(P.S. V) Building Land Governance Resilience with Open & Transparent Land Data Systems
Channel: Land Portal
Date: 2021-06-23

Read More: https://landportal.org/event/2021/04/landac-conference-2021

The COVID-19 pandemic substantially exacerbated numerous land governance challenges, including addressing failures in land governance systems, a lack of transparency, systemic corruption, and lack of accessibility to data. It also is undermining decades of development progress on global food security and has driven hundreds of millions of people into poverty, while governments take license to develop indigenous and community lands and thus fuel the climate crisis. Good land governance is said to be efficient, effective and transparent, while ensuring participatory processes and outcomes that are equitable and secure, but data and its governance are key to assessing and monitoring if this is indeed the case. In order to stem the impact of COVID-19 and these intertwined crises on land governance, land-related data and information can provide the support needed to monitor key indices, especially those related to progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) such as women’s ownership of land or perceptions of tenure security, among others. However, land ownership data is consistently ranked lowest on both the Global Open Data Index and
the Open Data Barometer and each year this data is highlighted as the least likely to be open.

In this context, the Land Portal Foundation and the Open data Charter have joined efforts to create an Open Up Guide on Land Governance that
outlines key land governance data types, how they should be collected, stored, published for improving land governance and transparency. This
session will showcase evidence of how open land governance systems can be used as a tool to untangle and ameliorate the damage caused by the
lack of transparency and corruption fuelled by the COVID-19 crisis, and demonstrate how open land governance systems can serve as a tool to fight
poverty and ultimately increase food security.