2026 Theses Master's

Revealing the Gap: Evaluating Colombia’s Multipurpose Cadastre Through Expert Testimony and Cadastral Dataset Quality

Useche, Pablo

This study evaluates the implementation of Colombia’s Multipurpose Cadastre through expert testimony and a structured audit of publicly available cadastral datasets, examining the program across the dimensions of efficiency, coherence, and equity. The Multipurpose Cadastre was designed not simply as a technical upgrade to an existing fiscal system, but as a structural reform of the land information infrastructure that supports territorial governance, post-conflict rural reform, and property taxation in a country where, as of 2023, less than ten percent of the territory had updated cadastral records.

The empirical design brings together two complementary forms of evidence. The first is a set of semi-structured interviews with five practitioners whose roles connect them to the production, regulation, application, and evaluation of cadastral information. The second is a structured audit of publicly available cadastral datasets across five purposively selected municipalities: Bogotá, Barranquilla, Chiquinquirá, Tumaco, and La Primavera, and three institutional managers: UAECD, AMB, and IGAC. These datasets were examined through attribute completeness, coordinate system consistency, schema alignment, FMI population, and public accessibility.

The central finding is a structural collection-dissemination gap. The program has built an increasingly capable collection machinery without building an equivalent dissemination infrastructure. Across all five municipalities, published datasets contain boundary geometries and minimal identification codes, but none of the governance-critical attributes the normative framework requires. These include the FMI field that connects cadastral and registry records, fields capable of representing collective or Indigenous tenure, and functional programmatic access for the IGAC-administered cases. The interview testimony points to the same condition from different institutional positions, attributing it to an incentive structure that measures coverage accumulation more clearly than governance utility. Five recommendations follow, addressing dissemination performance, schema inclusivity, differentiated implementation, PDET-specific protocols, and fiscal transfer linkage.