Stakeholders' perception of defragmentation of new plots in a land consolidation project: Given the surprisingly different Slovak and Czech approaches

•Differences in Slovak and Czech ways of merging fragmented plots are highlighted.•Czech way focuses on a group of owners (on an ownership title).•Slovak approach deals with each owner exclusively.•All stakeholders show clear preference for the exclusive ownership.

There is a fundamental difference in the way of merging the fragmented plots of one owner within a land consolidation (LC) in Slovakia (the Slovak Republic, SK) and the Czech Republic (CZ). All the scattered shares of a single owner in SK are merged into a minimum amount of new plots in the proportion of 1/1; the shares of one owner in CZ are merged only to a group of owners who are on the same ownership title.Through an LC project a Slovak owner automatically acquires sole ownership and the Czech one remains in an unchanged ownership in equal shares. Authors wondered what general public and the owners themselves in particular think of these two ways of merging. A simple online questionnaire for all surveyed groups (representatives of owners, public administration officials, LC designers/experts) for a virtual model territory was created. The results based on the questionnaire (563 responses, 10-25% estimated rate of return, were evaluated at the time of preparing the contribution) show that there is a clear preference (90-98%, estimated margin of error 5-16%) for the exclusive ownership. The (surprising) differences in merging as well as subsequent findings provoked an informed debate about the causes which is still pending.

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