on low incomes be possibly expected to save enough money to purchase land, when hit by disaster after disaster?

But of course, we know how central the land administration field is to disaster recovery, and the piloting of one affordable housing site is just one link in the chain of broader, systemic reform. So – as we wrap up just one component of the larger VARS project – let us reflect on what has been achieved to date, and what crucial steps are still to come in the land policy, planning and administration space.

Commencing in May 2024, the LEI team were tasked with providing Land Development Policy, Legal and Marketing Advisory Services – specifically to support a single 10-hectare greenfield development in the outskirts of Port Vila, as a test for future reforms to unlock low hazard land for an affordable supply of resilient housing.

Our work encompassed:

A Cost Recovery Policy.

This is a tool to assist government with sustainably developing infrastructure. All costs are identified and transparently allocated, in principle to ensure that only ‘beneficiaries pay’ and there is no leakage of costs to others. In the context of affordable housing and urban planning things get a lot more complicated though – broader community benefits can apply but are harder to quantify. We developed the Cost Recovery Policy for the Government of Vanuatu to be both specific to the Etas-site subdivision, but to also serve as a model for future cost recovery. Evaluating the progress of the Etas site against the policy, and making revisions as necessary, will be essential to future implementation.

Determination of Market Appetite.

We anticipated (and confirmed) that eligible purchasers would be 100% interested in the site –  but we needed to dive deeper to understand if lenders, developers, builders and service providers were interested to play the roles we envisaged. Within these groups:

• Most lenders indicated interest and willingness to relax lending thresholds and criteria -but few had the necessary data to enable a full understanding of likely borrower capacity, and there remains a need to explore alternative financing products.
• Developer appetite was surprisingly limited, with land-only development dominating the Vanuatu real-estate sector and being one of the constraints to more sustainable, code-compliant housing stock and amenity provision.
• No builders were able to meet the upfront working capital contributions of site development – and the relatively small number of professional builders demonstrates a particular need to support and grow the industry to support reconstruction and future urban growth.
• Service providers – from markets to clinics – were highly interested, but would likely need government contributions (i.e. for site development) to be involved.

Agreed Eligibility Criteria and Applicant Selection Process.

Above and beyond ensuring clear and transparent eligibility rules and processes, we recognised that public trust in the process would be essential to success – of both the site, and future policy implementation. We developed a communication and engagement strategy, including internal and external feedback mechanisms and clearly set out provisions that would ensure that affordable lots could be purchased by underserved groups whose access to land has been systemically limited – especially women.

A Marketing Strategy.

Building on the eligibility criteria, we developed core messaging, activities and tools to promote broader community awareness of and support for the project and particularly ensure that targeted beneficiary stakeholders are adequately informed of the opportunity with sufficient information and time to apply. Management of the marketing and community engagement process highlighted a clear need for government staff to grow these skills.

Land tenure design and analysis.

The impact of land tenure on affordability, liveability and sustainability in urban planning isn’t as well-known as we’d like it to be. It’s clear that land laws and regulations need to allow for more bespoke parameters to accommodate for these considerations e.g. smaller lot sizes, but the team was particularly concerned with how the site would function under the different tenure (leasehold) options available – standard (derivative) leases, sub-leases (with government maintaining the head lease), and strata and community title. Each option had benefits and challenges, including the level of citizen familiarity with the tenure, the level of required administration (and who would pay for this) and the allocation of risks.

A site-level Zoning and Development Control Plan, draft legislative amendments and draft restrictive agreements.

The team worked closely with government to build legislative and planning capacity and ensure that the VARS-Etas site meets legislative and regulatory requirements that govern land development and building.

Where from here?

Our work was thus heavily focused on testing a new development paradigm for a single, 10 hectare site in Etas, demonstrating that ni-Vanuatu citizens would be amendable to purchase smaller (400m² vs. 1200m²) plots if it meant that they would be more affordable, serviced and in low-hazard areas.

But it has broader application, and a final piece of work highlighted the future opportunities for Vanuatu – in light of a new government, and post-disaster momentum and financing – to strengthen the land and planning sectors in a way that would build future resilience and economic growth. Some of these opportunities include:

• Improved public space management capacity: the Etas subdivision allocated close to 30% of the site’s total area to green and non-residential spaces, however ongoing operation and maintenance responsibility for these spaces is difficult in a customary leasehold setting without clear guidelines or legislation.

“Especially where residential lot sizes are small, open spaces provide important functions for people’s lives”

VARS Options Report

• Revisit the Vanuatu National Land Summit, held in 2006. Next year is the twenty-year anniversary of this historic event from which significant land reform followed. With renewed political momentum and interest, and a clear need to support the CBD reconstruction – the time is ripe to set the future land agenda. Topics including green certificate update and recording, formal lease registration, inclusive access to land and standardising processes, sustainable revenue collection, affordable housing and citizen access to data are all topics that could be addressed.
• Improve urban planning policy and implementation, through capacity development and improved compliance to not only improve urban design and function but also realise sustainable revenue flows. Property tax and urban land rent (to government) payment compliance has historically been poor – and government may need to balance rebuild incentivisation with recovering the backlog of payment arrears. Land value capture may be something for government to consider in the future.

[1] See e.g. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-08/port-vila-earthquake-recovery-tourism/105260536

Didi you mean to leave this sentence here in Italics?  Could be worked into the above paragraph.