There are three reasons why land policies in Africa are attracting greater amounts of attention. First, it is recognized that enhancing smallholder productivity is critical for sustainable and broad-based growth as well as poverty reduction (World Bank 2007). However, land-related investment, technology adoption, establishment of processing, markets, and value chains, all are unlikely to come about unless land tenure is secure. Moreover, increased productivity will be capitalized in land values and unless explicit attention is devoted to traditional land rights and land access by weaker groups, in particular women, interventions aiming to increase agricultural productivity may have negative social consequences. This is particularly relevant in contexts where current interpretations of customary systems define women's rights only through their relationship with men and women are often unable to inherit land which is considered the property of their husband's lineage. Negative implications for productivity can be severe, in particular if, as almost everywhere, women make a major contribution to agricultural production and its management.Second, demand for land, and in many cases land prices, have vastly increased with population growth, urbanization, and overall economic development. While higher land values makes land registration more rewarding, leaving land rights undefined increases the risk of having them appropriated by outsiders in a way that may neither be consistent with principles of equity nor conducive to the most productive use of this resource.Third, in a decentralized setting, land administration can not only help provide public goods and improve government finance but also that are rural areas will not develop based on agriculture alone. Nonagricultural development will imply migration of households out of agriculture that requires secure land rights so as to allow transfer of land rights, either through rental on a temporary basis or through sale, to others who are able to make more effective use of it without the fear of losing it. In many cases, this is now complemented by demand for land by investors who want to use it for food production, bio-fuels, or in anticipation of carbon payments has increased significantly in the wake of recent commodity price booms. It has highlighted that, without clear processes to process requests or assign of land rights, land acquisition by outsiders may end up fostering corruption and leading to inequality and dispossession of traditional land users rather than as a positive force for growth.This paper examines the theories identifying channels through which land rights can affect socioeconomic outcomes, points to realities which often prevent such effects from materializing, summarizes quantitative evidence on the actual impact of land registration interventions to assess the validity of theoretical arguments, and derives conclusions that can help guide applied work in this area. An example from Ethiopia is used to illustrate the potentially far-reaching impacts of ‘new' models of formalizing land rights and a number of policy conclusions are drawn.
The debate around the relative roles of markets versus bureaucrats took on renewed life with the end of the Cold War. The public policy debate shifted from focusing on the public sector to emphasizing markets and their ability to innovate, decentralize, use incentives and meet needs more effectively. Yet there remains in this public policy debate a stunning silence about the absence of property rights for the rural poor. This article focuses on the need to put property rights for the rural poor--the need for land reform--back on the international policy agenda. The first half of the article examines current land reform paradigms and looks at what has been learned, focusing on Brazil as a case study The second half of the article moves from what has been done to a discussion of where future research and operational work should go from here. There are 1.3 billion people around the world who live on less than U.S.$1 a day.(1) Even though urbanization has been one of the major features of development and change in the past decade, the majority of these poor still live in rural areas. Furthermore, there are rural roots to the urban poverty seen in most countries, as those without assets migrate to urban or semi-urban areas searching for work. Thus redistribution of assets is central to long-run progress on reducing poverty in both the city and the countryside. Researchers Michael Lipton and Jacques van der Gaag point out: For poverty reduction to succeed, the poor need some autochthonous source of income and safety. That is, they need to have an alternative, in the market place and in the polity, not to depend on a patron, monopolist or bureaucrat. Providing the poor with access to productive land is usually regarded as crucial.(2) Land reform is one of the most central steps in this process. The effectiveness of land-reform programs in improving productivity and reducing rural poverty relies on many factors including land quality, access to technology and strong local agricultural markets. However, access to land is the single most important prerequisite for improving economic conditions among the rural poor. Precisely because of the salience of land reform to the reduction of rural poverty, one of the major recommendations of this paper is that international donors should recommit themselves to land reform and begin financing the analytical work and technical assistance it requires. The current general silence and limited operational programming of donors on land reform exacerbates the rural poverty problem.(3) CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK Over two decades ago, Peter Dorner, a major authority on land reform, cautioned: Land reform is so intimately related with the whole development process that one feels the need to deal with issues of development in general as well as with those more specifically identified with land reform. That requires simplification of complex and nationally specific experiences. No single body of theory encompasses all the strategic variables.(4) Dorner's definition of land reform includes measures to redistribute land in favor of peasants and small farmers and ... embraces consolidation and registration in areas where customary tenure is prevalent and also land settlement on new lands.(5) He places an additional emphasis on the need to make changes in tenancy rights. Each of these aspects goes to the core of rural politics, and nothing about them is easily simplified. Indeed, to think of land reform as only a technocratic or economic problem is a mistake. It is a political economy problem with economic and social consequences amenable to resolution through good technical skills and political change. As such, land reform is a central part of the whole development process. While development economists and agricultural economists have done most of the conceptual work on land reform, more recently attention has shifted to the ancillary fields of institutional theory (including organization theory), development management and law. …