PROTOCOL: The Impact of Land Property Rights Interventions on Agricultural Productivity in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review

1.1 DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEM

Secure and predictable access to land as a productive resource is key to the livelihoods of millions of farmers around the world. Secure land rights enable farmers to invest in long-term improvements to farms and soils in the expectation that they will reap the benefits of those investments without fear that their land will be confiscated arbitrarily. Investments in improvements to soil fertility, and capital improvements such as irrigation equipment and fences, pay for themselves over multiple cropping seasons. Recent research on the use and management of common pool resources, such as forests and grazing lands, shows that ecological and livelihood outcomes are greater where local user groups have clear and secure rights to the resource; the right to exclude ineligible users often emerges as decisive to local communities' ability to manage their natural resources sustainably (see especially Persha, et.al [2010] and Porter-Bolland, et.al [2011]). A recent meta-analysis has also suggested that natural forests are better managed under community ownership rather than state ownership, because a greater share of the benefits of good forest stewardship accrue directly to local communities (ibid.). Formal and informal land rights are therefore seen as keys to improving the conditions of the poor in developing countries in terms of economic growth; agricultural production; food security; natural resource management; gender-related inequalities; conflict management and local governance processes more generally.

Many farmers in developing countries hold customary rights that are considered highly secure in the context of local social arrangements, but which are not accorded legal status in the country's statutory property regimes. Rather, land assigned under customary arrangements is statutorily categorized as public land, and subject to the stewardship and administration of public agencies. These areas of public land have been the principal targets of large-scale acquisition of land, or so-called “land-grabbing,” in many developing countries. In the process, the customary tenure arrangements that delivered secure tenure rights to generations of farming families have been over-ridden and thousands of farming families face displacement. An appropriate policy remedy may be to accord extant customary arrangements statutory status equal to that accorded land held under public land and freehold tenures (Knight, 2010; United Nations, 2012). The land-grabbing problem underscores the connection between clear statutory recognition of the land rights, whether they are based on customary rights or freehold rights, and tenure security.

Leading multilateral and bilateral development agencies accord high priority to policy reforms that strengthen tenure security, especially as elements of strategies to reduce poverty among women and other traditionally disadvantaged members of society. According to a 2003 World Bank study,

Other agencies, including USAID and FAO, have placed support for reforms promoting tenure security close to the centre of their funding strategies (see especially USAID and MCC [undated] and FAO [2011]). More about the historical and contextual understanding and success of land tenure interventions is discussed in section 1.4.

1.2 DESCRIPTION OF THE INTERVENTION

Land rights may include a wide range of rights to use, own and/or transfer land, as well as enforce rules and exclude outsiders. Strengthening of land rights can take a variety of forms that range from documenting customary uses to formalizing legal rights. Some forms may engage directly with the rights holder, for example through farm-by-farm land titling. Other forms of strengthening rights may act on a national level, for example constitutional reforms in Mozambique that recognize customary rights to land (van den Brink et al. 2006). National scale or even community level interventions that seek to strengthen rights may have differing impacts within populations, for example many interventions seeking to improve rights may lead to elite capture of benefits and subsequent loss of rights for poor and vulnerable sub-populations particularly in the absence of safeguards. The socially embedded nature of customary rights means land rights of many women depend on family relations that can be disrupted during interventions to strengthen rights resulting in men, but also women with greater status, exerting greater control over reform processes. Thus the observed impact depends on the type and scale of the assessment, across individuals, communities, regions and countries (Place and Swallow 2000).

The review will examine the specific impacts of two types of land rights interventions: •

Conversion of communal or non-demarcated rural land to freehold title and registration of such rights in an official registry. This kind of conversion has been a standard approach, under the presumption that communal land tenure rights are inherently insecure. Such conversion typically consists of adjudicating and assigning land rights, physically surveying boundaries, and registering rights and boundary demarcations in an official land registry. Subsequent to this conversion, all transactions involving the land are intended to be recorded in the official registry.

Informal processes may resemble what we have described above but without statutory backing– conversion and communal rights registration interventions constitute a very prominent class of interventions in this sector. Despite the value of these informal interventions, this review will focus on the affects of the added value of formal registration of land rights. This decision was taken for the practical reason that effects of informal practices are less likely to be robustly and rigorously measurable and comparable, and because formal interventions are more relevant for development projects aiming to introduce and replicate effective interventions transparently and accountably.

We exclude from the review related justice interventions (e.g., paralegal, outreach, alternative dispute resolution interventions, etc.) and enforcement capacity interventions (e.g., training of justice sector actors, digital boundary marking, etc.). Land inheritance reforms are also excluded. ¹ Relevant moderating factors and mechanisms/intermediate outcomes for these interventions are likely different, and analyzing them would require separate theories of change and literature searches. Associated with this exclusion, it should also be noted that we expect to find that many interventions relevant to this study will constitute only one part of a bundle of mutually supportive interventions affecting tenure undertaken simultaneously in a given context, and that extracting specific effect sizes– and accordingly differentiating out the clear-cut success or failure– of specific interventions within such bundles may not be possible. In our analysis, we will indicate whether or not interventions were carried out in isolation and if not, the other tools used will be identified and if studies include the information we will explain their perceived context specific roles in the qualitative section of the review. We will also suggest further work be done to review access-to-justice, enforcement, and other complementary interventions.

1.3 HOW THE INTERVENTION MIGHT WORK

A variety of factors are likely to influence effectiveness of land property rights interventions on productivity. Figure 1 presents the basic elements of a theory of change (causal chain) that draws on the research teams' own work in this area as well as the available literature (summarized below). The figure sketches out moderating factors, mechanisms of change and intermediate outcomes, and endpoint outcomes that we see as being important in understanding the effects of land property rights on productivity. The endpoint outcomes of interest include:

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1

Theory of Change

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Productivity of land use

In theory, it is important to distinguish between the welfare of pre-policy and post-policy landholders in evaluating the welfare impacts of these interventions. To the extent that these groups differ, any analysis ought to incorporate the potential for adverse consequences for pre-policy landholders.

The theory of change proposes the following moderating factors as being important in determining the nature of the effects that are likely to follow land property rights interventions: •

Governance, including the nature of interests represented by those controlling policy.

The theory of changes proposes that interventions and moderating factors operate through a number of intermediate drivers of change, including the following: •

Recognition of alienation right by those holding registered rights. This is presumed by conventional economic theory to provide collateral and, therefore, enable access to credit.

Intermediate outcomes include shifts in land, labor and agricultural inputs relevant to both short and longer term production. More specifically, these would include changes in: •

Investments of resources into short term production and land (fertilizer, pesticides, etc.)

1.4 WHY IT IS IMPORTANT TO DO THIS REVIEW

Existing evidence on the effects of land property rights interventions is mixed and to a considerable degree dependent upon the initial land rights conditions. In many cases where existing rights are already secure through stable informal and customary systems, the formalization of rights through land titling, one form of strengthening rights, may have little impact (Pickney and Kimuyu 1994, Atwood 1990). In other cases, as in the Brazilian Amazonian frontier in the early 1990s, mechanisms for formalizing property rights, where no formal institutions had previously existed, are argued to have increased productivity and slowed forest loss (Alston et al. 1996). Alternatively, if strengthening land rights simply results in formalizing a bundle of overlapping rights customarily distributed through a community into private property, this “strengthening” could lead to the exclusion and marginalization of large sections of the community, including the poor, as is argued to have occurred alongside Kenyan tenure reform (Meinzen-Dick and Mwangi 2005). Thus it is important to understand to what extent the strengthening of rights in any context leads to new institutional realities and who bears the costs and benefits of changes in how land rights are assigned (Fort 2008, Bellemare 2010). As a result, a systematic review of these lessons would allow policy makers to define specific contexts and allow for consideration of likely success of a variety of potential land tenure interventions for women and men.

These inconsistent conclusions from studies on the relationship between strengthening rights and productivity have led academics and policy makers in recent years to try to investigate these differences (Brasselle et al. 2002). A literature review published by Dickerman et Al. (1989) on efforts to formalize and register customary land rights in Africa found that formalization had significant positive effects on investment and agricultural productivity in only a small number of particularistic contexts where customary systems had broken down or were absent. Rarely did the benefits associated with surveying land, adjudicating and assigning rights and maintaining official registers outweigh the costs. The authors suggested that registration in many settings had deleterious effects on the poor and on women farmers, particularly where women were not listed as joint title-holders.

Recent research on land certification programs in Ethiopia (Deininger, et. al. 2011) found that new low-cost survey and titling technology, along with growing demand for land and the opening of new markets, appear to result in higher net benefits in the form of agricultural productivity and farmer incomes. In the case of Rwanda's land tenure regularization program, access to land for married women appears to have improved in the short term (2.5 years after interventions), and investment in, and maintenance of, soil improvements increased as well, especially in female headed households (Ali, et. al. 2011). Other evidence suggests that titling, especially where it is an option in peri-urban settings, can be an effective pathway for widowed, single and divorced women to purchase secure land rights not otherwise available to unmarried women under customary tenure.

These and other studies underscore the complexity of attribution and the importance of context (Place 2009) to understanding relationships between security, registration and productivity, and to understanding gender dimensions. They also suggest that tenure security alone is not the single factor ‘silver bullet’ leading directly to higher farmer incomes attributed to tenure reforms by writers such as Hernando de Soto (2000). Context matters, including whether markets and credit institutions are in place and input and other costs are at levels conducive to competitive pricing of agricultural products (Bruce, forthcoming). Relevant questions have recently been raised about the extent to which much of the available empirical research on the effects of tenure security has a handle on tenure security as a concept (Arnot, et. al, 2011).

To date, and with the exception of Porter-Bolland et.al (2011) which concerns forest management, the team is unaware of any systematic review or meta-analyses on the relationships between land property rights and productivity, or other outcomes. In addition, Fenske (2010) highlights study design limitations in many of the studies that have not found significant impacts of tenure security. The concerns about inconsistent effects and design limitations provide a strong motivation for a systematic review. Such a review might enable policy makers to better predict the outcomes of alternative interventions in particular social, economic and cultural contexts. In addition, our methods, which include both quantitative impact assessments as well as qualitative research, have been shown in the field of medicine to be useful for a variety of purposes, including: ensuring decision-makers have the most accurate evidence; assessing key population traits relating to a given intervention; establishing whether further primary research is required; and gaining new insights into relevant population or institutional traits (Ring et al 2011).

Finally, this review will be useful in that we plan to highlight areas in need of further assessment through rigorous impact evaluation and by providing guidance on how to make the most of evaluation opportunities.

3.1 CRITERIA FOR INCLUDING STUDIES IN THE REVIEW [PICOS]

Although the literature on the relationship between property rights and productivity in developing countries is large, with theoretical and applied research dating to the 1960s, rigorous impact evaluations are not the norm. Initial searches found 12 studies that may meet the standards for our review (see Appendix I); 12 studies are quantitative effectiveness studies, while three are qualitative investigations).

3.2 SEARCH METHODS FOR IDENTIFICATION OF STUDIES

3.3 DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS