Supporting Local Land Governance: Land Use Mapping and Community Sample Surveying in Lombok, Indonesia
By: Rubeta Andriani, Kevin Barthel, Christen Corcoran, Adriana Gaviria, Elyse Magen
Global Land Alliance and Cadasta Foundation jointly supported Yayasan Puter Indonesia (Puter) to conduct a Land Use Mapping and Community Sample Survey initiative in Labulia Village in the Jonggat Sub-District of Lombok Indonesia. This is ahead of the district government’s efforts to complete a Village Boundary Setting/Resource Mapping activity, which has been postponed due to COVID-19. These initiatives build upon the work initiated under a Millennium Challenge Corporation and Millennium Challenge Account Indonesia Compact, which concluded in 2018. We hope the activity can serve as a model to support the decentralization efforts of land governance by the Government of Indonesia, and their Program to Accelerate Agrarian Reform (One Map Project) supported by the World Bank, by collecting data on land use and land tenure from a participatory and local level. The following article describes the results of the community sample survey and land use mapping initiative that took place in late 2020.
Activity and Data Collection
In Indonesia, the decentralization of land governance remains an important step in securing recognition of rights for communities and citizens. For many local government offices, funding and technical resources has been a barrier for completing village mapping activities, leaving knowledge gaps as to how vulnerable communities are to conflict, encroachment, and insecurity. The village boundary setting and resource mapping activity of the Central Lombok District Government seeks to address this gap. In 2020 Global Land Alliance and Cadasta Foundation, working with the Indonesian organization Yayasan Puter, supported a rapid sample survey to assess perceptions of land tenure insecurity and land use in the Labulia (see map below) to support the government's VBS/RM efforts. The initiative collected spatial and alphanumeric geographic reference data on natural and socio-cultural resources as well as land use data and conducted a community sample survey of 200 households. This survey consisted of a set of questions on land tenure and socio-economic characteristics and included two key questions from the Prindex survey of perceptions of tenure security.
What Is Village Boundary Setting and Resource Mapping (VBS/RM)?
VBS/RM is an approach to determine and set administrative village boundaries, which complies with Indonesian Government regulations and integrates international best practices of community participation to achieve both government recognition and community legitimacy.
The community sample survey initiative was carried out for nine days in November 2020 by seven enumerators collecting data from 200 respondents, representing nine hamlets in the village. In collecting land data, the enumerators used two techniques in mapping respondent's land tenure and land use: mapping using points (red circles) and mapping using polygons (blue lines), as seen in Figure 1 (Household Survey Dashboard below).
Figure 1: Household Survey Dashboard
Dashboard is an output of the Cadasta Platform. Learn more at cadasta.org
The sample group for the household survey was determined using data sources from the 2020 Labulia Population Master Book (BIP). The sample group was selected based on labor categorization and status as ‘Head of the Household.’ In Indonesia it is customary that the Heads of Households are male, and out of the 200 respondents surveyed, 86% were male and 14% were female[1].
Findings
Data from the community sample survey allowed us to analyze results of the key Prindex questions: ‘In the next five years, how likely or unlikely is it that you could lose the right to use this property or part of this property against your will?’ (Graph 1). This was subsequently followed by another question to determine the reason that they felt they could lose the right to use the property (Graph 2).
Graph 1: Perceptions of Tenure Security in Labulia
On average, eight out of ten respondents perceive their land tenure as secure, meaning that they believe it is unlikely that they could lose the right to use their properties against their will (Graph 1). Perception of tenure security is high in Labulia when compared to the national average of 6.3 out of ten reporting feeling secure about their land tenure, according to Prindex findings. Respondents tend to feel more secure in their property rights when they are:
Male, from the village, do not work as traders, live in a property of others, do not manage land ** or manage private property,
bequeathed (as opposed to bought) their private property*** ,
have government issued (instead of informal) documentation***,
manage plots below 100 m2
(Note: Statistical significance: ** (95%); ***(99%) )
The data indicates that living on a property owned by another individual or individuals produces higher perceptions of security in property. This goes against the intuitive and long-standing belief in Indonesia that owning one's own property through legal title is the best form of tenure security.
Those who did report feeling insecure of losing their ability to use their property cited many reasons in the follow-up question. The most prominent response had to do with intra-familial disputes. Others reported that insecurity may stem from the death of a parent or household member. The other common source of insecurity comes from an individual being asked to leave their property.
Graph 2: Reasons for Insecurity
Cross tabulation exercises suggest that, on average, insecurity seems to be higher when the head of household is female. A comparative analysis of the data indicates that when the household head is male, approximately 20% of respondents reported feeling insecure. This number rises to 30% when the household head is female (Graph 3). Note that this difference is not statistically significant.
Graph 3: Perceptions of insecurity by Gender of the Head of Household
The type of documentation held by the head of household seems to affect tenure security perceptions. In the survey, nearly 92% households had government issued titles. The remaining observations reported having customary or informal documentation. Insecurity among the households with government issued titles is close to the average: around two out of ten perceive insecurity. When the household holds customary or informal tenure, the perception of insecurity rises to five and seven out of ten households, respectively (Graph 4).
Graph 4: Perception of insecurity according types of tenure documentation
This community sample survey sought to combine land use mapping with a household survey to better understand how land use and land tenure affect each other at the village level in rural Indonesia (See Graph 5). Those who use their primary property for pastoral purposes reported the highest levels of perceived land tenure security at 92.6%.
Graph 5: Tenure Security and Land Use
The data showed six respondents, comprising 3% of the sample population, reported having experienced a conflict over their land in the last five years. The perception of tenure security is lower in those who have experienced conflicts.
Graph 6: Land Conflicts
Perceptions of tenure security may also affect behavior related to land investment and land use. The data indicates that using properties as collateral for credit or funding negatively correlate with the perception of tenure security (statistical significance: 99%). Additionally, half of the respondents reported that they would spend more on education if they had certainty over their property rights in the next five years and one out of four respondents would spend more on health and nutrition.
Graph 7: Perceived Tenure Security and Behaviors
The findings also reveal for new questions that can be studied in future analyses, such as:
Why is tenure security perceived higher when respondents live in a property owned by someone else?
Why would perceptions of tenure security decrease as respondents manage more parcels of land? (of the sample population surveyed, 54 heads of households managed more than one parcel).
Why does perceptions of tenure security decrease as respondents have managed land for a longer period? (Graph 8).
Graph 8: Duration of Land Management
Box 1: Benefits of Digitalization of Data for Local Governments
An unforeseen outcome of the activity was demonstrating new digitalization platforms and technologies, whose uses can be beneficial to across other sectors of local government.
The community sample survey used local census information to identify the sample population in Labulia. Some of the selected respondents had passed away, moved out of the village, or were working abroad as migrant workers. In Indonesia, changes to the census are made manually rather than through real-time, automated processes. Thus, the ability to collect digital data, as Cadasta’s platform demonstrated in this activity through geospatial data collection, offers tremendous opportunities at the local government level.
In places like Labulia, automating census-taking could potentially have real benefits to individuals who have been previously excluded. For example, during COVID-19, the Indonesian National Government set aside direct financial assistance earmarked for marginalized individuals. The lack of current and accurate data created gaps in the provision of social services for those who were not registered in the census, in some cases these were people most in need of the support. This anecdote was shared by local officials during the community sample survey initiative.
Next Steps
The community sampling initiative was conducted at the request of the district government in Central Lombok as part of the Village Boundary Setting / Resource Mapping process. The results of the land use mapping and community sample survey were well received by local officials. All of the heads of villages in Lombok were notified of the success of this initiative and encouraged to budget accordingly so they could replicate a similar initiative in 2022.
According to GLA’s Rubeta Andriani, there is high political will in Lombok and around the country to implement village boundary setting and resource mapping, and include in this process land use mapping and a community sample survey. However, this process has faced delays primarily because of COVID-19 and funding constraints at the district level.
In Labulia, VBS/RM is the aim of the local government, however the timeline under COVID19 remains unclear. Budget is a bottleneck for the implementation as village funds are not sufficient to conduct VBS/RM in a widespread manner throughout the district. We hope this initiative can build momentum for funding and capacity to complete VBS/RM in the full district of Central Lombok - and that land use mapping and community sample survey can be seen as a model for future implementation in the approximately 77,000 villages across Indonesia.
[1] In accordance with the Solvin formula, a robust sample size of Labulia Village would consist of 368 heads of households. Due to various constraints, 200 respondents were determined as sufficient for the purposes of the community sample survey.