MetRe (phase 1) has conducted a systematic and critical review of existing toolkits for measuring land rights and governance around the world. In many developing countries, approximately 70% of land is not documented, managed or protected by law, even in peri-urban and urban contexts. Research has highlighted the links between tenure security and poverty reduction, women's empowerment, climate change mitigation and other dimensions of efficient and equitable urban development, motivating large-scale programmes to increase land tenure security in many countries. In this context, the Sustainable Development Goals have set targets for monitoring tenure security, particularly for vulnerable groups, thus generating the need for global reporting on land rights. For example, new initiatives such as Prindex are advancing global measurement of tenure security as part of the Gallup survey, while other initiatives aim to strengthen national capacity for data collection. In sum, several initiatives have developed toolkits to measure land rights and governance through interviews with experts and practitioners, community representatives and ordinary residents, which allow us to learn from the data collected in the field.
How do existing toolkits approach issues of measuring land rights and governance, and what questions do they raise? We reviewed and analysed the toolkits developed by major international organisations before selecting 20 of them to examine in depth, which are presented in the toolkit section of our library. We reviewed the latest available version of each toolkit and, where possible, compared it with the original and an interim one. In this way, we arrived at 43 questionnaires in our first round of research that inform the current library. This research produced an unprecedented compilation of questions for studying land rights, which will provide inspiration and guidance for developing more comprehensive or more detailed toolkits for those interested in measuring land rights, from development agencies to community organisations, researchers and others. Clearly, this library is a work in progress that requires updating over time. We describe the research process and our critical evaluation of existing tools in a paper available here [soon].Â
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