Advancing Cadastral Survey Theory for the Digital Age: Blockchain-Enabled Land Registry Architecture and Its Application to the Nigerian Land Administration Crisis

Land administration systems globally are confronting foundational challenges of trust, transparency, and resilience that conventional cadastral paradigms and institutional architectures are theoretically ill-equipped to resolve, particularly in high-corruption, low-trust governance environments such as Nigeria. This dissertation makes a theoretical contribution to cadastral survey theory by critically re-theorising the cadastral parcel as a distributed digital object and developing an original Blockchain-Enabled Cadastral Architecture framework specifically designed for the Nigerian land administration institutional context. The theoretical framework integrates property rights theory, transaction cost economics, information asymmetry theory, and distributed ledger governance theory to construct a formal model of how blockchain-enabled cadastral systems address trust, immutability, and contestation in land registration. A prototype blockchain cadastral application is developed using Hyperledger Fabric and spatially extended to link cryptographic parcel records to GNSS-referenced GeoJSON boundary representations. The prototype is evaluated through a controlled pilot implementation involving 145 land parcels in Awka South LGA, Anambra State, assessing transaction processing time, spatial data integrity maintenance, access control effectiveness, and stakeholder acceptance. Comparative institutional analysis across Ghana, Rwanda, and Georgia blockchain land registry experiments is conducted using a structured case study framework to identify transferable design principles. The dissertation contributes the Cadastral Blockchain Adoption Readiness Framework as an original institutional diagnostic tool and provides theoretical and practical guidance for Nigeria's ongoing land administration reform agenda. Keywords: blockchain, cadastral theory, land registry, Nigeria, distributed ledger.