There appears to be a constantly incontrovertible, yet delicately inseparable cord, between land resource as an all-time invaluable asset, and meaningful socio-economic growth and development. Much as this assertion holds, what enigmatically remains almost unsolvable is the seeming unending mystery that surrounds ‘wilful’ prevention of access to this very non-substitutable resource, in spite of its tangentiality to virtually all endeavours, around which the survival of all human beings revolves. Thence, it is compellingly tempting to reason that, some ‘unseen’ factors are decidedly making the delivery and accessibility of land, especially within urban milieu, extremely difficult, so much that, enviable growth and development might be so perennially elusive, particularly to the poor segment of the populace, which unfortunately forms the largest proportion of any country’s citizenry, Nigeria inclusive. Although, the trend facades itself to be solely caused by economic and other attendant pecuniary factors, but as all the economically-defined strategies seem not too effective over the years, to finally nail several challenges associated with formal land delivery and accessibility; it behoves upon researchers and policy-makers alike, to look beyond the ordinary. Hence, the demystification exercise such as this, which is geared towards unravelling this mystery, reveals more factors that are indeed non-pecuniary, this is the crux of this study. Therefore, this study, which is part of a doctoral research, pre-empirically via literature reviews and two pilot surveys, generated those not-so-suspected non-pecuniary factors that are considered as retardants to the formal delivery and accessibility of urban lands in Nigeria. These retardants are then catalogued and coined into one major determinant variable, which is called policy development and compliance engineering (PDCE) for ease of empirical exercise that was to follow later, as well as for the understanding by all would-be stakeholders. This major determinant variable is then being measured by other three latent constructs, which are calibrated to encompass some integral items of questions as their evaluative components; these constructs are named policy relevance and appropriateness (PRA), contents and context of policies (CCP) and role mediation regime (RMR). Hence, out of the total of 2408 respondents as total sample space, 850 respondents were qualified as the sample frame, from where a total of 450 respondents were considered for the sample size, upon which well structure questionnaires of 5point Likert scale type were administered among career land officers and tenured land regulators in the MDAs, independent land consultants and NGOs with shelter mandate, as well as various categories of land users and developers. After through normality and reliability tests on the 427 retrieved questionnaires, only 11 were considered invalid and thus rejected. Therefore, the remaining 416 questionnaires that were valid went through AMOS’ version 18 software for Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) analyses. The results showed amongst other things that among the three major constituting retardants of formal land delivery and accessibility, contents and context of policies has the highest regression via its estimate of 0.26 with critical ratio of 4.86, which thus makes it to be the greatest among the policy development and compliance engineering constructs, as contributor of retardation upon the propensity of formal lands’ regulo-administrative machineries to efficiently deliver lands for optimum accessibility by the land users and developers. Among other recommendations to address this pathetic scenario, are that the government should strive and ‘nigerianise’ all or very many important provisions of all the relevant land policy instruments, etc. Article visualizations
