Land tenure rights are fundamental to improving food security, promoting gender equality, ensuring sustainable urban development, building resilience, reducing land degradation and promoting peace and stability. The inclusion of land tenure in the Sustainable Development Goals, in particular through indicator 1.4.2 for monitoring the proportion of total adult population with secure tenure rights, disaggregated by sex and type of tenure, in urban and rural areas, was a global milestone linked to the successful implementation of this project. The project was designed to address gaps in the production and use of data in planning and decision-making and the lack of nationally applicable and globally comparable land indicators and methodologies for monitoring land tenure and governance issues in rural and urban areas.

Key outcomes of the project included: (a) the development and validation of 15 globally comparable land indicators for the monitoring of land governance issues by land actors, which served to bring the issue into the context of the post-2015 development agenda, including through the successful recommendation to include indicator 1.4.2 in the Sustainable Development Goals; (b) the development of a methodology for monitoring tenure security, including questionnaire modules for data collection; and (c) supporting efforts to develop a global, robust and comparable methodology for monitoring indicator 1.4.2. A gender expert review of the proposed methodology for monitoring indicators 1.4.2, 5.A.1 and 5.A.2 was also conducted, resulting in key recommendations for the harmonization of key concepts and definitions.