Land Tenure Reform in Asia and Africa ─ Assessing Impacts on Poverty and Natural Resource Management

By applying a unified framework, this book examines the impact of land tenure reforms on poverty reduction and natural resource management in countries in Africa and Asia with highly diverse historical contexts. These land tenure reforms include Land-to-the-tiller policies, Market assisted land redistribution reforms, Tenure security enhancing low-cost reforms, Forest tenure reforms and the Needed future reforms related to the recent sharp increase in demand for agricultural land in Africa. The Land-to-the-tiller reforms did not produce the intended impacts but rather enhanced tenure insecurity, undermined the efficiency of land rental markets and access to land for land-poor households. Market-assisted land redistribution reforms face many design and political challenges and have in many cases not been scaled up in a good way. Low-cost tenure security enhancing reforms have recently been scaled up in a number of countries with positive initial impacts. Individual ownership of forestland is preferred in some contexts while communal tenure manages forest resources effectively in other contexts.

Stein T. Holden is Professor at the School of Economics and Business and Centre for Land Tenure Studies (CLTS), Norwegian University of Life Sciences, As, Norway.

Keijiro Otsuka is Professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo, Japan.

Klaus Deininger is a Lead Economist in the Development Economics Research Group in the World Bank, Washington DC, USA.