**1. Introduction**

Land is a source of material wealth; it provides people with resources to sustain on. It is also a major economic asset from which people and nations get significant profit. In many developing countries, land is considered as an important economic and social asset where the status and prestige of people is determined. Because of such a high importance given to land, as compared to other properties, the legal protection accorded to land is al-ways strict in nature [1]. Due to this, strong institutions are established to administer and manage land. According to Holden, institutions are defined as systems of established and prevalent social rules that structure social interactions [2]. Institutions play an important role in shaping socio-economic outcomes [3]. For this to happen, institutions must be ef-fective and functional [2]. The change in institutional arrangements, in many cases, was made in anticipation of a better land administration system [4]. The United Nations

**Citation:** Chekole, S.D.; de Vries, W.T.; Durán-Díaz, P.; Shibeshi, G.B. Analyzing the Effects of Institutional Merger: Case of Cadastral Information Registration and Landholding Right Providing Institutions in Ethiopia. *Land* **2021**, *10*, 404. https://doi.org/10.3390/ land10040404

Academic Editors: Ruishan Chen, Uchendu Eugene Chigbu and Chao Ye

Received: 23 February 2021 Accepted: 5 April 2021 Published: 13 April 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Global Geospatial Information Management (hereinafter UN-GGIM) has affirmed in the Addis Ababa declaration for "Good Land Governance for Agenda 2030" that strong land administration institutions are required to support effective and efficient land administration and management to address the need to secure land and property rights for all [5]. According to UN-GGIM institutional arrangement is defined as the formal and informal structures that support organizations to establish the legal, organizational and productive frameworks. This type of arrangement establishes the sustainable management of geospatial information, inclusive of its creation, updating and dissemination of geospatial data. This in turn provides an authoritative, reliable and sustainable geospatial information base for all users [5]. Relevant institutional arrangements contribute to the strengthening of geospatial information management.

Theoretically, there are three types of institutional arrangements [6]: hierarchy based, market based, and network based. Each type of institutional arrangements has its own mechanism to understand the causes of problems experienced, the gains to be achieved, and the processes through which better institutional arrangements can be achieved. In hi-erarchy-based institutional arrangements, patterns of interaction have two main drivers: (1) authority, operationalized in administrative orders, rules and planning, and (2) dominance and authority as the basic control system on the other. Market-based institutional arrangements are based on competition, bargaining and exchange between actors. Network-based institutional arrangements take the form of cooperation between actors, where inter-organizational relations are ruled by the acknowledgement of mutual interdependencies, trust, and the responsibilities of each actor. In this paper when we talk about insti-tutional arrangement, we are referring to the hierarchy-based type of arrangement. Institu-tional arrangements may be realized by creating new or changing existing structures or management forms within the government.

The importance of institutional arrangements in geospatial information management was recognized by the UN-GGIM at its third session in July 2013, when it identified the need for countries to examine institutional arrangements in geospatial information management, and thereby provide governments with options on how best to create strong na-tional geospatial entities [7]. One of the mechanisms to (re)arrange institutions is through merger, which assembles institutions having related tasks so that resources could be uti-lized on its best use [8].
