Land-value capture refers to the policy mechanisms that allow governments to release value from land and other immovable assets to recover public expenditures made on such assets in order to redistribute and channel them into infrastructure development and eventually public wellbeing. It is a global practice, and a good one – at least on paper. Successive governments in Egypt have been practicing it, albeit with controversial outcomes. In this chapter, we will give an overview of LVC mechanisms and practices in Egypt since 2014, the year Abdel Fattah El-Sisi “captured” the Presidency. While literature indicates that LVC mechanisms were in practice since the establishment of Modern Egypt in the nineteenth century^[1], an explicit LVC narrative emerged since 2014, albeit with anemic public disclosure of data. Based on secondary sources, media narrative analysis, and in-depth interviews, we will argue that the proverbial cycle of public expenses to public wellbeing does not apply to LVC cases of Egypt. Instead, a battery of macro-and micro-economic factors makes palpable benefits elusive namely, chronic fiscal imbalances, soaring internal and external debt, exorbitant costs of serviced land, a dis-functional land registry, an inaccurate land tenure system, inadequate executive capacities, and acute financial centralization. Nevertheless, LVC has evolved into a powerful mechanism for the consolidation of a land-infrastructure-finance-nexus channeling incremental returns from public to private hands.

[1] Kenneth M. Cuno. (1992). The Pasha’s peasants: land, society, and economy in Lower Egypt, 1740-1858. New York: CUP.