The lessons learned from the Thailand and Peru programmes and the experience gained from large projects involving investment in land in some countries in Latin America, such as Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and others, constitute an important legacy which should be taken into account in the design and implementation of LAPs.

The main lessons emerging from the initial phases of LAPs, from the late 1990s to 2005 can be summarized as follows:

• It is important to have a strong political and financial commitment from the national government to the objectives and implementation of the LAP. It is vital that this commitment continues once the LAP has been completed, to ensure that the advances made with the project persist.
• The effects of titling are not the same for the various types of beneficiaries. LAPs require the forms of regularizing tenure rights to be in line with the financial, social and cultural situations of beneficiaries.
• Handing over titles and including them in land registers does not guarantee that subsequent transactions carried out on these properties will be recorded with the corresponding land administration institutions, particularly when they are remote from population centres and there are no incentives for the population to recognize the importance of registration.
• Land administration institutions in charge of cadastral mapping, land registration or regularization of tenure rights are usually poor as regards access and management of technology, information systems, transparency and financial sustainability, consequently huge efforts need to be considered to strengthen them from the outset of projects.
• Obsolete legal frameworks with contradictory laws or with land administration overlaps have created serious bottlenecks for LAPs, particularly in the modernization of land administration institutions, the implementation of quicker procedures for the regularization of tenure rights or the recognition of communal land rights in favour of indigenous peoples or peasant groups.
• Several countries have social, cultural and legal norms that hinder the access of women to land tenure rights and to control over these. Training, communication and awareness initiatives therefore need to be designed to offer women better opportunities for accessing property rights and understanding how land administration institutions work.

With the aim of achieving better performance in the following phases of development, LAPs have considered the following changes in their design:

• As a result of the interest and commitment of governments in Central America, LAPs have been designed allowing for the development of several phases, or because they have been extended from the initially planned duration.
• Legal and institutional reforms have been undertaken in cadastral mapping, modernization of land registers and information systems on tenure, regularization of tenure rights and access of women to titling, as well as in the recognition of the territorial rights of indigenous peoples.
• In the majority of LAPs, project coordination units have been incorporated in one of the land administration institutions. Besides facilitating the implementation of projects, their role involves strengthening the capabilities of the institutions themselves.
• The integration of the cadastre and land registers has been encouraged, and when this option has not been viable, an attempt has been made to modernize and unify the information systems that both institutions manage.
• By strengthening the communication programmes and capabilities of municipal authorities to provide land administration services in a sustainable manner, LAPs have been trying to strengthen the local cadastre and registration culture, as well as making the services these institutions provide more accessible to the population.
• Owing to the complexity of the task, LAPs have been focusing their efforts to regularize tenure rights, individually or collectively, according to various criteria: some countries have given preference to areas with the largest numbers of land transactions or where poverty levels are higher, while others have combined several criteria.
• Through legal and regulatory reforms, LAPs have encouraged new titles to be given individually or jointly to a larger number of single women or those living with a partner.

• The design and implementation of the M&E systems of LAPs are complex due to the diverse range of aspects they cover: legal frameworks, institutional strengthening, regularization of tenure rights in various sectors, decentralization of land administration services, etc. This requires the use of different skills and methodologies according to each of the aspects to be monitored and evaluated. Hence the need for multidisciplinary teams within the M&E unit of institutions involved in LAPs, and for this aspect to be incorporated in the design of its constituent parts and budget.
• It is important that institutions set up formats, procedures and systems for regular, automatic information collection which can monitor and evaluate the development of LAP activities and the increase in the efficiency of service provision to users. These should include mechanisms for measuring the time and costs of processes, as well as for registration with and without a project.
• Evaluating and measuring impacts on households, municipal districts and users generally requires a baseline to have been set up at the start of the project which includes an analysis of the situation of the project’s target areas, adjacent non-target areas, and the operation of cadastral, registration and tenure regularization offices.
• The initial creation of this baseline will, however, require the use of various statistical methods, owing to which the level of information obtained on the tenure situation in households, before the intervention of LAPs, will vary from one country or region to another (the less information there is, the more difficult it is to create a sample of households that will potentially benefit from LAPs and their control groups).
• The impacts of LAPs on the various levels of society, regularization of tenure, greater institutional efficiency or greater access to more transparent information on the land situation will require time to take effect. Therefore, before starting costly impact evaluations, key aspects of the results chain which leads to the final objectives sought should be monitored more cheaply.
• The impacts of LAPs are determined both by the scope of the intervention, and by the context in which the programme is developed (urban-rural, in an area with or without a dynamic land market, institutions with initial coordination levels, municipal areas with a culture of paying property taxes, etc.). A sound analysis of the LAP results obtained thus also requires an understanding and characterization of the context of the programme intervention.