Methodology

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:

Legal

A-level indicators

measure the strength of the legal and institutional framework surrounding a land issue

Implementation

B-level indicators

measuring to what degree policies or programs established in such frameworks had been implemented

Outcomes, results & perceptions

C-level indicators

look at diverse outcomes, impact or perceptions of implemented projects or policies

Downloads

Full list of Indicators

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.

Methodologies

People-based indicators

Guided assessments in the form of structured questionnaires on a specific theme. More than half – 18 of 33 – indicators in LANDex rely fully or partially on people-based assessments, proven to be a fundamental means of gathering perceptions and lived experiences of land governance from target groups. This kind of data collection is effective for collecting qualitative data such as opinions, attitudes, political and social beliefs, as well as rates of satisfaction or perceptions of inclusion. These indicators include a series of questions that respondents answer to assess progress towards a subjective topic or subject. Finally, in order to ensure the quality of the data that deals with questions about the legal framework, 10 of these 18 indicators will rely on assessments completed by designated legal experts.

Numerical or calculation indicators

These are indicators based on existing, quantitative data. For these indicators, members identify specific data points to calculate the indicator score, for example, the number of hectares claimed by Indigenous Peoples in a country and how many of those have been recognized. These indicators use secondary data, both from official sources and third-party data collectors. While many of the calculation indicators list likely sources of data – national census or survey data, for example – there is no specific data source required, so long as the data provided is compatible.

Global database indicators

Indicators where the source of data has been predetermined, either because there is no other viable source of data or because the source is a known data collector with good coverage on an issue that is of central importance to the index, such as the indicators on perception of tenure security among rural populations based on Prindex data, as well as the indicator for corruption in the land sector based on data collected by Transparency International. This also includes a unique integrated database indicator led by the ALLIED data working group – and counts the total number of verified attacks against Indigenous, land and environmental defenders attacked in a country over the previous 12 months. Indicator 10C, with information pooled from multiple sources, has not been integrated into LANDex index calculations to avoid giving the false impression that any amount of documented violence against these defenders is acceptable.