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The term ‘fit for purpose’ appears regularly in the literature on land administration. However, we must acknowledge that the ‘purpose’ of land administration, and therefore tools used to support it, may differ in different socio-political and economic contexts. The underlying purpose of land administration may be to record the ownership or other tenure and use of land in a country or area and any changes to this. However, concepts of ownership and forms of tenure differ greatly around the world. Therefore, the requirements of a system and the tools used to support it will differ. However, in very many places, the official cadastral system is certainly fundamentally weak or has been damaged by war, or does not exist at all, or does not meet the needs of planning by government. In these situations, the requirements of new or improved systems may differ. In some sub-Saharan countries, where no functioning land administration system exists and there is very limited institutional capacity to develop one, the focus of a fit-for-purpose system may not be to build a highly accurate system but rather to provide a system which can record ownership and provide security of tenure for underprivileged communities (Enemark et al., 2014). In countries where there has very recently been a

functioning system which is now in some disarray owing to war, the system may have reasonably adequate data on the number of plots and their size. However, it may need significant work to identify illegal settlement by squatters and internally displaced people. In countries where customary or tribal land systems operate alongside formal systems, the ‘purpose’ of land administration may be to reconcile the multiple forms of ownership and tenure across the country. For this PhD study, the purpose of the land administration system in Iraq is complex. The country has had an evolving and relatively well functioning system over many decades. However, repeated wars and periods of civil unrest have left that system damaged and out of date and have also significantly affected the institutional capacity to repair and update it. Land data does exist but it requires urgent updating, especially given the degree of corruption, false claims and squatting which the country is currently experiencing. The current purpose of land administration in Iraq, therefore, is to collect attribute data such as ownership and land use, as much as it is to collect spatial data, such as accurate extent and area.

This type of system, which may not be fully concerned with spatial accuracy, involves a few principles that may need to be considered when attempting to introduce it. These principles include firstly the adoption of general boundaries rather than fixed boundaries, which means that the accuracy of the delineation process is not considered to be very precisely determined, especially in the rural and peri-urban areas, but it is expected to be suitable for most land administration purposes. A successful example of the adoption of this approach is the Land Tenure Regularisation in Rwanda introduced in 2009 (Enemark et al., 2014).

In the Rwanda case, the goal was to provide legally valid land registration documents to all those who held land legally. The approach of the programme was to collect data relating to boundaries in a very collaborative and participatory way. Geospatial data was collected using high-resolution orthophotos and satellite imagery. Specially trained teams of locally ‘para- surveyors’ outlined land parcel boundaries on printed images which were then scanned, geo- referenced and digitised. These images printouts of the parcel plan ultimately formed part of the legal ownership document. Attribute data on, for example, owners’ details and rights were collected in a register by legally constituted adjudication committees.

The information from the registers was entered into the Land Tenure Regularisation Support System, from which titles were processed and printed for first issuance. By May 2013 about 10.4 million parcels had been registered and 8.8 million printed land lease certificates had been issued. One of the benefits of the system was its very limited cost, at around 6 USD per parcel. One of the major outcomes hoped for with the system was that Rwanda would improve the

tenure, leading to increased investment in land and increasing the contribution of land as an economic resource for national development. Rwanda suffered from a severe lack of qualified surveyors. However, there is now an ongoing programme to train Geomatics engineers. The implementation of this programme was a collaborative effort between a wide group of Rwandan and international partners, including Rwanda Natural Resources Authority who took the lead. Others included the United Kingdom´s Department for International Development, the Swedish International Development Cooperation, Agency, European Union, Royal Netherlands Embassy and IFAD.

A second principle is to use satellite or aerial imagery rather than traditional land surveys with a total station. This can be three to five times cheaper than an ordinary survey and is suitable for many land administration purposes. A good example of this situation is the use of printed 1:25000 satellite image for volunteers to draw parcel boundaries with ordinary pencil as implemented for land ownership in Tsoukalades, Greece (Basiouka and Potsiou, 2012).

Thirdly, the accuracy of the information input to a fit-for-purpose system should be appropriate for the purpose for which the data is going to be used and finally, the system should be designed in such a way that it can be updated and improved over time. For example, the design and implementation of a pilot fit-for-purpose land administration system in Botswana addressed issues such as database design, including the Social Tenure Domain Model (Enemark and McLaren, 2017), an effective user interface and access to official records through a trust and reputation modelling of individuals’ abilities (Moreri et al., 2018).

A fit-for-purpose approach builds on some important elements (Enemark, 2013). These include that it is participatory, which means that geospatial data is collected with the aid of the community. Next, it should be inclusive, to cover all tenure types without any exceptions. This element is considered to be crucial because it takes into consideration social tenure which has been neglected in the majority of official land administration systems. A further element is attainability, which means that the system is built depending on available resources and within a short timeframe. Finally, upgradability means that the data can be updated and improved in response to the development of the society. The fit-for-purpose concept as presented by Enemark et al. (2014) was developed with reference to these principles and other practical factors.

It is clear that some of the characteristics of VGI conceptually match the framework of ‘fit-for- purpose’ land administration systems; but there has been limited investigation in real-world scenarios. Keenja et al. (2012) reported that “to date, limited empirical work has been undertaken in this domain: there remain many unanswered questions regarding the accuracy,

authority, assuredness, availability, and ambiguity of crowdsourced data. Meanwhile, the potential for crowdsourcing to provide a low cost and high-speed solution in areas where cadastral coverage is lacking, is eagerly anticipated”. Basiouka, Potsiou, and Bakogiannis (2015) used volunteers to assess the possibility of using OSM for official, cadastral purposes, but the target group was college-educated surveying practitioners, rather than real members of the community. Other researchers, such as Grus and Hogerwerf (2014), have reported on experiences of crowdsourcing in the Netherlands’ Kadaster, concentrating on change detection, whilst de Almeida et al. (2014) explored the role of VGI in capturing and utilizing 3D data for property cadastres.