Digitization of Mapping and Global Land Registry in making: Concerns and Options before Community and Commons as Land Data delocalize

Abstract

Secure land tenure is critical to alleviate poverty, augment food security, help adapt to climate change, while ensuring identity and contributing to peace. Land tenure security is incumbent upon clear, transparent and updated land records; documenting the personal, parcel and tenure information under prevailing legal regime. However, only 10% of land in rural Africa and 30% globally are documented. In India, about 1.5 billion parcels either remain un-updated or un-surveyed. Lack of land record updation and syncing of textual, spatial and actual rights/tenures is often attributed as the cause of 2/3rd of conflicts in Indian civil courts. It also undoes realization of benefits from India’s massive land record digitization program, which has made millions of land records openly accessible online, as most of them remain un-updated.

In contrast to the traditional land administration challenges, recent strides in IT, GIS, machine learning and AI ecosystems, now, offer easier options to address land-record gaps. With ubiquity of mobile phones and enhanced access to cloud computing, high-resolution satellite imageries and drones, mapping using handheld devices, with/out high accuracy DGPS receivers, has become the game changer. This technology revolution along with raised land-awareness and business concerns is fueling a land rights revolution. Updating land records and ensuring tenure security among marginalized landscapes and communities is fast becoming cheaper and easier. Mobile/aerial mapping are argued as silver bullets to address inclusion, participation, transparency and community empowerment while ensuring accuracy, efficiency, outreach at low cost. Governments, NGOs and businesses welcome them with legal reforms, institutional innovations and investments. From Ghana to India, global and local agencies are piloting and upscaling such mapping, through innovative partnership-ecosystems and social-entreprenuerships.

By integrating personal information, spatial location and parcel characteristics, such platforms offer positive development-externalities beyond land records, viz. around land use planning, multi-purpose cadastre etc. However, the concerns and ethics on data handling and storage are not uniformly addressed and tenure diversities often not adequately documented, along with the need of adhering to FPIC while collecting such information. Multiple actors having diverse capabilities, approaches and mandates are involved in such mapping ecosystem and data value-chain. Along with them, legal-institutional frameworks and land and data governance regimes are also widely divergent in different countries, leading to land-information traffic, data-sharing and privacy follow different trajectories.

As the local land data converge towards a global land registry, through seemingly polycentric land and data-governance regimes, we explore whether concerns around data ethics, privacy as well as their intended or unintended abuses, are addressed. We question if such globalization, also delocalize the land data and triggers their commodification, disproportionately affecting poor, indigenous communities and their land resources in open land data environment. Considering the ‘divide’ debates on access to internet, technology, land market and discourses on control and empowerments, we explore if commons norms and data standards can make the fast globalizing land open data space, a level playing field for the marginalized and unconnected communities as well as for their community and common lands?

Full text

Digitization)of)Mapping)and)Global)
Land)Registry)in)making:))Concerns)
and)Options)before)Community)and)
Commons)as)Land)Data)delocalize)!
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