Monitoring Indicators of International Guidance Documents and Frameworks through LADM

Evaluating the performance of a land administration system (LAS) is a critical task as it can provide input for improving the operational system. Through such an evaluation, the strengths and weaknesses of the existing system can be identified, and actions can be taken to improve it. Efforts have been made to develop frameworks and best practices for the assessment and comparison of the performance of LASs. Amongst the most prominent are the ‘Land Governance Assessment Framework’ (LGAF) of the World Bank and the ‘Global Land Indicators’ proposed by the Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) in its Global Land Indicators Initiative (GLII). The GLII indicators are closely related to the UN-Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicators on land tenure security, namely SDGs 1.4.2 (%adults with secure tenure rights), 5.a.1 (%agricultural population with secure rights over agricultural land), and 5.a.2 (women's equal rights to land ownership).

The Land Administration Domain Model (LADM), an International Standard (ISO, 2012), can be used to monitor global indicators proposed by various international organizations and to evaluate the performance of LADM-based LASs, as LADM Edition II now provides full support for all land administration (LA) functions including marine georegulation, valuation information and spatial plan information. Interface classes to the LADM are designed to support the generation and management of products and services, such as the monitoring of global performance indicators for LASs.

This paper is a follow-up on Chen et al. (2024), which was focusing on formalizing SDG land related indicator using LADM. The objective of this study is to explore the extent to which LADM can be used to also monitor the indicators of LGAF and GLII. To this end, the indicators are categorized according to their degree of association with LADM (i.e. full computational association, partial computational association, indirect association, association with other standards and non-association), and interface classes are created based on the results. The results show that LADM can be used to monitor a significant portion of the indicators of LGAF and GLII, although most of the indicators are related to a country's national legislation, its implementation and organizational decisions and capability.