Conference Agenda


Session Overview
06-07: Methodologies to Evaluate Land Program Impact
Wednesday, 22/Mar/2017:
10:30am - 12:00pm

Session Chair: Heath Cosgrove, USAID, United States of America
Location: MC C1-200

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A Land Evidence Framework

Jennifer Lisher, Derick Bowen, Joshua Alfonso

Millennium Challenge Corporation, United States of America

Following global agreement around the Voluntary Guidelines and Responsible Agricultural Investments, increasing investments are being made to improve land tenure and governance. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recently highlighted the importance of land in alleviating poverty, incorporating land tenure indicator 1.4.2 under Goal 1. As interventions and global monitoring of land increases, donors and governments are requesting better evidence on the impacts of land interventions and a comparable understanding of the status of land governance across the globe. As we look to improve our monitoring and evaluation frameworks, establishing global land indicators and data collection, what does the existing literature on land tell us and can we see consistent patterns emerging? How does the evidence to date compare to land's theory of change and what are the key gaps in the land evidence that would benefit from further analysis? Based on land evidence, this presentation offers an approach to modeling the economic benefits from improvements in property rights and land policy and suggests key areas for further research and understanding of the impacts from land.

Investigating the Causal Channels for Increasing Land Tenure Security: An Organisation-Specific Systematic Review

Daniel Higgins

IFAD, Italy

Improved land tenure security has become increasingly adopted as a means of reducing rural poverty. And accordingly, it is imperative that efforts are made to ensure practitioners have a strong understanding of its causal dynamics. In a bid to address a perceived lack of such understanding, and to identify gaps in the literature, this piece of research has conducted a comprehensive review of the existing evidence around the impact of secured land tenure, using the Systematic Review methodology. This review is unique in that it is specifically tailored to the land tenure-related activities of a single organisation, the International Fund for Agricultural Development. The research finds a total of 60 quantitative and qualitative papers that fit the inclusion criteria, which offer varying levels of support for the different causal mechanisms within the Theory of Change of IFAD's land tenure intervention portfolio.

Contextual Factors, Property Regimes, and Environmental Outcomes: Applying a Realist Synthesis Approach to a Systematic Review of Marine Protected Areas

Rebecca McLain1, Steven Lawry2, Maria Ojanen3

1Portland State University, United States of America; 2CIFOR, Indonesia; 3CIFOR, Finland

Given the complex nature of common pool resource systems, evidence review approaches that help clarify when, how, where, and why property regime interventions are likely to result in positive environmental (or other) outcomes are needed. Realist synthesis has emerged as a promising approach in public health for identifying the mechanisms that condition policy intervention outcomes when complex systems are involved. Our paper describes the results of applying a realist approach to synthesizing data from 31 articles on marine resource governance. Owing to space limitations, we focus on an in-depth context-mechanism-outcome (CMO) analysis of five of the customary tenure regimes described in the sample dataset. Use of this approach allowed us to reach a better understanding of three key social mechanisms — perceptions of legitimacy, perceptions of the likelihood of benefits, and perceptions of enforcement capacity — that condition behaviors vis-à-vis marine and terrestrial resources. Our study contributes to the field of natural resources governance by demonstrating the utility of a systematic review method which has received little attention by property scholars but which has great promise to clarify understanding of how complex systems work.

Using innovative research methodologies to uncover nuance and diversity: The results of household diaries in Odisha, India

Elizabeth Louis, Niketa Kulkarni, Diana Fletschner

Landesa, United States of America

In this paper we discuss a methodology called household diaries (hereafter Diaries). The method brings together quantitative and qualitative research collected in nine visits to 150 households in Odisha between November 2015 and November 2016. Our findings highlight that 1) The number of parcels of land that households relied on with varying tenurial arrangements was higher than expected; 2) Conceptualizations of ownership are ambiguous and subjective; 3) Households consistently relied on undocumented plots; 4) The number of plots relied on by each household fluctuated over time; 5) Diversification was crucial for poor households who often struggled to meet basic needs and had to rely on land and non-land based activities; 6) The Diaries improved accuracy of data on plots of land.

The findings help our programming in two ways. It would help inform programming on what would be needed if beneficiaries of land programs are to experience increased food security and agricultural production and therefore reduce poverty, key outcomes of interest to development practitioners. Second, it will help us to improve our evaluation approach going forward. Our past efforts at evaluation focused mainly on homestead plots and to some extent the other plots that households owned.