SmartSkeMa: Scalable Documentation for Community and Customary Land Tenure

Malumbo C Chipofya,Angela Schwering,Sahib Jan

doi:10.3390/land10070662

Malumbo C Chipofya, Angela Schwering + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/land10070662

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Journal: Land	Publication Date: Jun 22, 2021
Citations: 6	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Twente, University of Münster

Abstract

According to the online database landmarkmap, up to an estimated 50% or more of the world’s habitable land is held by indigenous peoples and communities. While legal and procedural provisions are being made for bureaucratically managing the many different types of tenure relations in this domain, there continues to be a lack of tools and expertise needed to quickly and accurately document customary and indigenous land rights. Software and hardware tools that have been designed for documenting land tenure through communities continue to assume a parcel-based model of land as well as categories of land relations (RRR) largely dimensionally similar to statutory land rights categories. The SmartSkeMa approach to land tenure documentation combines sketching by hand with aerial imagery and an ontology-based model of local rules regulating land tenure relations to produce a system specifically designed to allow accurate documentation of land tenure from a local perspective. In addition, the SmartSkeMa adaptor which is an OWL-DL based set of rules for translating local land related concepts to the LADM concepts provides a more high-level view of the data collected (i.e., what does this concept relate to within the national LADM profile?) In this paper we present the core functionalities of SmartSkeMa using examples from Kenya and Ethiopia. Based on an expert survey and focus groups held in Kenya, we also analyze how the approach fairs on the Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration tools scale. The results indicate that the approach could be beneficial in scaling up mapping of community and customary lands as well as help reduce conflict through its participatory nature.

Highlights

Much of the world’s habitable land is held by indigenous peoples and communities
While legal and procedural provisions are being made for bureaucratically managing the many different types of tenure relations in this domain, there continues to be a lack of tools and expertise needed to quickly and accurately document customary and indigenous land rights
We give an overview of a few fit-for-purpose land registration and land tenure documentation approaches and outline how the SmartSkeMa approach differs from them

Summary

Introduction

Much of the world’s habitable land is held by indigenous peoples and communities. Surprisingly, there is a dearth of tools and expertise needed to quickly and accurately document customary and indigenous land rights. By contrast a lot of investment is put into implementation and improvement of statutory land administration systems as witnessed by many recent projects in the domain (LIFT in Ethiopia and the Rwanda LTR for example). This is ironic considering landmarkmap’s estimate that of the nearly 70% undocumented tenures on land in the world a significant proportion is likely to cover up to 50% of the world’s habitable areas (http://landmarkmap.org). Legal land rights categories are often created to simplify (and make uniform) the relations of tenure on land to render them amenable to administration This simplification inevitably entails a tearing down of some existing local social norms and cultural practices. The distinction is between sporadic and systematic registration of land [9] (pp. 349–354)

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