**1. Introduction**

Land is the ultimate resource, without which, life on earth cannot be sustained [1]. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development puts land at the center of accelerating and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) worldwide. The reason is that land plays a significant role in sustainable development due to its multiple economic, social, political, and cultural dimensions. In terms of the economic aspect, it serves as a basis for livelihood; in terms of the social aspect, land is a space for interaction; in terms of politics, land is a source of power; in terms of culture, land is a symbol of collective identity [2]. Hence, significant efforts have been invested all over the world for the correct management of land, including the development of reliable cadastral systems towards a secure land recordation [3,4].

The human dimension of land relates to the concepts of land governance, land management, and land administration. Although these concepts are interconnected, the land administration guideline [1] defines them separately and specifically. According to the land administration guideline, land governance is the process by which decisions are made regarding the access to and use of land, the manner in which those decisions are implemented, and the way that conflicting interests in land are reconciled. Land management is the process by which the resources of land are put to good effect; it covers all activities concerned with the management of land as a resource, both from an environmental and from an economic perspective. Land administration is the processes of recording and disseminating information about the ownership, value, use, and development of land. The land management paradigm [5] turns the cadastral system into the engine of land administration, such that cadastral information assists the functions of land tenure, land value, land use, and land development. In this way, the cadastral system becomes the core technical engine delivering the capacity to control and manage land through the four land administration functions [6]. Soto [7] and Larsson [8], Yildiz [9], and Milka [10] also recognized that accurate and reliable cadastral systems are fundamental to the economic development of any nation.

The main issue of the cadastral system is documenting land information in support of land management, and its definition varies depending on each country's circumstance and context [11,12]. In addition to this, the level of understanding and operation of cadastral systems in different countries are different due to the fact that there are different interpretations of the concept as a consequence of cultural, legal, social, and institutional differences [13]. According to Williamson [14,15], the cadastral system is the foundation and an integral component of parcel-based land information systems (LIS) that contain a record of interests in land. These systems are the central component of the land administration and land management in a state or jurisdiction [16]. Bogaerts [17] defined cadastral systems on the basis of their constituents, in which the cadastral system is a blend of a land registration and a cadaster. In the same way, Zevenbergen et al. [18] stated that a cadastral system consisted of the land registration and the cadaster. For Silva et al. [13], it is the combination of a cadaster with a spatial focus, and a land register with a legal focus including all aspects of the juridical, fiscal, and regulatory cadaster, and developed and assessed considering its political, legislative, economic, technological, and social aspects and relationships. Other scholars defined the term as a subsystem of LIS, which incorporates other subsystems; juridical, regulatory, and fiscal cadastral systems [19,20]. The cadastral template [21] defined it as the system that includes the cadaster, title registry, and the associated processes of land transfer, subdivision, and adjudication, often termed land administration. To Enemark [5,22,23], a mature cadastral system could be considered as a land administration system.

Although there is no universal definition of a cadastral system [15,24], for the purposes of this research paper, it is defined as a system that refers to the operations that a cadastral organization is conducting [25].

Ethiopia, as one of the fastest developing countries in Africa, is in the process of implementing a modern urban cadastral system at the country level. In response to this, new legal and institutional frameworks have been introduced. In this regard, the Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (FDRE) [26], under Article 40 §3, states that the mandate of administering both urban and rural land is given exclusively to the regional states. As an integral part of the land administration, the Constitution promotes the implementation of cadastral systems. Given this empowerment, the urban land is administered and managed by the legal frameworks of Proc. Nos. 721/211 [27] and 818/2014 [28]. These proclamations dictate the modality of urban land acquisition and registration, respectively. The institution undertaking these mandates is the Ministry of Urban Development, Housing and Construction [29].

In addition to these legal frameworks, a five-year strategy called the Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP) was introduced to implement the cadastral system policy. According to this strategy, adjudication and registration of 1.6 million and 1.2 million landholdings, respectively, across 91 cities, are planned with 200,000 adjudicated and 150,000 registered in the first year across the prioritized

23 cities [30]. Ethiopia's urban cadastral system is carried out with the goal of providing a safe and reliable real property registration system in order to foster land management which, in turn, achieves sustainable development goals (SDGs) [31]. Literature studies [16,25,32–35] have documented that Ethiopia's urban cadastral system has not been successful. In view of this, Daniel [20] argued that Ethiopia has experienced a poor urban land registration system due to the past land registration laws and also because strategic directions were not comprehensive. With regard to operational cadastral registration, Deininger [36] revealed that the early 1990s attempts of land titling in Ethiopia were unsuccessful. According to Tigistu [33], the problems and challenges faced in implementing cadastral systems basically fall within the realm of policy and legislative gaps, technical deficiencies, and inadequate institutional arrangements. Likewise, Chekole [25] reported that, though there have been many projects developed to implement the urban cadastral system, none of them could be successful. Each of these projects contained trials for implementing cadastral systems, yet these were often not complementary to earlier projects. This has resulted in overlaps, redundancies, and ill-functioning and inconsistent cadastral systems throughout the country. The aforementioned issues are results of the absence of a progress performance evaluation of the project in each project phase. In other words, there is no systematic assessment and evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of earlier projects, and there is no systematic set of guidelines used at the start of projects.

Therefore, the purpose of this research is to investigate whether the quality of leadership, strategic planning, excellence of professional expertise, level of partnership, and mode of process affect the organizational performance of the urban cadastral system significantly or not. The underlying research question is: does quality of leadership, strategic planning, excellence of professional expertise, level of partnership, and mode of process affect the organizational performance of the urban cadastral system significantly?
