Fit-For-Purpose Upscaling Land Administration—A Case Study from Benin

The government of Benin in 2013 decided upon a centralized land administration, with the purpose of recording the entire national territory in one land administration system to promote durable economic development by increasing legal certainty in real estate transactions. This is a major challenge, given that currently, of the estimated 5 million cadastral parcels, less than 60,000 parcels have a land title and are registered in the national land administration agency’s central database. This case study describes how a transition to a fit-for-purpose approach in land administration makes it possible to realize the Benin government policy. In the context of Benin, the core of this approach is the introduction of a tenure system based on presumed ownership parallel to the existing title system with state-guaranteed ownership. From a quality perspective, this meant a shift in priorities from “good but slow” to “good enough and fast”. A field test has proven that this new approach is necessary to realize the governmental purpose but puts pressure on the quality aspect and the related interests of established parties such as private surveyors. In the Benin case, this pressure is reduced by designing a land information system based on the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) that makes it possible to include and keep track of both cadastral parcels with state-guaranteed ownership and cadastral parcels with presumed ownership in the database. Both ways of tenure security can therefore coexist, allowing landowners to choose between the level of legal security that best fits their needs and means.