Increased global demand for land posits the need for well-designed country-level land policies to protect long-held rights, facilitate land access and address any constraints that land policy may pose for broader growth. While the implementation of land reforms can be a lengthy process, the need to swiftly identify key land policy challenges and devise responses that allow the monitoring of progress, in a way that minimizes conflicts and supports broader development goals, is clear. The Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF) makes a substantive contribution to the land sector by providing a quick and innovative tool to monitor land governance at the country level. The LGAF offers a comprehensive diagnostic tool that covers five main areas for policy intervention: Legal and institutional framework; Land use planning, management and taxation; Management of public land; Public provision of land information; and Dispute resolution and conflict management. The LGAF assesses these areas through a set of detailed indicators that are rated on a scale of pre-coded statements (from lack of good governance to good practice). While land governance can be highly technical in nature and tends to be addressed in a partial and sporadic manner, the LGAF posits a tool for a comprehensive assessment, taking into account the broad range of issues that land governance encompasses, while enabling those unfamiliar with land to grasp its full complexity. The LGAF will make it possible for policymakers to make sense of the technical levels of the land sector, benchmark governance, identify areas that require further attention and monitor progress. It is intended to assist countries in prioritizing reforms in the land sector by providing a holistic diagnostic review that can inform policy dialogue in a clear and targeted manner. In addition to presenting the LGAF tool, this book includes detailed case studies on its implementation in five selected countries: Peru, the Kyrgyz Republic, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Tanzania.

The Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF) is a diagnostic tool to assess the status of land governance at country level using a participatory process that draws systematically on existing evidence and local expertise rather than on outsiders. The analysis covers nine themes: land tenure recognition; rights to forest and common lands and rural land use regulations; urban land use, planning, and development; public land management; process for transfer of public land to private use; public provision of land information (land administration and information systems); land valuation and taxation; dispute resolution and review of institutional arrangements and policies. The assessment follows a scorecard approach and produces a matrix of policy priorities matrix. The LGAF process helps to establish a consensus on (i) gaps in existing evidence; (ii) areas for regulatory or institutional change, piloting of new approaches, and interventions to improve land governance on a broader scale (e.g. by strengthening land rights and improving their enforcement); and (iii) criteria to assess the effectiveness of these measures. This report presents the result for Ethiopia.

The impact of land tenure systems in developing countries on agricultural investment and productivity continues to be the subject of intense scrutiny. This paper looks at land policy reforms with emphasis on lessons from Africa south of the Sahara (SSA). Food security crises in developing countries in the past decades have revived the debate about whether land tenure systems constrain farmer innovation and investment in agriculture. Changes in tenure systems can potentially have major implications for agricultural transformation. This chapter summarizes the arguments about how best to provide land tenure security in SSA and reviews recent experience and evidence arising from innovative interventions, with implications for other developing regions as well. It is hoped that the experiences and topics analyzed here may also help Venezuela in the process of normalizing land tenure systems in that country.

This book provides a significant contribution to the literature on land reform in various African contexts. While the economic evidence is clear that secure property rights are a necessary condition for catalysing broad-based economic development, the governance process by which those rights are secured is less clear. This book details the historical complexity of land rights and the importance of understanding this history in the process of trying to improve tenure security. Through a combination of single country case studies, comparative case studies and regional comparisons, the book is unequivocal that good governance is paramount for improving the performance of land reform programmes. All attempts at moving towards more formal secure tenure require congruence with informal norms, beliefs and values, and a set of clear systems and processes to avoid corruption and unintended negative consequences.

Rwanda has initiated a major land tenure reform program over the last two decades to clarify land rights, underpinned by far-reaching legal and institutional reforms (2004 national land policy (NLP); 2005 organic land law (OLL)), which culminated in a nationwide program of systematic land tenure regularization (LTR) that was completed in 2012. The implementation of the land governance assessment framework (LGAF) in Rwanda is timely and will help the country to take stock in a comprehensive way, benchmark, and assess priorities as input into ongoing policy, legal, and institutional reforms. LGAF was undertaken between September 2014 and May 2015, and validated in January 2016. The framework analysis is organized into nine modules: (i) land tenure recognition; (ii) rights to forest and common lands and rural land use regulations; (iii) urban land use, planning, and development; (iv) public land management; (v) process and economic benefit of transfer of public land to private use; (vi) public provision of land information; (vii) land valuation and taxation; (viii) dispute resolution; and (ix) review of institutional arrangements and policies.