Sustainable access to rural and urban land by integrating local perspectives: The potential of using Information and Communication Technologies

Abstract

With fast growing human populations over the past decades, access to land has become an increasingly pressing issue. This is the case in urban as well as in rural spaces, and across both emergent and established economies. In this context, the management of land use and land ownerships, formal as well as informal, is of primary importance. Specifically, the balanced partition of land between public space (commonalities) and private property plays a key role in the achievement of sustainable land access policies. In this study, we explore the potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to promote stakeholder participation and achieve sustainable access to land. Based on research in two case study areas, we show that transdisciplinary ICT-based tools can help us and the local stakeholders to identify specific needs, capabilities and potentials, to analyze emergent patterns and to support the development of place-specific sustainable development strategies.