The Open Up Guide on Land Governance is a resource  aimed to be used by governments from developing countries to collect and release land-related data to improve data quality, availability, accessibility and use for improved citizen engagement, decision making and innovation. It sets out:

1. Key datasets for land management accountability, and how they should be collected, stored, shared and published for improving land governance and transparency;

Les Open Up Guides sont des outils pratiques développés par l’ODC et ses partenaires thématiques pour aider les gouvernements et d’autres acteurs à utiliser la publication d’ensembles de données stratégiques pour relever les principaux défis politiques. Ils s’appuient sur des preuves pratiques tout en recueillant des enseignements pour s’assurer que les normes mondiales sont applicables localement.

Academic scholarship captures different land governance dimensions while focusing mainly on agrarian, legal, and economic aspects. However, little to no attention is paid to land governance consideration through public policy lenses. In particular, this holds for Central Asian (CA) countries where there is a noticeable lack of academic works on land governance effectiveness and anti-corruption strategies in the land sector.

Long-term, sustainable and responsible ways to access and share data are fundamental to all efforts to support sustainable development and particularly salient to improving land governance and securing land rights for landless and vulnerable people. The COVID-19 pandemic has unequivocally demonstrated that the need for land rights has never been greater, as governments have shut down land administration systems and rolled back regulations protecting vulnerable communities.

About the workshop

On 28th June from 2pm - 5pm CEST the LandPortal and LandVoc Community of Experts hosted a workshop as part of the 4th AGROVOC Annual Editorial Meeting to support shared learning and dialogue on the development, promotion and adoption of AGROVOC sub-schemes. 

The period for public comments is now closed. Thank you to all those who submitted feedback. The revised version is available here.  

To ensure a better and more sustainable future for all, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (“the 2030 Agenda”) has identified 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. SDGs range from poverty eradication, zero hunger, decent work and reduced inequalities to quality education, clean water and sanitation, and gender equality, only to name some of them.

The Global Land Indicators Initiative (GLII) platform was established in 2012 through the joint effort of United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), the World Bank and Millennium Challenge Corporation with the aim of making global-scale monitoring of land governance a reality by 2021.

Opening up land-related administrative data, combining it with data from other sources  and processing and making this data available as easily accessible information for women and men equally could be a means to counteracting land corruption in land management, land administration and land allocation. But does open data and enhanced data transparency indeed help to counteract land corruption?

Environment statistics enumerate various aspects of the environment and human interactions with it. The scope of environment statistics encompasses all dimensions of the environment, be it Earth, Water or Air, the biotic and abiotiv matter found within the natural environment, and various concerns arising out of impacts of human footprints on it. The objective of environment statistics is to provide information about the environment, its changes over time and across locations, and the main factors that influence them.

This is the presentation of Dr.  Marcello De Maria, Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Agriculture Policy and Development at the University of Reading during the webinar on the Role of Open Data in the Fight against Land Corruption on January 28th, 2021. 

The analysis revealed overwhelming support for the use of open data as an anticorruption tool in the land sector, but it also found strong evidence for the existence of a high degree of untapped potential.

The rapid progress in digital information and communication technologies  (ICTs) comes with both fresh opportunities and new challenges for different sectors and actors adopting the new solutions that become available over time. Since the mid-2000s, the global land governance community has piloted a series of open data and transparency initiatives largely based on such digital innovations, aiming at increasing accountability and counteracting corruption in the land sector, both at the local and global level.