Practice Brief – Insights from Land Evaluations

This Practice Brief from the Land Facility Decision Support Unit shares insights, best practices, and emerging trends from research into academic literature on land and evaluations of land programmes, covering the sector’s experience over the past decade.

The research aims to help development partners, evaluators, and programme designers and implementers strengthen their work on land governance reform evaluations and, potentially, to shape the field by pioneering new approaches to analysing and evaluating land governance reform processes.

The study examined evaluation approaches across various land programmes and donors to draw out relevant lessons for evaluating interventions that support land governance reform. It is based on an extensive review of over 230 research papers and evaluations and includes case studies from Tanzania, Mongolia, and Uganda. Through their analysis, the team identified gaps to be addressed and gained insights into what works in evaluations of land programmes.

High-level findings include:

• • Both the academic literature and the programme evaluation literature are extensive and span multiple strands of research and practice.
  • An impressive evaluation literature incorporates substantive evaluations which have made significant contributions to providing evidence on the link between land titling, tenure security and social and economic outcomes at the community and household levels.
  • While the predominantly quantitative impact evaluation approach is appropriate for evaluating land titling-focused programmes, it has meant less emphasis on analysing and contextualising land governance systems.

Read the practice brief here or use the download button on the right.

Click here to read the full report.