Contestation, negotiation, and experimentation: The liminality of land administration platforms in Kenya

Abstract

This paper examines diverse infrastructural interventions in the making of Ardhisasa, the Kenyan state's digital land information management platform, as a space of contestation, negotiation, and experimentation. We analyse the platformisation of governance through theories on liminality to explain the agency of various actors in shaping the digital state. We particularly zoom into the influence of two actors: the private actors in the land sector and the civil society organisations representing informalised residents, and how they exercise agency in the development of Ardhisasa. Drawing on interviews with state and non-state actors, secondary literature, and extensive experience within Kenya's land administration system, we trace the overt and covert exercise of power in the platformisation of land administration of Nairobi. Our central thesis is that, despite its progressive development, Ardhisasa follows the tradition of a long line of large-scale infrastructural or developmental projects that rarely deliver on their promise for improvement but rather further entrench marginalised groups due to its exclusion of the already existing, albeit informalised, land administration and transaction practices that meet the needs of the urban poor. We argue that Ardhisasa's perpetual state of becoming leads to the spatialisation of liminality itself.

Full text

Article
Contestation, negotiation,
and experimentation:
The liminality of land
administration platforms
in Kenya
Fenna Imara Hoefsloot
University College London, UK
Catherine Gateri
Kenyatta University, Kenya
Abstract
This paper examines diverse infrastructural interventions in the making of Ardhisasa, the Kenyan
state’s digital land information management platform, as a space of contestation, negotiation, and
experimentation. We analyse the platformisation of governance through theories on liminality to
explain the agency of various actors in shaping the digital state. We particularly zoom into the
influence of two actors: the private actors in the land sector and the civil society organisations
representing informalised residents, and how they exercise agency in the development of
Ardhisasa. Drawing on interviews with state and non-state actors, secondary literature, and
extensive experience within Kenya’s land administration system, we trace the overt and covert
exercise of power in the platformisation of land administration of Nairobi. Our central thesis is
that, despite its progressive development, Ardhisasa follows the tradition of a long line of large-
scale infrastructural or developmental projects that rarely deliver on their promise for improve-
ment but rather further entrench marginalised groups due to its exclusion of the already existing,
albeit informalised, land administration and transaction practices that meet the needs of the
urban poor. We argue that Ardhisasa’s perpetual state of becoming leads to the spatialisation
of liminality itself.
Keywords
Land administration, platforms, liminal, Kenya, digitalisation
Corresponding author:
Fenna Imara Hoefsloot, Department of Geography, University College London, 25 Bedford Way, WC1H 0AP London,
UK.
Email: f.hoefsloot@ucl.ac.uk
EPD: Society and Space
0(0) 1–19
!The Author(s) 2024
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/02637758241254943
journals.sagepub.com/home/epd

Introduction: Ardhi Sasa, Ardhi Tasa
“Ardhi Sasa, Ardhi Tasa”. This was written on the banners of the lawyers protesting in
front of the Kenyan Supreme Court and the State Department of Lands in January 2023
(Figure 1). It roughly translates to ‘the land now is barren land’, a pun on the name of the
national land information management system (LIMS) currently being piloted in Nairobi,
known as Ardhisasa. Ardhisasa, a digital land administration platform, is a replacement for
earlier paper-based land management in Kenya, which has existed since the colonial period.
In line with other digital governance initiatives across the urban spaces, which claim to
introduce efficiency, effectiveness, accountability, and the democratisation of public service
provision by reducing the frictions associated with transmitting and storing information
(Datta, 2018; Graham et al., 2015), Ardhisasa is developed with the promise to reduce the
backlog in the processing of land transactions by fast-tracking land property searches, reg-
istration, valuation, and issuance of titles, culminating in accelerated investment and devel-
opment of land as capital. In the longer term, this should resolve land administration and
management challenges of manual, paper-based transactions, introduce a more efficient and
integrated land management system, and provide a tool to counter fraud and corruption
within the land sector. However, the challenges with Ardhisasa’s implementation have
delayed transactions, reducing land-based revenues and rendering the land sector unpro-
ductive – or barren – at least for the private actors that profit from each trade.
The Law Society of Kenya is only one of the many professional bodies that have
expressed discontent with the newly digitalised LIMS and its current design and functioning.
Other private sector actors, such as the Institution of Surveyors of Kenya (ISK) representing
land surveyors, land valuers, property managers, and land administration managers, have
Figure 1. Photo taken during the Ardhi Sasa, Ardhi Tasa demonstration led by the Law Society of Kenya
and the Institute of Surveyors of Kenya on 20 January 2023. Image source://twitter.com/lsk_nbi/status/
1616450160699097089.
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directed complaints to the Ministry of Lands and Physical Planning regarding their day-
to-day interaction with the Ardhisasa system and its perceived failure to properly engage
with the needs and recommendations of the professionals who will use and depend on this
system. While the digital LIMS has generally been welcomed, both the lawyers and built
environment professionals argued that the implementation of Ardhisasa has led to the
partial failure of services across the land registries and severe delays in land transaction
processing. The implementation of Ardhisasa, an ambitious national digitisation program of
all land records to replace the manual paper-based system, proves to be one of the most
complex and expansive reforms of Kenya’s LIMS to date. It should be understood within a
context characterised by bureaucratic lethargy, corruption, and political patronage (Kariuki
et al., 2018; Manji, 2020), in which the digitalisation of public services itself is a field of
contestation and negotiation.
This paper analyses the platformisation of urban governance (Van Dijck, 2021) through
theories on liminality (Elbanna and Idowu, 2022; Mertens, 2018) to explain the agency of
various actors in shaping the digital state. In doing so, it responds to calls to forge con-
nections between these fields through the extended governance–digitalization–urbanisation
nexus (Barns, 2018; Leszczynski, 2020).
Other empirically grounded studies have analysed digitalisation in urban contexts, either
focusing on the reformation of the governance practices (Pelizza, 2017; Taylor and Richter,
2017) or looking at the effects of digitalisation on the position of citizens within the city
(Calzada, 2018; Vanolo, 2016). However, little research exists on how, particularly in
Southern cities, infrastructures of the digital age generate differentiated urban landscapes
through the territorialisation of information systems (Datta, 2023a; Hoefsloot et al., 2022).
To unpack these dynamics, we draw attention to three distinct strategies mobilised by
various actors – contestation, negotiation, and experimentation – and are interested in how
the three different strategies are leveraged to reconfigure how the digital platform materi-
alises. Our central thesis is that despite Ardhisasa’s progressive development, it follows the
tradition of a long line of large-scale infrastructural or developmental projects that rarely
deliver on their promise for improvement but rather further entrench marginalised groups
(Anand et al., 2018; Lesutis, 2022a; Li, 2007) due to its exclusion of the already existing,
albeit informalised, land administration and transaction practices that meet the needs of the
urban poor. We argue that Ardhisasa’s perpetual state of becoming leads to the spatialisa-
tion of liminality itself by keeping informalised communities permanently on the threshold
of becoming formalised conform the digital land administration system.
The liminality of platform infrastructure
Increasingly, digital platforms such as Ardhisasa are being implemented to govern state
services. Previous literature on platforms and platformisation has focussed on the role of
big-tech companies in developing digital platforms and their extraordinary power to influ-
ence democratic governance (O’Reilly, 2011; Van Dijck, 2021) and the organisation of
public, work, and social life (Artioli, 2018; Heeks et al., 2021). We focus on the platform-
isation of government itself. Platformisation, following van Dijck (2021) and Poell et al.
(2019), in this case, refers to the corporate or state-controlled digital information infra-
structures that have become central to collecting data, governing the access and circulation
of information, and structuring the interaction between users. Digital platforms are often
presented as instrumental to knowing the state and guiding daily operations (Kitchin et al.,
2016). Yet, they regularly emerge from economic-driven interests and are at odds with pre-
existing practices and regulatory traditions (Poell et al., 2019) or reproduce structural
Hoefsloot and Gateri 3

inequalities because they are designed for and appropriated by the elites to serve their
benefit (Senshaw and Twinomurinzi, 2022). Tracing the development of Ardhisasa as a
land administration platform enables us to discern its logic; how the information infrastruc-
ture developed is an enactment of the socio-political decisions made and works towards
institutionalising these into space and society (Bowker and Star, 2000; Turner, 1967).
Highlighting the process, we argue that platformisation will always be an aspiration. It is
the internal negotiations and politics which make it interesting and give insight into the
emergence of the digital state in all its inequalities (Datta, 2023a).
Guma (2020) states that incompleteness is a common state of infrastructure in Kenya.
Building on the work of Simone (2004), he introduces incompleteness as a lens through
which to think about infrastructures in the Southern cities beyond normative binaries such
as success or failure but rather understanding them as emergent and heterogeneous.
Incompleteness, in Guma’s (2020) use of the word, does not fixate on what is missing but
turns our attention towards the constructs that are already there and the process of becom-
ing. State infrastructures are often envisioned as technologies for ordering, stabilising, and
governing societies. However, in practice, they are the fragmented and open-ended out-
comes of the dynamics between the state and society, embodying plural rationales that
are not always compatible with the logic of the bureaucratic state (Simone, 2004).
While the concept of incompleteness provides a useful frame to understand the incre-
mental, heterogenous infrastructural development through a non-normative lens (Guma,
2020, 2022), in this paper, we aim to capture the unsettled, ambiguous conditions arising
when novel infrastructures implemented create a rupture with previous systems. To concep-
tualise this ‘interstructural’ (Turner, 1967) moment of movement and transition, of being on
the precipice of a new system, we turn to the literature on liminality. Here, it is not the
incomplete infrastructure that is the unit of analysis but the liminal space created through
this incompleteness that we study. As we will discuss in the next section, where incomplete-
ness focuses on a certain lack of services, liminality emphasises the agency to manoeuvre
within the system.
Originating from anthropology to understand rites of passage (Turner, 1967), the concept
of liminality, signifying a state of in-betweenness or an ambiguous boundary or threshold,
has been applied in geography, innovation sciences, and organisational studies to diverse
topics ranging from the iterative process of technological innovation (Mertens, 2018), the
position of migrants as belonging to two different places at once (Lim et al., 2016),
the strategies of crowd workers within digital platforms (Elbanna and Idowu, 2022), or
the transition of work practice during the Covid-19 pandemic (Orlikowski and Scott,
2021), but in all cases it is used to convey the time/space characterised by the possibility
for new configurations of ideas and relations to emerge. Kelly and McAdam (2022: 5) define
liminality as:
a transformational space in which individuals may explore possibilities of reconstructing identity
and agency. Liminality opens up spaces for tactics including adapting, negotiating, avoiding, reject-
ing, and resisting, teflonic manoeuvring, legitimacy affirming or contesting, and experimentation,
reflection, and recognition.
Lancione and Simone (2021) similarly argue that liminality is not only a state or space/time
but a praxis. Although referring to a state of transition in which the start and end are
marked by rituals (Banfield, 2022), in practice, when there is no certainty over the outcome,
the liminal period can be suspended to the point where it becomes a semi-permanent con-
dition (Elbanna and Idowu, 2022). Hence, while liminality often invokes a notion of
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temporality and contains the anticipation of transformation, it might be experienced as
perpetual in-betweenness. Liminality becomes the permanent condition of the platform.
Applied to the city, liminality has been used to understand the different modes of urban-
isation in the face of uncertainties and ambiguities in urban development policies, political
regimes, and market reforms (Mu
¨ller and Trubina, 2020). Mu
¨ller and Trubina (2020) con-
ceptualise urban liminality as the space where the rigid infrastructures and rationales of
government meet the city’s unstable, unanticipated, and unruled assemblages. Highlighting
the openings that are created through half-baked laws or semi-implemented plans, scholars
have described how actors, from slum dwellers to elites to multi-lateral organisations
(Lancione and Simone, 2021; McConnell, 2017; Mu
¨ller and Trubina, 2020), speculate,
improvise, and experiment with codes, spaces, and politics as a process of ‘worlding’, refer-
ring to the practices through which the space itself is staged and performed (Omura et al.,
2019). The never-ending accumulation of ideas, interventions, and materialities keeps the
city on a precipice of whatever it is amassing into (Lancione and Simone, 2021).
This is particularly prevalent in the introduction and use of digital technologies for urban
governance. Kitchin et al. (2016) present an understanding of urban digital technologies
such as platforms, dashboards, and central control rooms as ‘ontogenic in nature’, centring
the different stages of becoming and growth these socio-technical systems undergo before
reaching maturity. Whether or not a digital urban technology reaches this point of maturity
and passes through the phase in-between design and functioning is dependent on the align-
ment of state, private sector, and societal actors, technology, and knowledge through the
reiterative processes of visioning, negotiation, contestation, and re-visioning (Kitchin et al.,
2016, 2017). As we will explain, while Ardhisasa promises a radical transition in Kenya’s
land administration system, this is thus far not accomplished, elongating the liminal status
of land and digitalisation.
Agency in in-between spaces
Thinking through liminality allows us to investigate how actors draw on their different
capacities to transform the systems they inhabit and how difficulties and contradictions
are resolved in practice. Moreover, liminality provides a way to examine how the status
of in-betweenness in the city is reproduced in the digital platform by considering the posi-
tions that different groups occupy in developing Ardhisasa. This departs from the notion
that “agency is always and simultaneously in-between spaces, positions, and worlds”
(Siles et al., 2023: 64). Siles et al. (2023) operationalise this by analysing how agency in
in-between – liminal – spaces is present in the potential and power to act and enact change:
to participate in shaping digital technologies through both resistance and compliance.
Understood this way, becoming attuned to the different openings for reconfiguration
helps identify the strategies mobilised by actors to exercise their agency and give shape to the
platform as an emerging system (Orlikowski and Scott, 2021). Exploring agency within
liminal space and time can inform analysis of the platform-user relationships and provide
insight into how individuals and organisations mobilise to negotiate, comply, or resist the
system’s architecture. Within liminality, the ‘rigid hierarchy’ (Jordan, 2015) defining how
information systems are organised is mendable, and actors are less bound by the pre-existing
identities and roles. Instead, there is the opportunity for individuals and organisations to
craft out a new position for themselves within the socio-material system, enact new compo-
sitions between state and technology, and derive greater capabilities and outputs. However,
this is not a level-playing field. Cultural, context, and regulatory frameworks impact
actors’ agency in shaping technological platforms for the city (Odendaal, 2023).
Hoefsloot and Gateri 5

Similarly, Elbanna and Idowu (2022) argue that while the theory on liminality foregrounds
agency, we should be attuned to the restrictions of culture, society, and politics in structur-
ing and limiting the capacity of people to act within the system. Liminality can be a space/
time of opportunity or characterised by vulnerability and loss (Lim et al., 2016).
Hence, we analyse the implementation of Ardhisasa as a liminal space/time of negotia-
tion, contestation and experimentation. While this negotiation happens at many levels and
at many times, we particularly zoom into the influence of two actors: the private sector
actors, including land surveyors, lawyers, and land valuers, and the civil society organisa-
tions representing informalised residents and how they exercise agency in the development
of this national LIMS. Considering these two actors and their influence in the design and
development of Ardhisasa, we trace the overt and covert exercise of power in the platform-
isation of land administration in Nairobi. In focussing on these perspectives, we are inspired
by Qadri and D’Ignazio (2022), who argue for examining the tactics and agency from within
and outside to understand how the platform is built, operated, and resisted.
By positioning the strategies of private sector actors in relation to those of civil society
organisations, we follow Coˆ t
e-Roy and Moser (2019) in their distinction between ‘elite
stakeholders’ (e.g. the state and governments, multinational corporations, private founda-
tions and non-profit organisations, and global consultant firms) as holding key roles in the
travel of policy and the mobilisation of knowledge, and subaltern actors whose voice,
knowledge, and criticism are often actively rejected. They add that with the emergence of
foreign direct investment funds and private sector-driven design and building of new urban
developments, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the state and private actors
who form part of the elite (Coˆ t
e-Roy and Moser, 2019). Kitchin et al. (2017) describe this as
the formation of ‘advocacy coalitions’. During the development of digital governance strat-
egies, coalitions between the technocratic bureaucrats and a plurality of consultants, insti-
tutional bodies, academics, and civil society organisations are formed and reconfigured that
share a particular vision regarding policy and practice and depart from similar values
(Kitchin et al., 2017). The formation of the coalition is the negotiation over who is a valu-
able stakeholder and what politics and imaginaries of the state become embedded.
Initiatives that go against the grain of the dominant narrative within the coalition and
challenge the state’s rationale are often met with apathy or resistance from the inside.
Yet, as Li (2007) describes, critical mobilisation can come in many forms and use many
strategies for social, structural, and political transformation, from academics using method
and writing to the many citizens or recipients of the policies that defy or challenge politics
through practice.
Acknowledging how agency is nested within historical, political, economic, and cultural
contexts of colonialism, inequality, and informalisation, it is worthwhile to understand these
struggles to influence the development trajectory of the Ardhisasa. Specifically, in the con-
text of land administration, we should pay attention to how the digital recording of land is
territorialised unevenly. As Cowan (2021) shows, this often happens through facilitating the
commodification of land and the strategies of elite state and private sector actors to capture
land against the attempts of the urban poor to consolidate their property claims. Lesutis
(2022b) describes this as governance through disavowal, or the way in which the state
effectively pays lip service to marginalised groups by including them in the discourse and
planning of infrastructural developments while rendering them politically absent and mate-
rially unaccounted for. As a result, Lutzoni (2016) explains, informality in Kenya is not
outside of planning practices but rather emerges as out of a relational sphere of legality,
approval, negotiation, as well as contestation, eviction, and delegitimisation.
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As we will illustrate in our analysis of the strategies of experimentation, there are many
instances where marginalised groups contest their institutionalised exclusion, find ways to
manoeuvre within the structure and adapt it to meet their needs, and imagine alternative
futures in the process (Kimari and Ernstson, 2020). Kimari and Ernstson (2020) write,
“rather than seeing the innovative infrastructural and incremental practices of the marginalised
as making do, or filling the gaps, we can see them as crucial sites to re-think spatial distribu-
tions of power” (p. 9). Creating new forms of information and new ways to record land and
property falls within these modes of living between defiance and compliance (Easterling,
2016).
Methodology
This paper draws on 22 semi-structured interviews and observational data collected during
two two-week field visits in 2022 and 2023 within the context of the Regional Futures
research project, analysing the process of digitalisation-as-urbanisation in the metropolitan
areas of Nairobi, Guadalajara, and Mumbai. We interviewed policymakers and employees
from the land administration departments at national and county governments, land
surveyors, land valuers, and community organisations representing informalised residents
in Nairobi.
The diversity of the researchers being Kenyan and UK-based and our different position-
alities in the field provided interesting perspectives. Particularly, we derive information from
the experiences of one of the authors who has interacted with Ardhisasa in a professional
capacity. Given that Ardhisasa is an ongoing project that has generated a lot of debate in the
land sector, being part of the professional bodies working with the platform on a day-to-day
basis gave an insider perspective into the practices and debates revolving around Ardhisasa’s
development. Moreover, the Kenyan researcher accepted and understood the digitisation
process as a land management and administration tool from a historical perspective, having
experienced the various previous land reforms in Kenya. In contrast, the UK-based
researcher, with no prior experience in the Kenyan land sector, probed and interrogated
the land digitisation process from a different perspective, questioning the roles of the dif-
ferent actors in the development of the platform. Additionally, the interviewees showed
patience with the UK-based researcher; they were willing to provide detailed responses
about the process, whereas the Kenyan researcher was deemed to be knowledgeable
about what had been going on and thus received shorter responses.
Interviews were conducted in English and transcribed and analysed thematically, focus-
sing on the digitalisation of land records at the national government, the different actors
involved in the development of Ardhisasa, and the challenges that arise due to the imple-
mentation of the national LIMS in a context of extensive informality in land tenure. In
addition, we attended online and in-person workshops and working sessions organised by
professional bodies, such as the ISK and civil society organisations in which Kenya’s land
administration and the development of Ardhisasa were discussed. Secondary data from
digital media and publications from professional bodies provided more information regard-
ing the public discussions revolving around Ardhisasa’s development and implementation.
Ardhisasa’s perpetual liminality
Ardhisasa, as a digital LIMS, was initially envisioned as a one-stop-shop designed to enable
the States Department for Lands and Physical Planning to modernise the land administra-
tion system by improving efficiency and transparency in land transactions through a
Hoefsloot and Gateri 7

web-based platform (Kabubu and Wambui, 2021). Kenya’s significant surge in data vol-
umes and rapid population growth have led to notable repercussions on the efficiency and
effectiveness of service delivery. The reliance on manual LIMSs within government offices
has resulted in long queues and created an environment vulnerable to corruption (Kariuki
et al., 2018). Ardhisasa aims to address these challenges by introducing a digital system that
promises improved efficiency in land transactions and reduces corruption within the land
market.
However, as we will explain in this section, this is a promise that neither Ardhisasa nor its
predecessors have completed. Ardhisasa is at best seen as incomplete, a work in progress, or,
as described by a land valuer interviewed: “an ongoing conversation between, uh, the insti-
tution of surveyors in Kenya, who will present the affairs of the surveyors and state agents”
(NA221110PV).
This ongoing conversation regarding the development of Ardhisasa has to be understood
within a continuous cycle of innovation, incomplete implementation, and reform that has
characterised the attempts to digitalise Kenya’s LIMS, starting with the first National Land
Information Management System (NLIMS) as part of the state’s e-Government strategy
introduced in 2004. Following this first attempt to implement a digital NLIMS, several
others have followed (Table 1), each providing the incomplete, sometimes partially discon-
tinued, foundation for the next iteration.
Hailed as the most ambitious attempt to digitalise Kenya’s land administration system to
date, in conversations with private sector actors in the field of land administration and
management, Ardhisasa was continuously described as having great potential in reforming
and streamlining the land administration system in Kenya:
Ardhisasa is supposed to facilitate all the large transactions and do away with manual processing of
transactions. So you can search on it, get your land rate upon demand, a surveyor can carry out a
subdivision and launch the whole process on that platform and complete from the comfort of our
homes. That is the whole idea. We can carry out complex land transactions without really having to
interact physically with the Ministry of Lands. It’s a very noble project, I must say. Uh, but of
course, it has had its own teething challenges. (K10112022-1)
With only a few months in operation, the digitisation of the paper-based LIMS has come
under fire by both public and private entities, raising questions about whether the current
challenges are novel with digitisation or are only now visible as exacerbation of already
existing issues in our current land systems. Kenya’s land sector is characterised by historical
injustices due to colonisation, long-standing political tensions related to land, and the elite
capture of resources and institutions (Boone et al., 2019; K’Akumu, 2016). Aiming to
address these problems, the period between 2009 and 2016 has been characterised by drastic
reforms in the land sector, most significantly through the new constitution enacted in 2010.
Hence, the various iterations of digitalising the LIMS take place amid institutional and
legislative reforms changing the administrative landscape in Kenya by decentralising land
governance from the national state to the counties through the new Lands Act and the
National Land Commission (Boone et al., 2019).
Some of the main challenges prevailing within the platform are related to the fact that
with the introduction of Ardhisasa, the Ministry of Lands and Physical Planning is simul-
taneously working on the unification of the land title system across the country into a block
system and geo-referencing the governmental maps to create a national land cadastre. While
officially separate projects, these are interlinked since the land records can only be included
in Ardhisasa after they have been converted and geo-referenced. Delays in both these
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Table 1. Timeline of government-led initiatives to digitalise Kenya’s land administration.
Year Name Description Reason for succession
2004 e-Government Mile-stone initiative to digitalize
Kenya’s government transac-
tions, including the Ministry of
Lands and Physical Planning.
Continues to form the guiding
strategy. After its adoption,
several attempts have been
made to digitize the land
records culminating in the
current National Land
Management Information
System.
2009 First Project on Land
Administration in
Kenya (PILAK I)
Funded by the Swedish
International Development
Agency with the objective of
improving land administration
as part of development of
NLIMS to develop business
and IT infrastructure, mod-
ernize the geodetic frame-
work, reform parcel
identification and element of
land rent collection system.
Only partially implemented due
to continued challenges
related to the lack of security
of paper records, parcel iden-
tification, land rent collection,
geodetic reference frame-
work, systematic conversion
of Registered Land Act (RLA)
titles, staff capacity and
awareness.
2013 Second Project on
Land Administration
in Kenya (PILAK II)
Address the challenges of PILAK
I and develop and implement a
pilot Integrated Geographic
Information System based
National Land Information
Management System.
The system was to be imple-
mented and funded through
MTEF budget for the period
2013–2017 but failed due to
lack of funds. Additionally, the
added GIS component did not
work. Unlike the PILAK I
which was donor funded,
PILAK II was to be
government funded.
2014 Electronic Document
Management System
(EDMS)
Return to PILAK I and the
reorganization of the land
registries using an electronic
document management
system.
The system brought about huge
backlogs and only dealt with
land registries whilst the
department of surveys which
is the foundation of land
administration was left out.
2017 e-Citizen Aimed at the digitalization of all
citizen-government transac-
tions, including the payments
of land rents and the statutory
governmental charges in the
land information management
system.
Like the EDMS, e-Citizen was
not GIS-based. The
Department of Surveys was
not incorporated as the
system dealt only on the land
registry backlogs in transac-
tions due to lack of integration
of the various departments
functions.
2021 Ardhisasa An online platform that allows
citizens and private sector
actors to interact with land
information held and process-
es undertaken by the national
government.
Currently piloted in Nairobi County.
NLIMS: National Land Information Management System; IT: 䊏; MTEF: 䊏
Hoefsloot and Gateri 9

processes have led to the incomplete inclusion of land records in the system, making it
impossible to access data and verify its status for the areas of Nairobi, which have yet to
be converted to the block system, leading to a slowdown of land transactions. Also, in areas
that have been converted to the block system, the delays in receiving the results of the search
at times took longer than through the previous manual system, elongating the land trans-
action period (Tarus and Wamae, 2022).
Appearing before a senate committee, the former cabinet secretary for the Ministry of
Lands and Physical Planning reiterated that the digitisation process of the Central Registry
records (which holds documentation regarding the land previously occupied by the white
settlers) was to be completed in 2024 (The Star Newspaper, 2022
1
). Nevertheless, the delays
in these processes have significantly impacted the efficiency and service provision through
Ardhisasa. One of the platform’s essential services, the searches for title authentication –
often referred to as an ‘official search’ – is not available for certain parcels of land which
have not been digitalised yet, leaving out sections of the city. This standard procedure is the
starting point in the process of land valuation and is crucial for all land transactions. Those
who have used the system to conduct a search say that the system was, at times, unable to
generate results. Various private sector actors in the land sector were frustrated with the lack
of information flows to establish the authenticity of the title document: establish ownership,
size, type of tenure, encumbrances, and the history of the parcel.
Contestation and negotiation
At the core of these developments are the private sector actors influencing the design and
development of Ardhisasa. While the private sector actors we conversed with at times
expressed frustration with the current circumstances, there seemed to be a general patience
and willingness to collaborate in developing the platform from which they should ultimately
benefit. This is not to say that the relationship between the private sector actors and the
Ministry of Lands and Physical Planning is always constructive. One land surveyor
explained that Ardhisasa had been developed top-down with little regard for the expertise
and needs of the professionals whose work practices will change due to its implementation.
“There have been meetings between, uh, our representative body, which is the institution of
surveyors in Kenya, and the Minister of Land” (NA221110PV). However, he continued to
explain that aside from these meetings, there had been minimal consultation with private-
sector actors in the design phase. A land surveyor explained that there was a willingness to
cooperate and negotiate over the platform’s features to ensure that its functionality meets
the needs and matches the workflow of the land professionals. Yet, in his experience, the
‘developers’, referring to the programmers coding the digital platform, did not take their
input seriously and failed to consider the usability of the platform for surveyors in the field:
The issue is when [...] you want to ensure that what I do in the field, I can do on the system, that
becomes complex, and it will take some time to be able to get it to work the way it needs to be
worked. [.] If we have an open system where the person who is in charge and the person who is
developing are willing and ready to listen to what the users are saying, then [.] it becomes easy. But
where you have a developer who seems to think that they know, then you have a problem.
(NA2303141006)
Regardless of the ambivalence in experiences from officials during the development of
Ardhisasa, the transition from development to the piloting phase created new opportunities
for professional bodies to influence the platform’s development and employ different tactics.
10 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

In the development phase, the private sector actors could – to more or lesser effect – express
their opinions in conventional settings such as stakeholder meetings, advisory taskforces,
and policy position papers. In the pilot phase, different professional bodies have reverted to
public protests or expressed their dissatisfaction with the platform in the media in an
attempt to influence its progression. This has not been without results.
As a platform, Ardhisasa officially grants access to documents and data by issuing ver-
ified accounts for private landowners and private sector actors. However, at its initial
implementation, Ardhisasa’s architecture did not recognise land valuers as a relevant
group alongside land surveyors and lawyers needing a verifiable account and data to the
platform. After repeated protests and lobbying from the professional body of land valuers, a
separate account option was created for which they could apply. Similarly, after public
complaints from the Law Society of Kenya regarding the fact that foreigners cannot register
on the platform – one of the requirements for an account is a Kenyan ID number – the
Ministry of Lands and Physical Planning has responded that they will work towards making
this possible. It is in these interactions that Ardhisasa shows itself as a responsive platform,
accommodating the needs and perspectives of private sector actors as key users and stake-
holders in the process.
Nonetheless, complaints regarding the changing workflows within the system have not
been taken on thus far. In the paper-based LIMS and the digital predecessors of Ardhisasa,
anybody with a stake in a piece of property that had been registered was free to ask for and
receive an official search in any of the land registries. This enabled people and organisations
to get information on the ownership and encumbrances of any registered land parcel when-
ever they choose, providing they pay the necessary statutory fees. Currently, in a break with
custom, Ardhisasa requires the property owner’s permission to be sought before conducting
official searches. The negotiation about the workflow is, in essence, a discussion regarding
the trade-off between transparency in information and the privacy of property owners,
which is currently being re-settled in practice and through debate in meetings and publicly
on social media and through protest.
In addition to negotiating over the platform’s architecture, Ardhisasa’s introduction has
forced private sector actors in the land sector to adapt their practices. Adjusting the socio-
material system through developing new relationships or deepening existing ones proves to
be crucial to maintain information flows even if the digital platform does not produce the
results required. According to a government planner interviewed informally, some land
professionals have managed to continue with land transactions because they have a liaison
person whom they consult to facilitate the process. Actors who do not have an insider
person are forced to interact with a “silent” platform that will not lead fast results:
The frustrating bit is that you don’t know who to call. Because once you launch it on the platform,
it’s just wait and wait and wait unless you have an inside contact, and I have no idea what they’re
doing now on the inside. I’m not sure if they have access to the system and can see you applied for
the search. I have no idea. You have to pay someone inside to do it for you, because you can’t
proceed with the valuation unless you have the searches. This also applies to the bankers and the
lawyers who are dependent on the search document to affect any transaction. (K10112022-1)
Taken together, these expressions of frustration, experiences with transformation, and the
need for adaptation from the land professionals are illustrative of the liminal stage of
Kenya’s land administration system. It is in between paper and digital-based systems, in
between the development and implementation phase, and in between previous innovations
and future ones. As described earlier, the constant reinvention of digital platforms for land
Hoefsloot and Gateri 11

administration causes a seemingly never-ending transitional phase where one digital plat-
form serves as a starting point for the next iteration, each different from the previous one
through incremental innovations. However, none has been implemented fully and embedded
in land administration practices.
Hence, while these forms of resistance and cooperation could be interpreted as opposition
or disapproval for Ardhisasa, these are also spaces for negotiation and improvement. It is
through these series of ad hoc interactions and conversations, some conducted in formal
settings while others happen behind closed doors or on the street, that Ardhisasa is taking
shape. In this proactive form of engagement with the development of the digital platform,
actors also find ways to overcome the precarious position they hold and build more secure
positions within the system that align with their previous roles in the paper-based system.
For Ardhisasa, this means that although clear decisions on how to impact the development
trajectory of the platform can be made, rules for interaction can also be withdrawn, adjust-
ed, or adapted.
Experimentation
Outside of the core of ‘elite stakeholders’ (Coˆ t
e-Roy and Moser, 2019) such as the private
sector actors, civil society is peripheralised in Ardhisasa’s development. One of the main
concerns with the introduction of Ardhisasa has been the issue of digital illiteracy and
inclusion. In Kenya, 17% of the adult population has low illiteracy levels and an even
higher amount of people, the majority women, are not fully digitally literate or only have
limited access to digital technologies such as computers, smartphones and the internet
(Koyama et al., 2021; UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), 2022). Moreover, while
Swahili is the more commonly spoken language in Kenya, currently, the platform is only
provided in English. As a result, a large part of the Kenyan population will not have the full
capacity to operate Ardhisasa in its current form. This has raised calls to maintain a paper-
based system to fall back on in addition to the digital platform:
So, we need to be inclusive [...] and we have to look for another alternative, which gets us back to,
takes us back to paper. [...] If you do not consider paper and then you end up leaving a section of
people away. [...] The government is digitising land records, and that means you’re going to
digitise your land rights. (NA22110CS)
Nevertheless, what is less discussed is the effect of digitalisation on those for whom the
paper bureaucracy also does not function. Spread across Nairobi are informalised settle-
ments that house around 60 per cent of the urban population, assembled and expanded
through unregularised land transactions and auto-construction. Like so many other infor-
malised settlements around the world, these neighbourhoods always seem to be many things
at once. They are icons of the resilience and self-sufficiency of urban residents but also in
need of upgrading and development; they are examples of pioneering and bottom-up urban-
ism but also need state regulation and service provision; they are the steppingstone into the
city while also being the embodiment of exclusion and marginalisation; they are vehicles for
incremental consolidation while also being perpetually unfinished.
Truelove (2021) describes the ability of informalised settlements to represent so many
things while being in between everything as liminal infrastructural space. These spaces are
neither regularised nor sanctioned, legal nor illegal. More importantly, they are in constant
transformation. They are spaces of continuous struggle to transition into more formalised
urban assemblages, of which a crucial step is the regularisation of land titles and urban
12 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

residency. The introduction of Ardhisasa means that land possession has to be registered on
paper and in the digital LIMS. A lack of official landholding documents is automatically
associated with non-ownership.
Yet, parallel to the formalised land title registration system, many other forms of land
governance and transfers exist within Nairobi, which Ardhisasa does not cater to. In
Nairobi’s land market, a variety of alternative documents – share certificates, temporary
occupation licenses, allotment letters, certificates of tenure, and subleases – are used to
transfer land as proof of ownership in informal or semi-formal ways. While the state
does not recognise these documents as confirmation of land ownership, they are generally
accepted in property and land transactions as documenting unregistered housing and proof
of continued occupancy. Hence, they are intermediary documents that play an important
role in transitioning from informalised to formalised residency and ownership or, for exam-
ple, determining who should be included in slum upgrading schemes and resettlement pro-
grammes. However, as they only establish a legitimate interest in the land rather than
ownership, and are often not issued by a formal authority but are drafted amongst com-
munity members, they cannot be registered within Ardhisasa.
Lacking documentation is not only an issue with people living on squatted public or
private land. Partly due to the backlog in registrations and the resulting lengthy bureaucratic
process, many people do not follow through with registering transactions as a result of
succession, inheritance, or sub-divisions. As these transactions are often only processed
informally without officially changing the land title, disputes over land ownership and
land use claims in Nairobi are prevalent. With the digitalisation of land records, property
owners face a lack of administration and formal paper-based and digital registration of
land titles.
Multiple community-led groups and civil society organisations in Nairobi and Kenya at
large have aimed to raise issues related to digital inclusion and the registration of people
living in different degrees of informality through various means, such as lobbying, organis-
ing multi-stakeholder workshops, and solicited and unsolicited advice. Most notably, there
have been initiatives to take means into their own hands to map and register irregular
settlements by and for the community. They use various digital and in-person means to
do this, overcoming the constraints of the existing digital platforms. As a civil society
organiser stated: “Government has been absent for a long period of time. And when govern-
ment is absent, then people innovate” (NA230317I011).
In this case, the innovation she was referring to was the introduction of an alternative
land registration system – the social tenure domain model (STDM) – that departs from the
relationship between an individual and the space that they occupy rather than the docu-
ments they possess. The STDM functions as a tool for land administration that breaks down
the complexities that exist within irregular settlements. It allows us to identify the commu-
nities and individuals living on squatted land and define and establish their relationship with
space and role within the land market. For example, individuals can be registered as tenants,
structure owners, or landlords. Moreover, exploring the opportunities and boundaries pro-
vided by the Community Land Act, the STDM facilitates the registration of communal
lands in informalised urban neighbourhoods (Odol Otieno et al., 2017). While the
Community Land Act was introduced in 2016 to formalise rural community lands, it pro-
vides a comprehensive definition of community, opening pathways for urban collectives
living on the same land, sharing customs, culture, or language, to pursue the registration
of the territory they occupy as community land.
The primary motivation for introducing the STDM in Nairobi is to expand the categories
of formal categories of land tenure to include the relationships with land and occupancy that
Hoefsloot and Gateri 13

have emerged in informality. This challenges the structures determining ‘legitimate’ land
tenure and works towards decriminalising the auto-construction of housing and basic serv-
ices such as water and electricity in informalised settlements, hoping to reduce forced evic-
tions and provide tenure security.
On a more profound level, the experiments with community mapping, the STDM, and
registering irregular urban settlements under the Community Land Act challenge the
assumptions in the architecture of Ardhisasa that value private ownership and public
administration structures over communal ownership or collective land administration and
management. Where private sector actors such as land valuers, lawyers, and surveyors are
making progress in influencing Ardhisasa to become a faster, more accessible, and more
efficient platform, the community organisations pushing these alternatives want something
far more radical. They want to introduce a non-capitalist land administration system that
prioritises communal over private ownership and appreciates the African sociocultural
dimensions of land. In discussing the tensions between the formal systems of the state
and the informal and semi-formal documentation of communities that want to become
formalised, a community organiser explained the challenges the assumptions built into
the NLIMS:
So how do we legitimise their innovations to form a basis of policy development, for instance, in the
land sector? There are layers of rights that people have in the informal settlements. They are user
rights. They are access rights. They are occupancy rights. [...] That has been the contestation
between the formal Kenya and the informal Kenya that forms the majority. And it will lead us to
our conversation in the National Land Information Management System. [...] The National Land
Information Management System, as it was built, does not appreciate the people’s interpretation
and the cultural interpretation of land as property in the African context. (NA230317I011)
The liminality of the land administration system – a time/space and praxis in which the
categories are still malleable – allows for these types of innovations, tensions, and discus-
sions to emerge. It provides an entry point for civil society organisations to introduce
alternative approaches that question the basic premises of the platform. Yet, we notice
that while the private sector actors have exerted significant pressure on the development
of Ardhisasa as a platform, civil society organisations and community representatives have
had little real influence to date. Ardhisasa is constructed through politics, knowledge, and
actors and emerges from a market-driven governance approach. The objectives of the land
professionals gel well within the neoliberal imaginary of the digital state that Kenya is trying
to establish.
On the contrary, community groups and civil society organisations propose a radical
alternative that challenges the platform’s core objectives and is therefore not included in the
conversation. This illustrates the idle attempts of community groups and civil society organ-
isations to be recognised as important actors in the digitalisation of land records. As a result,
people living in various degrees of liminal infrastructure space in Nairobi continue to be
blank spots in the platform. They operate from the margins, socio-spatially distant and
outside of the information systems governing land.
Conclusion: Spatializing liminality
Looking critically at the negotiation over the platform and whose voice is represented or not
in the digital land administration system can inform us how notions about legitimate tenure,
ownership, and land governance are embedded in the platform’s architecture. In this paper,
14 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

we specifically did not focus on the formal institutions and how they have built Ardhisasa.
Instead, we analyse the platform’s emergence through the conversations, contributions, and
conflicts with the private sector and societal actors that Kenya’s land administration relies
on as a liminal time/space and praxis.
Liminality is crucial in three ways for how we conceptualise the platformisation of the
land administration system. First, liminality evokes the history of digitalisation in the land
sector and places Ardhisasa in relation to the previous platforms developed over time. Over
the past two decades, there have been ongoing initiatives to digitise land records and sub-
sequently create a digital platform for Kenya’s national LIMS. However, the result that
private sector actors and citizens experience right now is far from what was intended. The
various cycles of design, implementation, and abandonment of policies and digitalisation
efforts have turned what was promised to be an all-encompassing e-Government strategy
into an enduring process of contestation, negotiation, and experimentation, which never
really seems to reach completion.
This is described by Kitchin et al. (2017) as the ‘last mile’ problem, referring to the fact
that many e-governance policies and digital technologies for the state, such as platforms and
urban dashboards, never seem to reach maturity but remain in ‘pilot’, ‘testbed’, ‘experimen-
tal’ or ‘living lab’ stages. Nevertheless, it is not just an issue of incompletion. It is an issue of
struggle and frustration. Whilst Ardhisasa, like many other state-led projects in Kenya, tries
to present a smooth transition and a coherent set of practices for land information man-
agement and service delivery, reality proves to be more precarious (Lesutis, 2022a). In a
context as complex and fraught as land administration in Kenya, there are multiple objec-
tives and rhetoric that continually bump heads with each other, sometimes through
negotiation and experimentation and sometimes through contestation, leading to an
open-endedness in the process of platformisation.
Secondly, the lens of liminality highlights how the development of digital platforms is
situational, power-laden, and a politically ambiguous praxis. Ardhisasa reflects the very
ambiguities that gave rise to it in the first place. In its liminality, Ardhisasa exists in between
the ambitions of Kenya’s authorities to reduce bureaucracy and corruption and the social
and political imperatives of a highly unequal state and urban society. These often conflicting
foundations allowed negotiation over and experimentation with the rationale and function
of the platform and its uses.
In our analysis, we note that Ardhisasa is remarkable in its flexibility in incorporating
feedback from private sector actors. The digitalisation of public services through diverse
infrastructural interventions – e.g., the LIMSs, provides an opportunity for the private
sector actors to reconfigure inherently political socio-technical relations and consolidate
their position within the system. The platform is expanded or adjusted through negotiations
with land professionals without challenging its underlying principles. At the same time,
Ardhisasa has proven to be resistant to the efforts of civil society organisations that chal-
lenge the assumptions in its architecture and, by extension, the neoliberal politics of the
platform. These actors remain in the periphery, outside of the geographical spaces and
digital structures of power (Datta, 2023b).
Returning to Siles et al. (2023: 66), the establishment of user-platform relationships
through these modes of expressing agency can be seen as a process of worldling (Omura
et al., 2019): “staging the world in ways that render certain realities as neutral”. The nego-
tiations over the platform’s functions mirror the inequalities present in Kenya’s urban and
political landscape. As we found in our analysis, while various actors mobilise their agency
to shape Ardhisasa in various ways, their power for influence differs greatly to the extent
that it has been normalised that private sector actors are influential actors while civil society
Hoefsloot and Gateri 15

is kept at the margins. From this perspective, Ardhisasa is reductive, simplifying complex
relationships between people, land, and the state into decontextualised and tidy categories of
legitimate and illegitimate ownership and having a legitimate or illegitimate stake in the
platform. This mirrors the dynamics described by Kimari and Ernstson (2020), where large-
scale infrastructural projects in Kenya reproduce the landscapes of empire and capitalist
production under the banner of ‘development’ or ‘modernity’, neglecting citizens’ actions
that envision more just, communal, or non-capitalist futures.
Third, Ardhisasa creates liminal space. The development of the LIMS is inherently sit-
uated in space and the inequalities existing with the city and land sector. Analysing the
development of the Ardhisasa in relation to the experimental alternatives proposed by civil
society organisations in Nairobi casts a light on how the platform’s architecture structures
the urban landscape in profound ways. The liminality of the digital platform and the fact
that it is incomplete in its implementation – not all the data is included – nor in its scope –
not all land transactions can become digitalised – contributes to liminal existence in infor-
malised settlements. Hence, considering the relationship between the liminal digital platform
and the liminal city, we note the futility of approaching ‘land’ and ‘digital’ as separate fields
of urban governance but rather argue for a critical analysis of digital-land relations and the
territorialisation of information infrastructures. Informalised communities are permanently
on the threshold of becoming formalised, but with the liminality of the land administration
system, never seeming to complete this transition.
Hence, through the perpetual liminality of the LIMS implemented in Kenya, liminality
itself becomes spatialised (Banfield, 2022). In many ways, this is a silent process of further
exclusion of already disenfranchised communities living in conditions of semi-formality and
informality by increasing uncertainty. You cannot see it in the data or hear it in the dis-
course regarding land possession and administration. But it is lived and resisted every day –
in the informalised communities, in the land transaction documents that are not recognised,
and in the experiments with communal land. As Ardhisasa is currently piloted in Nairobi,
we have focussed our analysis on its impact on informalised urban settlements. However, as
Ardhisasa completes its anticipated rollout nationally, it will become important to consider
the future impact on Kenya’s rural and indigenous communities, which are materially,
politically, and informationally underserved by the state’s institutions.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Ayona Datta and Dennis Mbugua Muthama for their help in conducting the
interviews and feedback on earlier versions of this paper. We also want to thank all the land profes-
sionals and civil society organisers who have participated in this research and shared their knowledge
and time with us.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: The funding for this research was provided by a European Research Council
(ERC) Advanced Grant ‘Regional Futures’ (Grant agreement ID: 101019318) awarded to Ayona
Datta.
Make it ORCID iDsORCID iD
16 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

Fenna Imara Hoefsloot https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3373-3580
Catherine Gateri: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8168-5184
Note
1. https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2022-03-03-digitisation-of-land-records-to-be-completed-in-2024–
karoney/.
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