Course · ← 0001 Cadastre vs Registration · 0003 Systematic vs Sporadic →
Lesson 0002 · ~12 minutes
The doctrine behind almost every donor land project — and the reason your system's accuracy requirement is a policy decision, not an engineering one.
Roughly seventy per cent of the world's land is unrecorded. The conventional answer — survey every parcel to cadastral precision, then register it — costs more and takes longer than any developing country has. Countries that tried have spent decades reaching single-digit coverage.
Fit-For-Purpose Land Administration (FFP) is the response: build the spatial, legal and institutional frameworks to the standard the purpose requires, achievable now, and improve them incrementally as resources allow.1 It is the doctrine of GLTN / UN-Habitat / Kadaster and it is what donor evaluators read your proposal against.
"Accuracy of the land information should be understood as a relative issue related to the use of this information."1 Accuracy is defined by purpose, not by what your instruments could theoretically achieve. A boundary good enough to secure a family against eviction does not need to be good enough to site a pipeline.
FFP splits the design problem into three, and a proposal that only addresses the first is a proposal that fails.
| Framework | FFP position | What it does to your build |
|---|---|---|
| Spatial | General boundaries, visible physical features, imagery instead of field survey, participatory capture | Your geometry source is an orthophoto, not a total station. Accuracy metadata per parcel becomes mandatory. |
| Legal | A flexible continuum of tenure, not just freehold title; recordation of all rights people actually hold | Your rights model cannot assume ownership. Customary, group and use rights must be first-class. |
| Institutional | Good governance, integrated agencies, capacity built locally | Your system must be operable by the staff who will inherit it, in-country, after the funding ends. |
"The term general boundary means one whose position has not been precisely determined, although usually the delineation will relate to physical features in the field."1
A fixed boundary is surveyed to a defined precision and is legally definitive: the coordinates rule. A general boundary is approximate: the physical feature — the hedge, the wall, the track — rules, and the line on the map merely indicates it. FFP holds that general boundaries are sufficient for most land administration purposes, especially rural and semi-urban.1
The imagery standard usually quoted: high-resolution satellite imagery at 50 cm pixels or better, or orthophoto at roughly 1:2,000 for rural and low-density areas and 1:500 for dense urban.1
If boundaries are general, then two adjoining parcels digitised off imagery will disagree by a metre or two, and that is not a bug to be validated away. Your model needs to carry the accuracy class of each geometry, tolerate slivers and gaps within a stated tolerance, and never present coordinates in the UI as though they were definitive. Systems that hard-enforce topological perfection against general-boundary data spend their lives fighting their own data.
The other half of the doctrine: what you capture cheaply today must be upgradeable tomorrow — a general boundary can later be replaced by a surveyed one, for the parcels where it becomes worth it. That is a data model requirement, not a roadmap item. Every geometry needs to know how it was captured, to what accuracy, from what source, and when — so a later, better observation can supersede it without destroying the record of what was believed before.
Each is a real requirement from a land project. Which FFP framework does it belong to?
FIG Publication 60 — Fit-For-Purpose Land Administration (Enemark, Bell, Lemmen, McLaren; FIG/World Bank). The canonical statement, free:
fig.net/pub/figpub/pub60/Figpub60.pdf
The longer country-implementation version from GLTN / UN-Habitat / Kadaster is here. Read pub 60 first — it is shorter and it is the one people cite.