The Land Governance Assessment Framework: Identifying and Monitoring Good Practice in the Land Sector

Increased global demand for land underscores the need for well-designed, country-level land policies to protect long-held rights, facilitate land access, and address constraints to growth. However, reforms are often technically complex, politically sensitive, and time consuming. It is thus critical to identify priority issues in a participatory way, have a clear understanding of how they fit into the broader policy context, and be able to monitor improvements over time. The Land Governance Assessment Framework: Identifying and Monitoring Good Practice in the Land Sector presents a framework (the LGAF) to assess land governance at the country level, based on existing evidence. In doing so, the LGAF points toward areas where further study is needed, identifies options for regulatory or institutional change, and helps planning for the conduct and evaluation of pilot programs. The LGAF provides policy makers with a quick overview of the quality of land governance in five key areas: • rights recognition and enforcement • land use planning, land management, and taxation • management of public land • public provision of land information • dispute resolution and conflict management. While its design builds on extensive experience with land sector reform, the LGAF differs from other assessment tools because it is based on the involvement of stakeholders and experts at the local level in an inclusive process that can subsequently be built upon to monitor progress over time. The implementation and use of the LGAF in a growing number of countries also provide ways to identify good practice and share experience for policy reform, thus helping countries to move toward operationalizing international initiatives to improve land governance at the local level. This book describes the structure and rollout of the LGAF tool and includes detailed case studies based on its implementation in five selected countries: Ethiopia, Indonesia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Peru, and Tanzania. Implementation manual and country reports are available online. The book will be of interest to land specialists and practitioners, policy makers, managers and experts from development institutions, and international and nongovernmental organizations, as well as academics.