Community participation for inclusive land administration: A case study of the Odisha urban slum formalization project

Participation in land administration projects in the Global South is increasingly normalized, especially in processes like land formalization to ensure implementation is inclusive and responsible. This paper aims to extend land administration scholarship on participation with a focus on modalities of participation increasingly common in projects in the Global South: the central role of technology, decentralized implementation models, and local governance. The analysis draws on a case study of the experiences of eight urban informal settlement communities in Odisha, India, who are beneficiaries of a large-scale urban slum formalization project that has adopted these modalities to achieve an implementation process that aspires to institutionalize a strong participatory emphasis. The research findings reinforce longstanding issues identified in the broader participation literature that draws attention to how power, control, interests, motivations, and institutions condition community participation. In Odisha, these issues have clear intersections with caste, gender, and class – all of which have been found to further erode individual and community agency. Specifically for land administration, the results show that though technology aspired to facilitate inclusion, without the necessary checks and balances and the reframing of communities’ role as equal co-producers of knowledge, participation was often reduced to superficial transactions of information configured by technical workflows rather than mediated discussions for inclusive outcomes that have integrity. Similarly, despite a decentralized model, a normative approach to participation leaves it subject to interpretation and the skills and resources of local municipalities and NGOs, with little clarity or consistency for communities. This undermines deliberative participation and true agency. Finally, the assumption that newly formed Slum Dwellers Associations (SDAs) would provide effective local governance needs revisiting as the findings show low levels of participation in SDAs and that its functioning appears correlated with local capacity and extant community dynamics and politics. These have all inadvertently structured participation in a way that compromises aspirations of inclusive and equitable outcomes.