Originally published April 2, 2026 by the Land Portal Foundation. Republished from the original article under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
Related project: The Land Facility.
The 5th International Land Management Conference (ILM5), held in London and online in March 2026, explored the wide range of socio-cultural, political and economic factors that influence land management and land markets.
The session, “Widening perspectives for land governance,” brought together a diverse set of speakers to examine what it takes to govern land effectively in a period shaped by overlapping pressures, including food security, climate change, housing demand, institutional fragility, and competing development priorities. Although the presentations approached the subject from different angles, a common argument emerged across the session: Stronger land governance depends not only on better data or better policy frameworks, but on the institutions, professional networks, financing models, and participatory structures that allow knowledge to be translated into action.
In her introduction, Saskia Simonson, Lead Country Coordinator at the Land Facility, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), situated the session within a broader conversation already underway at the conference. She noted the links between land governance and major global priorities, while also highlighting the importance of recognizing land’s non-market and social dimensions. That framing helped set the tone for a session that consistently pushed beyond narrow technical understandings of land administration and toward a more political, institutional, and interdisciplinary view of governance.
Diane Dumashie, President of the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG)/RICS, focussed on the role of land professionals in a rapidly changing governance landscape. Rather than treating surveyors, geospatial professionals, and those working across the land, built, and natural environments as purely technical actors, she presented them as part of the broader architecture through which societies respond to change. She emphasised the value of FIG as a diverse professional network spanning countries, generations, sectors, and disciplines. That diversity, she suggested, is not incidental; it is one of the profession’s main strengths. Yet she also made clear that diversity is not enough. Knowledge, standards, resources, networks, and professional credibility only become meaningful when they are effectively mobilized to influence decisions and contribute to institutional capacity.
A particularly important theme in Dumashie’s presentation was the gap between innovation and implementation. She pointed to the long record of conceptual and technical innovation within the profession, including work on fit-for-purpose approaches, valuation, and standards, while questioning whether those advances are being embedded deeply enough in governance systems and decision-making processes. Her remarks suggested that the challenge is not a lack of ideas, but the difficulty of scaling influence, becoming more visible, and ensuring that the expertise held within professional communities translates into political and institutional traction.
Christelle van den Berg of Kadaster International, Netherlands, grounded the conversation in the realities of land information systems and the institutions that maintain them. Drawing on practical experience, she argued that land information is indispensable for responding to the spatial nature of major public challenges. But she identified a central paradox in contemporary land reform efforts. Many initiatives invest heavily in mass registration, large-scale data acquisition, and digital infrastructure, yet pay insufficient attention to the long-term institutional and financial sustainability of the agencies expected to manage those systems. She posited that that imbalance is one of the main reasons why land information systems fail to deliver lasting governance value. Data can generate significant public and economic benefits, but if institutions lack the mandate, resources, staffing, and operational capacity to maintain accuracy and update records, those benefits quickly erode.
Her central message was that financing land governance should not be reduced to paying for technology. It must also mean financing institutional strength, accountability, and the ongoing stewardship needed to keep land information reliable and usable over time.
The joint presentation by Francisco Carranza of Global Action for Land and Charl-Thom Bayer of the Land Portal Foundation extended that concern with institutional design by exploring the relationship between multi-stakeholder platforms and digital platforms in intersectional land governance. Carranza began by examining multi-stakeholder platforms as mechanisms intended to align competing interests, reduce power asymmetries, and create structured spaces for dialogue. His account was careful not to idealize them. While such platforms are often presented as inherently inclusive or democratic, he emphasized that their effectiveness depends on a series of difficult practical questions: who is represented, who convenes the process, who sets the agenda, whether weaker actors have the capacity to negotiate effectively, and whether neutral facilitation is available. In other words, their success depends heavily on context and design.
Bayer introduced the impact of digital public platforms when combined with multi-stakeholder platforms. Digital platforms are not passive repositories of information. They actively structure knowledge by deciding what is collected, how it is categorized, and how freely users are able to access it. Carranza and Bayer argued that multi-stakeholder platforms and digital platforms are are complementary in their impact. Multi-stakeholder platforms bring discursive legitimacy; digital platforms bring informational legitimacy. Dialogue without evidence may struggle to scale or remain too abstract, while data without structured spaces for deliberation and use may simply describe problems without changing them.
In practical terms, the point was that data, transparency, and participation only matter when they are connected to policy processes, review mechanisms, and institutional arrangements capable of producing accountability and corrective action.
Next, Robert Home of Anglia Ruskin University recalled his work in Nigeria to highlight why an interdisciplinary perspective is necessary to understand current land governance challenges. Legal history, political geography, planning, land administration, and empirical field research all reveal different parts of the problem, and too often they remain isolated from one another.
Home’s presentation traced how colonial land law, federal structures, legal pluralism, regional differentiation, population growth, environmental stress, insecurity, and investment dynamics all intersect to shape land governance outcomes in Nigeria. Formal governance systems, he suggested, can appear remote or inadequate when viewed against the realities of rapid urban growth, insecure tenure, weak infrastructure, and overlapping legal orders. Widening perspectives also means widening methods: Understanding land governance requires serious engagement with legal history, comparative institutional analysis, and grounded research on how systems function in practice.
The final presentation, by Lars Brugman of Kadaster International, shifted the discussion to land pricing and residential development in the Netherlands. Although more specialized in focus, it contributed to the broader session theme. Brugman’s research examined differences in pricing strategies between public and private land sellers in Dutch housing development. His findings suggested that developers charge a substantial premium over municipalities for comparable plots, while municipalities appear more likely to use land pricing as a direct policy lever to support affordability. In projects with affordable housing units, discounted land prices appeared to play a meaningful role, suggesting that land policy can be used deliberately to shape social outcomes rather than merely respond to market signals.
This presentation added an important reminder that land governance is also about valuation, pricing, and the political use of land markets. Even in a highly institutionalized context such as the Netherlands, governance choices still determine whether land is treated primarily as a market commodity or as a policy instrument that can advance broader social objectives.
The session made a persuasive case for a broader and more integrated understanding of land governance. It showed that widening perspectives is not simply a matter of adding more themes to the discussion. It means taking seriously the relationships between professional authority, institutional financing, land data, stakeholder representation, legal history, and market intervention. The most consistent message across the session was that none of these elements works well in isolation. Data without institutions are fragile and participation without representation and authority can become performative. Professional expertise without political traction has limited reach. Market outcomes without public purpose can deepen inequality. What the session offered, therefore, was a realistic and demanding account of what effective land governance requires.