Indicators and Scoring

LANDex Indicators

LANDex is built on 33 indicators related to land governance, retained in regional and global consultations with ILC members and partners in 2017 and 2018. These indicators are organized according to the 10 Commitments to People-Centered Land Governance, thematic areas that define and guide the work of the International Land Coalition (ILC), and measure land governance on three levels:

On a legal level: our A-level indicators measure the strength of tge legal and institutional framework surrounding a land issue
On levels of implementation: our B-level indicators measuring to what degree policies or programs established in such frameworks had been implemented, and
On outcomes, results and perceptions: our C-level indicators look at diverse outcomes, impact or perceptions of implemented projects or policies.

LANDex Scoring

All LANDex indicators are set on a 0-100 scale, with 100 being the highest possible score. A high score reflects the extent to which a country has fulfilled all aspects of the indicator, whether calculation- or evaluation-based. LANDex scores are not meant to rank countries but rather allow the land community to assess how the country is performing on important aspects of land governance. Through time, these scores reflect to what extent land governance appears to be improving or worsening in specific areas.

"We realized that we needed to back up [claims that data is lacking] with some kind of concrete evidence and LANDex has become such tool that identified some clear gaps. Now we are working with government land agencies and ministries showing the evidence that these are the crucial gaps."

Dharm Raj Joshi, NES Nepal

LANDex Methodologies

When developing LANDex, our aim was not to reinvent the wheel but to collaborate with local, national, regional and global initiatives, upscaling existing initiatives and bringing them together into a single platform. We identified existing methodologies that aligned with the retained indicators and in cases where no methodology was available, a new methodology was created.

For this reason, LANDex contains a number of methodologies from well-known initiatives and organizations: we use components of the ActionAid VGGT Toolkit, sections of the Indigenous Navigator survey, the Legislative Assessment Tool (LAT) from the Food and Agriculture Organization and questions from the Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF), among others.

LANDex has made these tools available to everyone, generating data from the broader land community. Rather than depending on expert evaluations or limited official data, LANDex aims to democratize land governance monitoring.

In general, the methodologies used by LANDex fit into four categories:

People-Based Indicators: indicators that include a series of questions, drawing responses from individuals in diverse sectors.
Calculation-Based Indicators: indicators that require a calculation of existing data and present it in a new or nuanced way.
Survey-Based Indicators: indicators that use select variables from surveys collected at the national level by global partners such as PRIndex and Transparency International.
Joint Database: indicator 10C reflects efforts by the Data Working Group of the Defending Land and Environmental Defenders Coalition to build a global, baseline database of attacks on LED beyond killings.

PRIndex Indicators

Five LANDex indicators – 1B, 1C, 3C, 4C and 5C.1 – are based on the calculation of variables from PRIndex, the Property Rights Index, a global survey that collects data on rates of property documentation and perceptions of tenure security. PRIndex has currently undertaken three waves of data collection. The first two waves of data collection were carried out in 2018 and covered 33 countries and the final wave, carried out by the Gallup World Poll, gathered data from 107 countries in 2019.

In 2019, LANDex pilots in Colombia, Nepal and Senegal used data from the first two PRIndex waves and in 2020, all PRIndex data gathered through the Gallup World Poll will be integrated into the platform.

PRIndex interviews are conducted either in person or by telephone. Different sampling approaches are used to select individuals depending on the survey method and availability of data to construct the sampling frame. However, the sampling approaches all aim to provide a dataset that is nationally representative for the population over the age of 18 years. Typically, circa 1,000 individuals were surveyed in each country. This was increased in some countries with larger populations. More information about PRIndex and its methodology are available at www.prindex.net.

While the PRIndex questionnaires ask a variety of questions related to urban and rural property rights, including the socio-economic status of respondents and the likely outcome in a number of scenarios, including death and divorce, LANDex looks at a select number of variables that are of especial interest to our members and their work on land governance. More detailed information about each indicator is provided below, but in general LANDex indicators look at five variables: location, gender, tenure class, levels of tenure security and rates of documentation.

LANDex indicator 1B: Women and men with legally recognized documentation or secure rights to land

This indicator reflects rates of documentation among all respondents in a rural property or home, regardless of tenure class. The score indicates the percentage of those respondents who confirmed that they or their family members possessed documentation from a predefined list of documents related to their property. PRIndex codes these as informal or formal documents, but LANDex counts either as evidence of documentation in its calculation of 1B.

LANDex indicator 1C: Women and men who perceive their rights to land protected against dispossession or eviction, disaggregated by type of tenure

This indicator reflects rates of perceived tenure security among all respondents in a rural property or home, regardless of tenure class. The score indicates the percentage of those respondents who responded "Unlikely" or "Very Unlikely" to the question of "In the next five years, how likely or unlikely is it that you could like the right to use some of all of this home or property against your will?

LANDex indicator 3C: Those living on community land perceive their rights to land protected against dispossession or eviction, disaggregated by sex

This indicator reflects rates of perceived tenure security among all respondents who indicated they 1) lived on rural property or in a rural home and 2) that this property or home was owned by their community or a community group. The score indicates the percentage of those respondents who 3) responded "Unlikely" or "Very Unlikely" to the question of "In the next five years, how likely or unlikely is it that you could like the right to use some of all of this home or property against your will?

LANDex indicator 4C: Women who perceive their rights to land protected against dispossession or eviction, disaggregated by type of tenure

This indicator reflects rates of perceived tenure security among all respondents who indicated that they were 1) female and residing in a rural property or home of any tenure class. The score indicates the percentage of those respondents who responded "Unlikely" or "Very Unlikely" to the question of "In the next five years, how likely or unlikely is it that you could like the right to use some of all of this home or property against your will?

LANDex indicator 5C.1: Those living on indigenous land* who perceive their rights to land protected against dispossession or eviction, disaggregated by sex

This indicator reflects rates of perceived tenure security among all respondents who indicated they 1) lived on rural property or in a rural home and 2) that this property or home is situated on indigenous land. The score indicates the percentage of those respondents who 3) responded "Unlikely" or "Very Unlikely" to the question of "In the next five years, how likely or unlikely is it that you could like the right to use some of all of this home or property against your will?

*Currently, there is no way to distinguish those respondents who reside on indigenous land in the PRIndex survey. In 2020, the International Land Coalition and PRIndex began piloting the application of PRIndex questionnaires on a select number of ethnic and indigenous communities in Colombia. The work is being led by the Observatory for Ethnic and Peasant Territories (OTEC) at Javeriana Pontifical University.