illustrates how this can be used to monitor compliance with environmental regulations. Making land use information public allows to use land use at parcel to determine eligibility for public credit programs (Assunção _et al._ 2020), certification of private sector supply chains (Carlson _et al._ 2018; zu Ermgassen _et al._ 2020), or reductions in the cost of measures to enhance resilience such as index based crop insurance (Masiza _et al._ 2022). Data on parcel boundaries together with satellite imagery on historical land use or yield proxies also offers opportunities to allow unbanked farmers to establish a history of creditworthiness.

Finally, connectivity can foster decentralization by combining central data maintenance with access to and use of authentic information by public and private bodies. By reducing cost of accessing information on registered primary or secondary rights (including encumbrances) and allowing its sharing (subject to right holders’ consent where required by data privacy regulation) in real time with stakeholders in private or public sector. By indicating, for example, interest in certain transactions (e.g., leasing land or obtaining credit at some price), this can reduce transaction cost and increase competition in and thickness of land and financial markets, expanding the set of possible contracts and contracting partners.

Together with the ability to reference land use outcomes that are objectively verifiable via remote sensing at high levels of granularity, connectivity provides opportunities to expand the contracting space in ways that may allow to better insure against risk or reduce the potential for moral hazard. Reliable data on parcel boundaries and land rights could allow to bundle cash rent with crop insurance as alternative to sharecropping. The scope to easily register encumbrances or monitor cultivation activity at parcel level in real time can aid reputation development and potentially support an array of contract farming arrangements. Building on private operators’ experience in documenting use rights for supply chain management or certification and adding interoperability with public records could allow to document rights in ways that can mature over time and reduce rural factor market imperfections in ways that could provide a basis for new business models by the private sector.

Connectivity, combined with the ability to use mobile money to transfer small amounts of resources at close to zero cost also makes it easier to better protect and more effectively exercise secondary rights by gathering consent to certain transactions electronically and automatically sharing current or future benefit streams. In settings such as Kenya where female co-ownership rights are enshrined in family law (Harari 2019), embedding a default requirement for spousal consent to any transfers or registered transactions could strengthen women’s rights even in the absence of joint documents. Remote connectivity also reduces the cost of establishing and managing group rights as members can make decisions and receive payments in line with their share without the need for physical presence or intermediaries. This may make common pool resources and public land more valuable and contractible, including by reducing collective action issues as state-contingent ‘Payment for Environmental Services’ (PES) schemes could be tailored to individual group 18