A Methodological Framework for Comparative Land Governance Research in Latin America and the Caribbean

Strengthening land governance is critically needed in Latin America and the Caribbean to protect the environment, achieve gender equality in land rights, expand the transparency of land records, and facilitate planned urban growth. Inadequate land administration limits the development of housing markets, tax collection, and the scale and speed of housing and land regularization programs in low-income communities. The region faces major challenges in land tenure informality and overlapping mandates for titling, mapping, and registration. In response to these issues, this technical note identifies the gaps in land governance information for five Latin American and Caribbean countries (Barbados, Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, and Trinidad and Tobago), and provides a comparative methodological framework for field research in these countries. The annex provides Spanish and Portuguese translations of the questionnaire, which includes new questions absent from existing tools, such as the World Bank's Land Governance Assessment Framework and USAID's Blueprint for Strengthening Real Property Rights.