In South Africa, land tenure security is a challenge for 60% or more of the population who hold interests in land outside of the formal system of registered title. There is a need for the cadastral and land administration systems to be reshaped, and for new land tenure forms to be developed to record all land rights and interests so as to improve land tenure security for all.

A Fit-for-Purpose (FFP) land administration system strives for a more flexible, inclusive, participatory, affordable, reliable, realistic, and scalable approach to land administration and management in developing countries. The FFP finds itself thus at the interface with the coordination and governance challenges of the mainstream promotion of democratic decentralization of the past decades in general, and collaborative systems for decentralized and participatory land governance in Africa, in particular.

Access to land for many people in Africa is insecure and continues to pose risks to poverty, hunger, forced evictions, and social conflicts. The delivery of land tenure in many cases has not been adequately addressed. Fit-for-purpose spatial frameworks need to be adapted to the context of a country based on simple, affordable, and incremental solutions toward addressing these challenges. This paper looked at three case studies on the use of the Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM) tool in promoting the development of a fit-for-purpose land administration spatial framework.

What potential will the fit-for-purpose land administration concept have of working in the Republic of South Africa? This question is asked against the existence of a high-quality cadastre covering most of the South African landmass. However, a large proportion of the people living in South Africa live outside of this secure land tenure system. Many citizens and immigrants reside on communal land, in informal settlements, in resettled communities, in off-register housing schemes, and as farm dwellers, labour tenants and other occupants of commercial farms.

The Republic of Uganda is one of the five countries within the East African region. Uganda’s efforts to increase land productivity are hampered by land tenure insecurity related problems. For more than ten years, Fit for Purpose Land Administration (FFPLA) pilot projects have been implemented in various parts of the country.

The struggles of women to access and hold landuse and other land property rights under the customary tenure system in peri-urban communal areas is increasingly becoming a cause for concern. These debates are revealed using a case study of a peri-urban communal area called Domboshava in Zimbabwe. Women living in this peri-urban communal area struggle to access and hold landuse and other land property rights registered under their names. The aim of this paper is to present an analysis of the struggles faced by women to access and hold landuse and other land property rights in Domboshava.

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.

The deviation of implementation of China’s cultivated land protection policy is the core problem urgently needing to be solved in the process of protecting the country’s cultivated land. This paper aims to explain the universality of this implementation deviation from the perspective of the spatial interaction of fiscal land strategies. Based on the data of 30 provinces in China from 2000 to 2015, the spatial Durbin model is used to validate the corresponding theoretical hypothesis.

Mozambique started a massive land registration program to register five million parcels and delimitate four thousand communities. The results of the first two years of this program illustrated that the conventional methods utilized for the land tenure registration were too expensive and time-consuming and faced several data quality problems.

Land administration is established to manage the people-to-land relationship. However, it is believed that 70% of the land in developing countries is unregistered. In the case of Ecuador, the government has an ambitious strategy to implement a national cadaster on the full territory in a short time period. Therefore, the objective of this study was the assessment of land administration in Ecuador based on the fit-for-purpose approach as an assessment framework.

In Slovakia, the large-scale acquisition of agricultural land in combination with land concentration represents a legitimate threat that can lead to land grabbing. Based on the research, two interrelated areas of protection need to be effectively regulated to limit land grabbing: the protection of access to land and the protection of agricultural land.

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) may facilitate the implementation of fit-for-purpose land administration (FFPLA); however, the approach can be compromised when funding for land registration is insufficient or donor projects end. This paper aims to introduce a new form of PPP to the literature on FFPLA, further extending the discourse and options available on PPPs for FFPLA. A background review finds that whilst PPPs have had long standing application in land administration, there is room to explore approaches that seek increased involvement of non-conventional land sector actors.