Validation and collaborative mapping to accelerate quality assurance of land registration

Incomplete digitalisation of land-titling documentation and sporadic first-titling in the past pose considerable challenges to delivering complete and good quality land information. In Indonesia, for the past three years, a new land policy has been implemented as part of a project to completely and systematically register land titles. This new policy has increased the production of land titles by seven to nine times. However, the approach remains focused on increasing quantity rather than improving quality. As the number of unmapped land titles is still high, insecurity of land certificates resulting from the current national project is imminent. Social challenges to land-titling activities include poor participation of landowners while technical problems could include incomplete validation. This paper presents the results of a study that employed collaborative mapping to validate land titles and evaluated corresponding quality improvements. The direct evaluation was done for a rural village and three urban wards. The results show that spatial accuracy and completeness could be delivered within the existing legal and institutional framework. However, complete legal security of published land titles cannot be achieved unless the local land office undertakes incremental improvement. This result suggests that land registration completeness before 2025 is unlikely without policy and technical reforms that use collaborative mapping methods for ensuring quality assurance in first-titling campaigns. © 2021 The Authors