Availability: Land tenure

To what extent is detailed land tenure information available as open data?

Definitions

Definitions and Identification

Land tenure data identifies who holds rights over land. This data can be used to understand the land ownership landscape in a country, to identify land concentration, to understand access to land and land tenure security, and for anti-corruption purposes.

Land tenure datasets typically rely on the existence of a national land registration system and database; land tenure data should provide information regarding specific parcels of land, and then either:

• the rights held with respect to those parcels (e.g., whether it is owned land, common land, or unregistered land); and/or
• the actual subjects—people or entities—holding tenure rights.

Note: A dataset that only provides details of land parcels, without any information on the tenure rights over them, is not considered a land tenure dataset for the purposes of this survey.

Research Guidance

Start by identifying the agency or agencies in charge of land registration and/or collection and publication of land tenure data. Look for registers, cadastres, and institutions working with land tenure of any type. Some countries have departments in charge of collecting and publishing land-related data, often in conjunction with geospatial data.

In some cases, information on individual rights holders may be available under more restrictive licenses than general rights information. In these cases, you can indicate that data on individual subjects is ‘partially’ available.

There may be cases in which available datasets only cover one kind of right hold: e.g., datasets of state-owned land, ownership by legal persons, or land concessions and customary land tenure. In these cases, conduct your assessment for the most open dataset(s), and indicate which kinds of tenure or data subjects are covered.

Starting points

• Sources:
  • The World Bank Doing Business Ranking contains a subindex on "Transparency of Information" (inside "Registering property") that tracks who can obtain information on land ownership from the agency in charge of immovable property registration; the subindex includes links to the relevant agencies that may be helpful. Be aware, however, that the detailed information provided in the subindex applies only to each country's largest business city.
• Search:
  • Releases of cadastral/register data;
  • Geospatial datasets;
  • Reports from government, civil society organizations, or international organizations on land tenure.
• Consult:
  • Officials with organizations that work on land tenure issues; for example, tenure security, anti-corruption, economic development, etc.;
  • Experts on land registration/land rights;
  • Geospatial data experts;
  • Rural reform advocates/experts;
  • Land information agencies;
  • Land registration agencies and/or national cadastres;
  • Geospatial agencies;
  • Open data portals.

What to look for?

Look for evidence that the data covers each of the following kinds of land tenure:

• Land tenure data involving natural persons and land tenure data involving legal persons—some countries' datasets may only cover land owned by individuals, while other countries may make data about corporate (company) land ownership accessible as open data.
• State lands—in some cases, data about the land owned by government entities is managed separately and may not be included in the main tenure dataset. Sometimes, when the main tenure dataset is closed rather than open, data about state lands may be in a separate open dataset. Land concessions information may also be bundled with state land data.
• Communal lands—land held by communities, and may include records of indigenous lands and reservations.
• Open access lands—land anyone can access, and may include national parks or common land.
• Urban tenure and rural tenure—some tenure datasets only cover urban or rural land. Check whether both are included, or whether separate datasets exist for urban and rural areas.

National and sub-national considerations

In some countries, land tenure data may be collected and published at the sub-national level, carried out by individual states, regions, or cities.Focus on land tenure data at a national level first, and then assess whether:

• National datasets also include data from sub-national or local government units;
• Equivalent data exists for a selection of sub-national or local government units, but is not nationally aggregated;

To assess countries where land data is organized sub-nationally, researchers should select the strongest example of sub-national practice, and then indicate whether  datasets available cover the tenure data of the majority of land, taking into account that this might not be the only cause of fragmentary evidence.

Question sub-components

Show/hide supporting questions

Existence

• Is this data available online in any form?
  • Data is not available online.

    Supporting questions: Are there other offline ways to access this data in the country? (e.g., attending an office to inspect it).

  • Data is available, but not as a result of government action.

    Supporting questions: If government is not providing access to data, how is this data available? Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

  • Data is available from government, or because of government actions.

    Supporting questions: Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

Elements

• Kinds of data:

• Datasets have information regarding indigenous people or marginalized populations. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If land tenure data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where indigenous people or marginalized populations land tenure data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data covers land tenure involving natural persons. (No, Partially, Yes) In some cases, information on individual rights holders may be available under more restrictive licenses than general rights information. In these cases, you can indicate that data on natural persons is ‘Partially’ available.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Are individual owners identified in the dataset?

  If Partially or Yes: If land tenure data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where natural persons land tenure data is located.

• The data covers land tenure involving legal persons. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: What information is provided to identify legal owners (e.g. company registration number, company name, address etc.)?

  If Partially or Yes: Is information provided on the beneficial ownership of land held by legal persons?

  If Partially or Yes: If land tenure data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where legal persons land tenure data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data covers land tenure involving state land. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If land tenure data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where state owned land data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data covers land tenure involving communal lands. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If land tenure data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where communal land tenure data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data covers land tenure involving open access lands. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If land tenure data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where open access land data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data covers urban and rural tenure, and other relevant forms of tenure. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide URL(s) of evidence and briefly explain which types of land tenure is covered by datasets available.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data covers and has information on land concessions and/or leases. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If land tenure data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where land concessions or leases data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data fields and quality:

• Each record has a geospatial reference that allows to assign features to a spatial extent. (No, Partially, Yes) The geospatial reference might be latitude–longitude coordinates, an address, an ID to associate it to a geospatial dataset, etc. Answer "Partially" when a geographical reference exists but is broad; for example, when a neighborhood is identified, but not a more granular location. Answer "Yes" for datasets that have the most granular geographic references that can be expected for their kind.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: What kind of geospatial reference is provided?

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly explain your answer and provide supporting URL(s) if necessary.

• The data contains information on land transactions and sale-values. (No, Partially, Yes)

• Each tenure record contains information about the rights held over the land (freehold, lease, etc.). (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly explain your answer and provide supporting URL(s) if necessary.

• Data includes information about individuals' sex and/or gender. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe what data includes sex and/or gender information.

• Data openness, timing, and structure:

• Dataset is available free of charge. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data is openly licensed. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If No: If there are explicit restrictions placed on re-use of the dataset, briefly describe those here.

  If Partially or Yes: If the data is provided with an explicit open license, please provide the name of the license, or a link to it here.

• Data is available in all the country’s official or national languages. If the country has no official or national languages, data is available in the major languages of the country. (No, Partially, Yes) Assess this against the list of official, national, or in-use languages you provided as part of your response to the governance indicator that asks, "To what extent do relevant laws, regulations, policies, and guidance require that data collection and publication processes be available in the country’s official or national languages?"

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe the language coverage available.

• There are accessible and open official tools available to help users explore data. (No, Partially , Yes) Answer 'Partially' if tools make it possible to get at extracts of data without having to download a full dataset. Answer 'Yes' if there is an interactive tool that displays user-filtered extracts of the data to answer simple questions without downloading data at all.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide URL.

  If Partially : What are the main barriers to accessibility and usability?

• Data is timely and updated. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: When was the most recent update to this dataset?

• Historical data is available that allows users to track change over time. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

  If Partially or Yes: For what time period(s) (e.g., start and end dates) is data available?

• Data is provided in machine-readable format(s) (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where this machine-readable data can be found. (Additional URLs can be included in the justification and supporting evidence)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a comma separated list of the formats available? (E.g. csv, json)

  If Partially: What prevents you from assessing this data as fully machine-readable?

• The machine-readable dataset is available as a whole (No, Partially, Yes) Answer no if it's only possible to access individual records; Answer partially if it's possible to export extracts of the data; Answer yes if there are bulk downloads or APIs providing access to the whole dataset without financial, technical or legal barriers.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where bulk download access is available or described.

  If Partially or Yes: If bulk access is provided through an API, please provide a link to where the API is described.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Negative scoring:

• This information is missing required data. (There is no evidence of data gaps., There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing., There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.) In cases where the indicator itself identifies a dataset(s) to assess against or a separate governance indicator has asked you to determine data requirements of a relevant governing framework, assess against that. In cases where there is no such identified dataset(s) or related governance indicator, assess based on the parameters laid out in the publication of the information (e.g., are some fields entirely empty when they shouldn't be?), your local knowledge (e.g., if the data is supposed to include information for all public officials, does the number of total entries look right?), and any broader research you may have done for this theme (e.g., have media articles decried the incompleteness of the data?).

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing. or There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.: Please briefly explain.

• The availability of this data has been affected by government response to COVID-19. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe how COVID-19 affected the availability of this data.

Extent

• Do the datasets available cover the tenure data of the majority of land?
  • The datasets available cover a small proportion of land tenure in the country.

    Supporting questions: What kind of land tenure does it cover?

  • The datasets available cover a big proportion of land tenure in the country, but not all.

    Supporting questions: What kind of land tenure does it cover?

  • The datasets available cover all forms of land tenure in the country.

    Supporting questions: What kind of land tenure does it cover?

Indicator Justification

Land is a key element in every human civilization. The way in which societies interact with land has broad impacts, from shaping social and economic development, to supporting cultural, and even religious life. The eradication of hunger and poverty, and the sustainable use of the environment depend in large measure on how people, communities, and others gain access to land and other related assets (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2012). Even though data is recognized as an important asset for good land governance, for many stakeholders, collecting and publishing information about land has been a challenge for various technical, conceptual, and political reasons.

Many initiatives, policy recommendations, and research papers highlight land tenure as fundamental to understanding land dynamics. Land tenure itself comprises a wide range of fundamental and complex topics. LandVoc, an online thesaurus for land governance, for example, classifies within this thematic area concepts such as land tenure systems, tenure regularizations, indigenous land rights, housing rights, and land ownership. For this indicator the Barometer focuses on data related to different kinds of rights held by people and/or institutions over a piece of land.