Land Tenure Reforms, Poverty and Natural Resource Management: Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Land reforms have played a central role in the political economy of many countries in the world and have been subject to massive disagreements between different political interest groups and ideologies. The 20th Century included many of the largest social land reform experiments in history such as in the earlier Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Vietn am, and Ethiopia. Many of these reforms have later partly been reversed. In other countries with a colonial history there have been tensions between property rights established during the colonial period and traditional (customary) land rights, and how to adapt these to changing conditions are critical issues. Some countries have had very skewed land distributions rooted in ethnic, colonial, and other historical circumstances and this has created demands for land redistributions to reduce discrimination and poverty and to stimulate economic development.\rSeveral factors have created a new interest in land reforms around the world:  The Millennium Development Goals sharpened the international focus on poverty reduction and legal empowerment of the poor as seen by the establishment of the Commission for Legal Empowerment of the Poor (CLEP). \r Population growth, population concentration and land degradation have created land scarcity and the emergence of land markets in densely populated countries in Africa and thi s has created a new interest in land reforms to stimulate more efficient and sustainable land management.  Excessive regulations of land transactions in some countries in Asia (e.g., India , Nepal and the Philippines) have created both inefficiency of land u se and inequity of operational land distribution.  Economic growth in Asia has led to changes in food habits towards more land -demanding foods (meat and milk), and to growing land and water scarcity.  Increasing demands for land for food and energy producti on have spurred a new land race to ensure national food security in countries with increasing food deficits. This has triggered sharp increases in demands for land in relatively land abundant countries where the property rights and other institutional arra ngements are not developed to handle these new demands or to protect the land rights of traditional land users and facilitate sustainable investments.  Deforestation is one of the main causes of climate change and the increasing international concern and su pport to stop and reverse deforestation have stimulated new thinking on how property rights and land reforms can play a role to reduce deforestation and forest degradation and stimulate tree planting and better forest management. New Land Reforms have be en promoted by international institutions, such as the World Bank and UN organizations, donor countries, new governments and pressure groups within countries. Such reforms have typically aimed at stimulating economic growth by enhancing land use efficiency and investment, reducing poverty and promoting more sustainable land management. However, many of these reforms have not had the intended effects or there have been disagreements about what the effect of the reforms have been. These problems may be relate d to both the design of the land tenure reforms and the measurement problems due to poor data to assess their intended and possible unintended effects, given the complexity of the relationships. The latter of the problems is also caused by insufficient att ention to the need for careful impact assessments and data collection to facilitate such assessments. The renewed interest in land reforms has also spurred a new requirement to carefully monitor and measure their impacts. New standards are being establish ed for how to carry out program evaluation not only through rigorous internal validation but also by giving more emphasis to the external validation (Ravallion, 2009). Development economics research has moved in direction of randomized social experiments a s a preferred way to identify unbiased estimates of program impacts. So far it has been rather difficult to implement randomized social land tenure reform experiments. New reforms in several countries involve elements of randomized control trials related t o the design of reforms and these can provide valuable future lessons. However, for our purpose of evaluating past and recent ongoing reforms we have not been able to draw on such experiments for this book. On the other hand, t here may be clever ways to id entify natural experiments in relation to land tenure reform programs and these may help to identify impacts when random social experiments are infeasible for various reasons. This book tries to utilize such natural experiments as one source of evidence of the performance of past tenure reforms. This book aims to identify the impacts and draw lessons from land tenure reforms in a number of countries in Africa and Asia and discuss the internal and external validity of the findings. The nature of the data an d the complexity of the issues make it necessary to be cautious about the conclusions and their robustness. Good knowledge of the historical context \rand process of implementation of the specific land tenure reforms is essential for careful interpretation o f evidence from past reform. In addition the book draws heavily on recent rural household surveys as a basis for assessment of reform impacts. The authors combine historical, process and recent statistical evidence to infer causal implications about impact s of land tenure reforms. Subjective judgment is a necessary part of such analyses like any historical analysis based on limited evidence. The book focuses on five major land tenure reform issues; a) Land-to-the-tiller reforms (Nepal and India); b) Market-assisted land redistribution reforms (Malawi and South Africa); c) Land tenure security enhancing reforms (Ethiopia, Vietnam and Uganda ); d) Forest tenure reforms (China, India, Nepal, Ethiopia and Kenya); and e) The need for new land tenure reforms in Africa with the expanding demand for land. We present a brief literature review related to these five areas in boxes that also provide the basis for our conceptual framework. We start by providing a discussion and review of literature on why land tenure secu rity is so important for enhancing economic and social development.