Barriers to Urban Land Records Management and Governance in Nigerian Secondary Cities

Abstract

Institutional, legal and technological barriers continue to undermine urban land records management and governance in Sub-Saharan Africa, threatening tenure security and spatial planning capacity. The study examines these constraints in Akure, Ondo State, Nigeria, a fast-growing secondary city which is largely underrepresented in urban land governance literature. Drawing on the Land Management Paradigm (Enemark, 2005) and the Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration (FFP-LA) model (Enemark et al., 2014), the study adopts a desk-based conceptual synthesis approach grounded in legislative instruments, policy documents, institutional diagnostics, and peer-reviewed literature. The findings suggest that institutional fragmentation, ambiguities within the Land Use Act 1978, and the absence of an integrated spatial digital infrastructure collectively reinforce systemic governance deficiencies in urban land administration. To address these challenges, the study develops and applies the Tripartite Diagnostic Framework for Urban Land Governance (TDF-ULG), comprising twelve institutional, legal and technological indicators for assessing urban land governance performance. Application of the framework indicates Low or Very Low performance across all assessed dimensions in Akure. A limitation of the study is that the desk-based methodology relies exclusively on secondary data and therefore requires future primary fieldwork validation. The study provides a replicable diagnostic tool to guide land governance reform and GIS-based land information system development in secondary cities across Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa. The study represents one of the first systematic analyses of urban land governance barriers in Akure and proposes TDF-ULG, a diagnostic instrument which combines the two theoretical models of secondary city contexts.