At global level, raising awareness of land management and institutional development plays an important role in building strong institutions for urban, regional, and national development, especially for housing. This can help the urban homeless by providing urban land when they need it. Hence, robust and well-structured urban land administration institutions are crucial for meeting planned housing land demand and achieving national, regional, and city-level objectives, contributing significantly to urban development. Because an effective urban land delivery system for housing favors low-income groups organized as housing cooperatives. However, substantial gaps in the current literature on land administration institutional structure have not been addressed in depth, notably in performing the land delivery process and utilizing communication as a tool between and within land administration functions and levels. The objective of this article is to investigate how an insufficient land administration institutional structure affects urban land supply to housing cooperatives as a capacity bottleneck. To achieve the study’s objectives, interviews and desk reviews were used as part of the mixed-methods approach to identify institutional structure challenges that limit effective communication and impede institutional performance in land delivery. The study found that inadequate institutional structures, conflicting roles, and poor communication channels were responsible for poor urban land delivery for housing cooperatives. Thus, without well-structured institutions in place, managing urban land may become an impossible mission, impeding progress towards sustainable development goals in cities. To this end, it is necessary to reform existing institutional structures to close current performance gaps related to institutional arrangements in urban land administration in general and land delivery for housing in particular. Ultimately, this conclusion calls for further research on responsible land stewardship and institutional arrangements, emphasizing the importance of understanding urban land institutions for housing developers in urban Ethiopia and analogous cities worldwide.
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