| Definition and concepts |
Definition:
Indicator 1.4.2 measures the relevant part of Target 1.4 (ensure men and women have equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to …, ownership of and control over land and other forms of property, inheritance, natural resources). It measures the results of policies that aim to strengthen tenure security for all, including women and other vulnerable groups.
Indicator 1.4.2 covers (a) all types of land use (such as residential, commercial, agricultural, forestry, grazing, wetlands based on standard land-use classification) in both rural and urban areas; and (b) all land tenure types as recognized at the country level, such as freehold, leasehold, public land, customary land. An individual can hold land in his/her own name, jointly with other individuals, as a member of a household, or collectively as member of group, cooperative or other type of association.
Secure tenure rights: comprised of two sub-components: (i) legally recognized documentation and (ii) perception of the security of tenure, which are both necessary to provide a full measurement of tenure security.
Legally recognized documentation: Legal documentation of rights refers to the recording and publication of information on the nature and location of land, rights and right holders in a form that is recognized by government, and is therefore official. For purposes of computing SDG Indicator 1.4.2, the country specific metadata will define what documentation on land rights will be counted as legally recognized (see next section for rationale).
Perceived security of tenure: Perception of tenure security refers to an individual’s perception of the likelihood of involuntary loss of land, such as disagreement of the ownership rights over land or ability to use it, regardless of the formal status and can be more optimistic or pessimistic. Although those without land rights’ documentation may frequently be perceived to be under threat, and those with documentation perceived as protected, there may be situations where documented land rights alone are insufficient to guarantee tenure security. Conversely, even without legally recognized documentation, individuals may feel themselves to be protected against eviction or dispossession. Therefore, capturing and analysing these diverse ranges of situations will enable a more comprehensive understanding of land tenure security, based on a country specific context.
For purposes of constructing the indicator (see next section for rationale), we define perceptions of tenure to be secure if:
- The landholder does not report a fear of involuntary loss of the land within the next five years due to, for example, intra-family, community or external threats and
- The landholder reports having the right to bequeath the land.
Total adult population: A country’s adult population is measured by census data or through surveys using an adequate sampling frame.
Interpretation:
One motivation that makes the indicator actionable is that, in many developing countries, the gap between data on the availability of documentation and on perception of tenure security can be large. For example, tenure may be perceived as secure, even though rights are not formally documented, as in the case of customary systems and trusted local land governance arrangements. Or, the opposite, tenure may be perceived as insecure even when there is a high level of formal documentation of rights. The latter situation can be caused by various factors, including limited trust in land administration services, possible duplicated documents, high cost of having state institutions protecting such rights.
Reporting on perceived security will provide important information on people’s satisfaction with the institutional quality of service, transparency, appropriateness, accessibility and affordability of land administration services and justice systems.
Concepts:
The concepts below are based on the “Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Forests and Fisheries in the Context of National Food Security” (shorthand VGGT), which were endorsed by the United Nations World Committee on World Food Security in 2012 and therefore considered an internationally accepted standard. Other international frameworks using these concepts are the African Union Agenda on Land as laid out in the 2009 Framework and Guidelines on Land Policy in Africa and the 2014 Nairobi Action Plan on Large-Scale Land-Based Investments.
Tenure: How people, communities and others gain access to land and natural resources (including fisheries and forests) is defined and regulated by societies through systems of tenure. These tenure systems determine who can use which resources, for how long, and under what conditions. Tenure systems may be based on written policies and laws, as well as on unwritten customs and practices. No tenure right, including private ownership, is absolute. All tenure rights are limited by the rights of others and by the measures taken by states for public purposes (VGGT, 2012).
Tenure typology: A tenure typology is country specific and refers to categories of tenure rights, for example customary, leasehold, public and freehold. Rights can be held collectively, jointly or individually and may cover one or more elements of the bundle of rights (the right of possession, of control, of exclusion, of enjoyment and of disposition).
Land governance: Rules, processes and structures through which decisions are made regarding access to and the use (and transfer) of land, how those decisions are implemented and the way that conflicting interests in land are managed. States provide legal recognition for tenure rights through policies, law and land administration services, and define the categories of rights that are considered official.
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| Data sources |
The data sources used are census, multi-topic household surveys conducted by national statistical Organizations and, depending on availability, administrative data on land tenure reported by national land institutions (in most cases land registries and cadastres).
Household surveys and census
Household surveys and census that have been implemented by national statistical agencies, are a key source of information for computing the indicator.
Censuses: These provide a complete enumeration of all the populations of the country at a specific time. In many recent censuses, questions on household characteristics, including short modules on security of tenure, are collected. So far, 41 countries have carried out a census in which questions on land tenure were included. Options for expanding land-related questions in the upcoming agricultural census are being discussed together with FAO (custodians of 5.a.1).
Household-level consumption/expenditure surveys: To provide aggregate information on levels of consumption, prices and, often, estimates of GDP, many countries conduct this type of survey. As one of the key assets, this often includes questions on how residential land is accessed but rarely goes beyond this in terms of the type of documents held or the gender of rights holders. Elaborated housing modules are often included, and which already contain some questions on tenure status of the dwelling and documentation held. In consultation with the NSO, these modules will be fine-tuned to fully cover the essential land questions identified for 1.4.2.
Multi-topic household surveys: Building on the need to generate reliable poverty estimates and understand the factors that lead households to fall into poverty or escape from it in developing countries, these surveys include a roster of household members and, where agriculture is a main source of livelihood, a detailed agricultural module that in many cases obtains information on tenure status, ownership, and production at plot level. The essential questions for 1.4.2 as well as 5.a.1 have been included in the Living Standard Measurement Surveys approach, which includes individual surveys and puts much emphasis on measuring intra household dynamics through direct reporting.
Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS): Responding to a need for more frequent and reliable information on population and health, especially in developing countries, these types of surveys provide nationally representative data on a wide range of areas including fertility, family planning, maternal and child health, gender, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and nutrition. A standard questionnaire, regularly revised to incorporate newly emerging issues, is administrated at the household and individual level. It is a nationally representative survey. In a majority of DHS surveys, people eligible for individual interviews include women of reproductive age (15-49) and men age 15-49, 15-54, or 15-59. The individual questionnaires in the latest version (round 7) includes questions on whether respondents own land, if they have formal ownership documents, and if their name is included on these documents.
Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS): Surveys implemented by NSOs under the program developed by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) to provide internationally comparable, statistically rigorous data on the situation of children and women. They cover topics such as health, education, child protection, and water and sanitation. The survey design follows closely that of DHS questions and modules. This facilitates cross-country comparisons of estimates obtained using DHS data with those obtained using MICS data. In addition to the household questionnaire, there are questionnaires for women of reproductive ages (15-49), men aged between 15 and 49 and children (aged 0-5 and aged 5-17). The household questionnaire includes questions on ownership of land that can be used for agriculture by any member of the household, and on the size of the agricultural land owned by the household members. Also, there are questions about ownership/rental of dwelling where the household lives.
Discussions are ongoing with the teams in charge of DHS and MICS, specifically on expanding questions on land in their standardized and nationally representative surveys, in order to cover all data requirements for 1.4.2.
Urban Inequity Surveys (UIS): These specialized surveys were designed by UN-Habitat as household surveys to monitor and assess water and sanitation service coverage and other topics on urban inequities, including tenure. More recently, these surveys have been expanded to cover both rural and urban areas. The upcoming UIS surveys will be reviewed to ensure that the data requirements for SDG 1.4.2 are covered.
Administrative data
Production of land records and maps is a core function of public land registries, with legally recognized documentation being the output. Reporting on the information contained in these land records ((i) names of people holding rights, (ii) type of rights and (iii) location) is not difficult in principle if records are kept in a computerized format. Using household surveys, this land information can be cross-checked against survey information with respect to quality and coverage. In the case of registered communal or group rights, identifying the group members who gain tenure security through its registration is equally possible.
The country specific metadata will include a description of the structure of the land information data base, available information and approach for routine SDG reporting.
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| Data providers |
National data providers:
- Statistical agencies – surveys
- Government administrative sources /registries, cadastres
Compilation & reporting at the global level:
- UN-Habitat - United Nations Human Settlements Programme
- World Bank
Development of methodology and data collection tools was done with support of national statistics offices (NSOs) (Colombia, India, Jamaica, Tanzania, Uganda, Cameroon, the United States, the Africa Centre for Statistics/UNECA) and land agencies (Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, United Arab Emirates and Uganda) and regional organizations of land agencies (registries, cadastres, ministries responsible for land) through international Expert Group Meetings.
The data collection tool was developed in coordination with FAO and UN Women/EDGE to harmonize instruments for 1.4.2 and 5.a.1.
The development of this SDG indicator is supported by the Global Donor Working Group on Land (GDWGL). This is a network of 24 bi- and multilateral donors and international organizations committed to improving land governance worldwide and which collectively represents virtually all global donor assistance in the land sector: the Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) and the Global Land Indicator Initiative (GLII), a network of over 70 CSOs, NGOs, professional organizations, research and training organizations; the International Land Coalition (ILC), an alliance of more than 200 intergovernmental and civil society organizations working on land; and the African Union/UNECA/AfDB Land Policy Initiative.
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| Comment and limitations |
In 2016, a total of 116 countries reported having electronic land information systems in place. Countries with paper-based systems will have more difficulties with reporting on administrative data and household surveys will be the main source of data for this indicator in these countries. The expansion of digitization of records and land data management is one way to facilitate the ease of reporting administrative data for this indicator. Coverage may, however, be geographically skewed, for example towards urban or specific rural regions where cadastral coverage is concentrated, and therefore sub-national dimensions should be properly considered and conveyed in narrative reporting by specific countries to accompany the headline data.
In federal countries with decentralized land registry systems and no centralized reporting yet, data reporting systems for aggregation will be put in place. For countries where the land administration system does not yet collect information on gender, and gender disaggregation cannot be computed using other core data (social security numbers, ID etc), land agencies are encouraged to start expanding this by recording also the gender of owners/users of newly registered land.
Most of the national household surveys’ target samples are sufficiently large to provide the statistical power for disaggregation by sex and tenure type at rural /urban and sub-national levels. Inferring the extent to which the adult population is tenure secure based on the existing web of surveys, will require the use of a standardized set of questions so that surveys can be combined. However, even nationally representative surveys tend to cover certain segments of the population (those living in agricultural areas, families in which there are women of reproductive age, official urban areas etc.). Even when all the existing surveys are aggregated, there may be pockets of the population that are not captured by the surveys and for which there is thus no data on tenure security. This may include families living in areas that are too far or costly to reach, like forest areas.
Household surveys generally collect household-level data from proxy respondents. Family members who are not the head or the most knowledgeable person in their households are not interviewed, as is also noted in the methodological note for the IAEG-SDG Secretariat for Indicator 5.a.1. This approach is problematic for measuring tenure rights and security due to the introduction of non-random measurement errors. For instance, proxy reporting by one member of the household tends to incorrectly assign rights and misjudge and underestimate both women’s and men’s rights and use of land. Indicator 1.4.2 should therefore be based on self-reported rather than proxy data. If not all household members are surveyed, only those surveyed should be reported, estimating the global adult population based on the smaller sample enumerated. This lack of information affects only the numerators of the indicator; it has no bearing on the denominator which should always be the total adult population. In other words, the indicator reports and tracks the proportion of the population for which there is self-reported data stating that they are tenure secure. People for whom there is no information cannot be assumed to be tenure secure and therefore are not counted in the numerator. National statistics offices (NSOs) should report the data collected from household surveys as individual level data that corresponds to the respondent and is not extrapolated to the rest of his/her household. Any limitations in the representativeness of this data should be clearly noted in the country specific metadata submitted with the reporting, including who was included in the enumeration.
Data will still be used for countries that do not yet have survey instruments in place that survey individuals, while capacity for expanding sampling and individual self-reporting by NSOs is expanded progressively through Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), Living Standard Measurement Survey (LSMS) and other type of surveys in coordination with FAO and UN-Women. Addressing this challenge will require combined efforts. Custodians of the land rights indicators1.4.2 and 5.a.1, and relevant stakeholders from the land sector, will work with custodians from other SDG indicators also require surveying of individuals, and in particular the NSOs, to identify effective approaches to start filling the void on self-reported data. NSOs need to be supported to collect data by interviewing individual adult household member. The custodians will leverage the work of the UN - Evidence and Data for Gender Equality EDGE project, in particular, which is the most advanced in using and testing gender sensitive methodologies and approaches. They have found the approach feasible and have developed training materials and data collection instruments suitable for this effort.
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