Land information is one of the basic requirements for land management activities such as land consolidation. However, the dearth of land information on customary lands limits the development and application of land consolidation. This paper presents and discusses the results of an experiment carried out to test the potential of participatory land administration applied on customary lands in support of land consolidation. A brief overview of the evolution of crowdsourced, voluntary, and participatory approaches is provided alongside newly related insights into neogeography and neo-cadastre, and fit-for-purpose and pro-poor land administration. The concept of participatory land administration is then developed in this context. The area of the experiment is in Northern Ghana where the process was developed together with the local farming community. The study involved collecting land information relating to farms over a two-week period, using a mobile app and a satellite image, based on participatory land administration. The results show that Participatory Land Administration can potentially support land consolidation, though further investigation is needed on how it can be integrated into the formal land registration system, into an actual land consolidation project. mostly because first, their pace is very slow in relation to the urgency of the results. Secondly, they have been too expensive, leaving them out of the reach of most citizens. Thirdly, these approaches have largely failed to integrate all forms of land tenure arrangements, especially secondary and customary land rights. The outcome is that parts of the community are left vulnerable to land grabs, contentious land disputes, limited investment in land, and increase in food insecurity. In response, calls for pro-poor and fit-for-purpose approaches to land administration have emerged [7,8]. These approaches, that seek to adapt local needs and circumstances in tandem with legitimate and acceptable social, cultural, and institutional practices, are described by de Vries et al. [9] as responsible approaches.Advances in responsible approaches usually consider new ways through which different forms of legitimate land rights can be recorded and documented on one hand; and on the other hand, explore how emerging and cutting edge technologies in geospatial sciences offer faster and cheaper options for spatial data collection. New insights into documenting all forms of land rights have been made by the continuum of land rights by the GLTN [10], and several studies in customary and informal land rights [6,11,12]. On the part of spatial data collection, emerging and cutting edge technologies have advanced new approaches to land administration in the form of crowdsourcing, voluntary geographic information (VGI), and neo-cadastres. These technologies include the use of old map documents, high resolution satellite images (HRSI), tools based on Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as well as smart technologies such as Automatic Featu...

No abstract

No abstract

In this paper, we develop a framework for an approach that assigns values to customary rural farmland parcels based on the local people's view of land value to support land consolidation. In a case study of Nanton, Ghana, key land value factors were identified and weighted by the local community. The weights were integrated into the framework that produced a Land Value Index for each farmland parcel. Though the strength of the approach is found in scenario and sensitivity analyses. However, the prime weakness of this framework is that it is more expensive to use than automatic valuation models.

No abstract