The Republic of Uganda is one of the five countries within the East African region. Uganda’s efforts to increase land productivity are hampered by land tenure insecurity related problems. For more than ten years, Fit for Purpose Land Administration (FFPLA) pilot projects have been implemented in various parts of the country.

The government of Benin in 2013 decided upon a centralized land administration, with the purpose of recording the entire national territory in one land administration system to promote durable economic development by increasing legal certainty in real estate transactions. This is a major challenge, given that currently, of the estimated 5 million cadastral parcels, less than 60,000 parcels have a land title and are registered in the national land administration agency’s central database.

The major global pressures of rapid urbanization and urban growth are being compounded by climate impacts, resulting in increased vulnerability for urban dwellers, with these vulnerabilities exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of this is concentrated in urban and peri-urban areas where urban development spreads into hazard-prone areas. Often, this development is dominated by poor-quality homes in informal settlements or slums with poor tenure security.

After the political change in Nepal of 1951, leapfrog land policy improvements have been recorded, however, the land reform initiatives have been short of full success. Despite a land administration system based on cadaster and land registries in place, 25% of the arable land with an estimated 10 million spatial units on the ground are informally occupied and are off-register. Recently, a strong political will has emerged to ensure land rights for all.

This Special Issue provides an insight, collated from 26 articles, focusing on various aspects of the Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration (FFPLA) concept and its application [...]

Intensive land use can support sustainable socioeconomic development, especially in the context of limited land resources and high population. It is measured by land-use intensity that reflects the degree of land-use efficiency. In order to support decision-making for efficient land use, we investigated the mechanism whereby natural and socioeconomic factors influence land-use intensity from the perspectives of overall, region-, and city-based analysis, respectively.

Land administration is established to manage the people-to-land relationship. However, it is believed that 70% of the land in developing countries is unregistered. In the case of Ecuador, the government has an ambitious strategy to implement a national cadaster on the full territory in a short time period. Therefore, the objective of this study was the assessment of land administration in Ecuador based on the fit-for-purpose approach as an assessment framework.

Natural resource management has entered a new stage in 2018 in the People’s Republic of China (China) marked by the establishment of the Ministry of Natural Resources of China (MNRPRC). More functions and responsibilities are integrated in the MNRPRC to build a uniform management system for full natural resource features in China with the aim of implementing uniform spatial planning and regulation, management, use and control, surveying, and registration for full natural resources.

Land consolidation zoning is the basis of land reclamation planning and provides a precondition for land management work. Zoning is beneficial to scientific decision-making regarding the use of cultivated land resources, and helps to ensure the quality and production level of cultivated land. Hence, land consolidation zoning is of national significance in terms of safeguarding food security.

The redevelopment of urban villages is a prominent part of urban renewal in China, which has attracted much attention from the academic community. However, the understanding of when and where the redevelopment of urban villages occurs is still limited partly because of the lack of empirical analysis. Through exploratory spatial data and overlay analyses, this study examines the spatio-temporal distribution characteristics based on data from 277 urban village redevelopment projects in Shenzhen, China, between 2010 and 2018.

Water reclamation contributes to a guaranteed increase in the yield of agricultural lands and can also negatively affect the quality of the land. Technical malfunction of reclamation systems, outdated reclamation technologies, poor water quality, and untimely drainage may result in such negative processes as resalting and bogging. In Russia, state monitoring of reclaimed lands is carried out annually and obtained data are used to identify soil degradation and pollution to fix the problems at the appropriate times.

In Slovakia, the large-scale acquisition of agricultural land in combination with land concentration represents a legitimate threat that can lead to land grabbing. Based on the research, two interrelated areas of protection need to be effectively regulated to limit land grabbing: the protection of access to land and the protection of agricultural land.