**2. Literature Review**

## *2.1. Land Tenure and Registration in Ethiopia*

Dominated by the agricultural economy, the available scholarly literature documents that widespread tenure insecurity hinders long-term land-based investment in rural Ethiopia [28]. Land tenure insecurity contributes to unprecedented environmental degradation, ecosystem depletion, biodiversity loss, decrease in productivity, and food insecurity [28–31]. These development challenges have been compounded and amplified by climate change and disaster risks that threaten the sustainability of productive landscapes and livelihood resilience [32]. This section briefly highlights the historical account of land tenure and the land certification program and its implication to NRLAIS development in Ethiopia.

During the last century, the land tenure history of Ethiopia has experienced extensive changes. Ethiopia has a long legacy of state intervention in land tenure relations that influence local tenure regimes throughout different political discourses [33]. Hence, the creation and recording of land rights by the national state has been a development theme since the 1960s in the contemporary land tenure history of Ethiopia [34]. The land tenure registration innovations before 1960 have generally been swept away by subsequent changes, but they still have relevance as the model of tenure reform. Before the 1974 revolution, the land tenure systems of Ethiopia were grounded in historically shaped, local institutions, complex and varied across the regions [31]. The military socialist regime's redistributive land reform of 1975 ensured that rural farming households received access to land through only usufruct rights, while ensuring state ownership. Notably, this reform legacy not only weakened the remaining customary institutions but also swept away the overall imperial land governance systems [35]. The current land registration system is highly affected by the 1975 radical land reform of the military socialist regime (1974 to 1991).

In post-socialist Ethiopia, tenure insecurity is linked to a history of limited empowerment of smallholder farmers and significant control by the state in determining access to and control over land resources [35]. During the Ethiopia Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF)-led government (1991 to 2018), state ownership was maintained and enshrined in the 1995 constitution. The 1995 constitution of the federal democratic republic of Ethiopia Article 40 inherited the state land ownership and usufruct rights for landholders from the military socialist regime. The governance structure also changed from a centralized socialistic arrangement to market-led decentralization [36]. Article 52 of the 1995 constitution gives the regional governments the right to administer land and other natural resources following the federal laws. As a result, the land tenure system is evolving differently in rural

and urban areas [37]. Different federal proclamations govern its development, and reforms have been progressing at different speeds across the country [38,39]. Moreover, there are essentially two parallel land registration and information system infrastructures—one for rural and one for urban. This rural–urban divide costs the country hugely in terms of policy, institutional, technical, operational, and human resource challenges for integrated and transparent land administration and resource governance systems that foster sustainable development [29].

In rural Ethiopia, the theme of this research, the government has been implementing a progressive two-stage land registration and certification program since 1998 [30]. The first-level landholding certification (FLLC) program that started in 1998 has been claimed by the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) as a policy response of improving tenure security to reverse land degradation, food insecurity, and poverty reduction [40]. Till 2010, the FLLC, which claimed to be cheap and fast, has mainly been financed by regional states but without spatial data of parcels [33,34], whereas the second level landholding certification (SLLC) is being coordinated by the Federal Government in collaboration with the regional states and has attracted strong technical and financial support from international development partners [41]. The latter approach introduced parcel-level cadastral mapping and the transition of the manual registry into a harmonized computerized LIS [42]. Since 2013, Ethiopia has continued investing in the SLLC program to cover over 50 million rural parcels and improve tenure security and land administration service delivery [40,42]. According to MoA [43], between 2013 and 2021, over 21 million rural parcels have been demarcated and mapped, of which close to 18 million parcels have been issued with SLLC. The demarcation and mapping cover about 42 percent of the estimated 50 million parcels found in the highland parts of the country. In Ethiopia, the household-level positive impact of these massive land certification programs has been well studied by different scholars [33,40,41].
