There exists a demand for effective land administration systems that can support the protection of unrecorded land rights, thereby assisting to reduce poverty and support national development-in... Show moreThere exists a demand for effective land administration systems that can support the protection of unrecorded land rights, thereby assisting to reduce poverty and support national development-in alignment with target 1.4 of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is estimated that only 30% of the world's population has documented land rights recorded within a formal land administration system. In response, we developed, adapted, applied, and tested innovative remote sensing methodologies to support land rights mapping, including (1) a unique ontological analysis approach using smart sketch maps (SmartSkeMa); (2) unmanned aerial vehicle application (UAV); and (3) automatic boundary extraction (ABE) techniques, based on the acquired UAV images. To assess the applicability of the remote sensing methodologies several aspects were studied: (1) user needs, (2) the proposed methodologies responses to those needs, and (3) examine broader governance implications related to scaling the suggested approaches. The case location of Kajiado, Kenya is selected. A combination of quantitative and qualitative results resulted from fieldwork and workshops, taking into account both social and technical aspects. The results show that SmartSkeMa was potentially a versatile and community-responsive land data acquisition tool requiring little expertise to be used, UAVs were identified as having a high potential for creating up-to-date base maps able to support the current land administration system, and automatic boundary extraction is an effective method to demarcate physical and visible boundaries compared to traditional methodologies and manual delineation for land tenure mapping activities. Show less
This paper introduces the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) for conducting needs assessments in land administration projects. Understanding the local context of what citizens, communities and... Show moreThis paper introduces the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) for conducting needs assessments in land administration projects. Understanding the local context of what citizens, communities and organisations need remains a complex challenge yet fundamental to the success of land administration projects. To date, key methods of understanding and identifying local needs have been qualitative in nature with various strengths and limitations. For land administration, it is also important for empirical methods to attend to power imbalances amongst participants that are a hallmark and driver of land tenure security. Although NGT has hardly been used in the domain of land administration, based on our experience of employing the method in a research project in East Africa, we argue that it presents a valuable addition to needs assessment strategies. We provide a broad outline of the method before providing a detailed description of how we employed the method. We discuss the opportunities and challenges that NGT offers, arguing that it is a time and resource efficient way of engaging communities in a participatory and equitable process which facilitates the co-production of valid and reliable knowledge on needs, and consensus on how these needs should be prioritised. Show less
