Course · ← 0002 Fit-For-Purpose · 0004 Time and Mutation →

Lesson 0003 · ~12 minutes

Systematic vs Sporadic

The single choice that decides whether you are building a transaction system or a campaign system. Donor projects almost always want the second, and it has states your CRUD model does not.

Two ways a record comes into existence

Systematic adjudication is the area-wide, block-by-block determination of rights covering all parcels within a declared adjudication area; sporadic adjudication happens whenever and wherever there is a reason to determine ownership of an individual parcel — typically because a dealing is about to take place, or an owner asks.¹

Sporadic registration is not a bad system — it is how mature registries handle their daily flow. It is simply hopeless as a way to reach coverage, because the people with the weakest tenure are the least likely to initiate.

The systematic pipeline

Roughly, and with local variation, first registration under a systematic campaign runs like this:

1. Declaration of the adjudication area A legal instrument opens the area. From this moment, ordinary sporadic dealings in the area are usually frozen or redirected.
2. Public awareness and community mobilisation Participatory by design — under FFP the community supplies both the claims and much of the boundary evidence.
3. Boundary demarcation and mapping General boundaries walked and traced, usually onto imagery. Adjoiners present and agreeing is itself part of the evidence.
4. Claim collection / adjudication An adjudication record is a register of existing rights, with the names of persons claiming an interest. It does not change rights — it establishes what they already are.²
5. Public display Claims and maps posted publicly so anyone can object or correct. Typical windows run 15–30 days, 30–45 days, or in some jurisdictions 6 months.²
6. Objections and corrections Handled collectively — often by a local tribunal sitting for the whole area, which is why systematic disputes resolve far faster per parcel than sporadic ones.
7. Approval and first registration Records become authoritative; certificates issue. Only now does the parcel enter normal transactional life.

What this does to your system

Four consequences, all structural.

Records have a lifecycle before they are true. A claim is not a right. Your model needs an explicit status — claimed → displayed → objected → adjudicated → registered — and the authoritative register must be readable without the pending noise. In LADM terms, this is the difference between a claim awaiting adjudication and a live LA_RRR.

The unit of work is the batch, not the record. Areas, blocks, display periods and tribunal sittings are all first-class entities. "Which parcels are in display until 14 March" must be one cheap query.

Objections are a domain object, not a support ticket. Who objected, against what claim, on what grounds, decided how, by whom, when. This is evidence and it must survive audit years later.

Capture is offline and asynchronous. Field teams work where there is no network. This is precisely why FAO's SOLA suite ships Open Tenure — a mobile app for community field capture — plus a Community Server to receive and process claims, as separate components from the registry itself.³ Sync, conflict and provenance are core problems, not edge cases.

Drill 1 — Which mode does this imply?

Drill 2 — Recall

Your primary source

"Initial Insights on Land Adjudication in a Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration", Land 10(4):414 — open access, current, and it connects adjudication practice directly to the FFP doctrine from lesson 0002:
mdpi.com/2073-445X/10/4/414

If you want the classic operational description of the systematic process, Simpson's Land Law and Registration chapter 15 is still the reference practitioners quote: The Process of Systematic Adjudication (PDF).