Assessment of Land Administration in Pakistan and the Potential Role of Volunteered Geographic Information

Introduction

Land can be defined as a physical thing covering the surface of the earth and all things associated with it, above and below along with the seawater (Dale & McLaughlin, 1999). Production of goods or services in any country help to stimulate economic development and the land is one of the four components of production along with labor, capital, and entrepreneurship (O’Sullivan & Sheffrin, 2007). For the growth of the country's economy, access to land, the security of tenure, and land management are significantly important (Grover & Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations., 2007).

A cadastre is a kind of up-to-date land information system (LIS) comprising parcels-based records of land interests such as rights, restrictions, and responsibilities. LIS holds the geographic footprints of the parcel land and a set of attributes that describe the parcel land (Robin McLaren, 2013). Cadastre is the fundamental appliance of a spatially enabled land administration system (LAS) (Enemark, 2010). Thus, Cadastre data has a distinct status in the LASs. LAS is defined as “the processes of determining, recording, and disseminating information about the tenure, value, and use of land when implementing land management policies” (UNECE, 1996). In other words, LAS manages not only land tenure and ownership but also land value and land use data(Bandeira et al., 2010; Bogaerts et al., 2002; Enemark, 2001; I. Williamson et al., 2010; I. P. Williamson, 2001).

Spatial data is the data that links objects to a location on the Earth’s Surface and is also known as geographical, geospatial, location-based data, or geo-referenced data (Rajabifard & Williamson, 2001). Land-related data is also spatial data. It is estimated that 80% of all human decisions are linked geographically (Worrall, 1991). Only 30-50 countries in the world have a complete land registration system and most countries still do not have a functional system of land administration thus people of such countries are under the threat of land conquest and precarious tenancy (McLaren, 2013). Pakistan ranks at 34th position by land area i.e 770,880 sq km. In a country like Pakistan, the development of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) is at an early stage. Pakistan is still facing an economic crisis and the allocation of proper funds for the establishment of NSDI may take years. Thus, in the absence of NSDI, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) can be a potential source of geographical information for land administration. Based on the experiences gained in the Land administration, VGI can later be upscaled to include in the future NSDI for Pakistan as well.

This chapter investigated the fitness of the recent initiative by the Government of Pakistan i.e reforming and modernization of the cadastre with respect to UNGGIM's recently adopted FELA. The study consists of multiple parts, in the first part of the study, the cadastre initiative has been evaluated against the FELA with the help of various materials such as official documents and information from official websites of the public departments related to land administration, input from the Delphi study conducted to sought expert opinions. In the second part of the study SWOT analysis is performed to document the weak and strong areas of the initiative along with opportunities for and threats to the initiative. The guidelines for effective land administration in Pakistan and the use of VGI for land administration are also shared. The research output will benefit policymakers and future implementation of VGI and LAS

The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 highlights the background of cadastre of the Pakistan including problems associated with the existing cadastre system. This section also underpinned the salient features of the recent initiative for the modernization of the cadastre system of Pakistan. Section 3 describes the background and importance of VGI for land administration in Pakistan. Section 4 designates the methodology employed in the study, and Section 5 offers results. Section 6 presents discussions on the results and guidelines for using VGI for Land administration in Pakistan.