How the sandbox approach could transform land administration
Innovative technologies in land administration face regulatory challenges, slowing their implementation. A sandbox approach could simplify and speed up land regularisation.
The sandbox approach
The sandbox approach allows for testing new products and services in a controlled environment while managing risks. It could simplify legal and administrative processes, especially for rural post-conflict areas and for maintaining the cadastre and registry. We are joining forces with the Colombian Land Agency, to test this new approach.
The challenge
National registries are heavily regulated, including land administration. Rapid advancements in fit-for-purpose (FFP) technologies and field data collection require adjustments to existing norms. This makes scaling up difficult. Those involved with the Colombian Land Agency emphasize the need to innovate regulations to simplify and speed up the process of land regularisation.
What does this approach look like in practice?
The idea is to regularise lands of several entire villages in a fast and affordable way, starting from scratch and ending with cadastral maps and accompanying formal titles. Without the usual obstacles of searching for old paper titles that can’t be found in governmental damp cellars all over the country, without old dated regulations on the minimal farm parcel size or without obsolete laws defining roughly the forest areas. This requires the formal support of all governmental institutions involved for each regulatory obstacle regulation that has to be lifted in the sandbox.
Colombia's sandbox potential
Colombia’s Ministry of Commerce oversees the possibility of executing sandboxes. Experiences in land administration and studies by Externado University highlight this approach’s importance for scaling up FFP innovations.
Urgent need for efficiency
According to a recently released official document it will take 265 years to adjust the current informal land ownership to formal landownership for the entire country. The timeline worsens when considering the ongoing maintenance of land administration as the government often processes data slower than the changing reality.
Support from RVO
The Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) runs the Land-at-Scale programme. This programme supports a sandbox project in Colombian land administration. This project builds on RVO’s experience with applying FFP methodologies to simplify rural land administration rules. Future plans include linking this project with a larger EU cooperation programme focused on peace and nature preservation.
More information
- Read more about the project in Colombia on our project page.