COMMUNITY LAND TITLING AND SOCIAL ENFRANCHISEMENT

Evidence from a field experiment in Uganda, Liberia and Mozambique

Tai Young-Taft, Gulf University for Science and TechnologyRachael Knight, NAMATI

Project Partners

• Liberia: The Sustainable Development Institute • Uganda: The Land and Equity Movement in Uganda• Mozambique: Centro Terra Viva• Namati: Innovations in Legal Empowerment

Context and Project Design

• Large scale-land concessions, rising land scarcity, competition for land urgent need to document, register and protect communities’ customary land claims, particularly the common areas. Necessary to both:

• Protect community lands from investors’ and elites’ bad faith appropriation

• Ensure intra-community mechanisms to safeguard the land rights of vulnerable groups.

• Some countries have legislation that allows the documentation of communities lands and natural resources as a whole (the “tenurial shell”) but these laws have generally not been well or widely implemented.

• To investigate how to best support communities to successfully follow their nations’ community land documentation processes: from 2009-2011 we ran a RCT in 60 communities throughout Mozambique, Liberia and Uganda.• 20 communities in each nation, split into 4 treatment groups - control, monthly

education, paralegal supports, full legal services• Baseline and Post-Service study of 2,225 villagers, 180+ focus group discussions• Community observation, tracking of all obstacles, debates, decisions.

General steps of a community land documentation processes

1. Outreach and education; creation/election of a coordinating committee; election of paralegals

2. Map-making, boundary harmonization, land conflict resolution and boundary demarcation/documentation

3. Cataloguing, discussing and adopting rules for community land administration (by-laws/community constitution-drafting)

4. Establishing a land and natural resources management plan (and/or land use and zoning plan)

5. Following necessary administrative procedures and electing a permanent governing body.

Results: Introduction

Two central questions:

1. How to best ensure that communities’ customary land claims are successfully documented and protected?

2. How to best facilitate the protection and enforcement of women’s and other vulnerable groups’ land rights during community land documentation efforts?

• The household survey had roughly 250 responses rich material for analysis.• We give a brief sample of some of our simplest findings and make a few final

remarks concerning:• experimental design and fields issues with sampling• possible leakage of treatment effects into the control group.

• We consider effects of treatment on:• community progress towards land titling and registration• community attendance and participation in meetings• provisions in community by-laws protecting vulnerable groups.

Results: Titling Progress

• Does level of legal aid provided effect stage attained in the land titling and registration process?• No exact order in completion of steps• All steps must be completed to obtain a title/certificate• So we created an index that gives equal weight to each step.• Standard bivariate hypotheses tests find very high statistical significance for

treatment group outcomes relative to the control group

• As of March 2011, the average community:• in the control group completed 19% of the steps,

• in the education only group completed 50% of the steps,

• in the paralegal group completed 58% of the steps, and

• in the full legal services group completed 34% of the steps.

Analysis of completion rates by treatment group

• Leaving communities with the responsibility to complete project activities on their own appeared to motivate them to claim greater “ownership” over the process than when the work was done for the community by a legal and technical team.

• Communities receiving “full legal support” tended to adopt a passive, less community-driven attitude towards the process, as “the lawyer is going to run after our papers.” 

• Various obstacles impede communities’ progress: Conflict between leaders, elite interference/sabotage, weak community cohesion, intractable boundary conflicts, etc.

Outside legal and technical professionals tended to exacerbate intra-community obstacles that they did not fully understand.

Results: Meeting Attendance

• Change in individual survey respondents’ attendance of meetings over the first year of the project, relative to the year before the project started:

All treatment classes had significantly higher changes than the control group, both across countries and on the country level.

Results: Meeting Participation

• Change in percentage of people who self-reported that they “spoke up” during meetings over the first year of the project relative to the year before the project started:

Significantly higher changes for all treatment groups than the control group, both across countries and on the country level.

Results: Women’s Meeting Attendance

• If we consider changes in share of women’s responses to the question• Have you attended a community meeting in the past year?

one year into the project relative to the onset of the project:• We find only the paralegal group treatment resulted in statistically

significant effects when positive response is counted for• “Yes, often,” or • “Yes, several times,”

• and negative• “Yes, once or twice,” or • “No”

• The paralegal group had on average a 16% greater change over successive years than the control group.

Results: Provisions Benefiting Vulnerable Groups

• Number of provisions in communities’ bylaws and natural resources management plans strengthening women and other vulnerable groups’ rights;

• The education treatment had on average 4 more provisions,• The paralegal treatment had on average 5.5 more provisions, and• The full service treatment had on average 2.8 provisions

• than the control group.• These results are statistically significant.

By-laws Drafting Process = Greater Protections for Women’s Rights

CENTRAL FINDINGS

1. Changed community members’ perceptions that land is “men’s business:” women showed by example how their involvement in land and natural resource management decisions is crucial.

2. Provided an opportunity for women to actively challenge discriminatory customary norms and argue for the inclusion of protections for their land and inheritance rights.

 NOTE: Most communities’ 1st draft rules included provisions that directly contravened their nation’s constitutional protections for women’s land and inheritance rights.

A process of cataloguing, discussing and amending local norms is key to the adoption of intra-community mechanisms to protect women’s rights.

The data indicate that, if well facilitated, community land documentation efforts that include conflict resolution and intra-community governance work have the potential to:

• Resolve long-standing land disputes;

• Improve local governance; hold leaders accountable;

• Encourage transparency and equality in rule enforcement;

• Stimulate communities to sustainably manage their natural resources;

• Improve local land use planning;

• Align community norms and practices with national law;

• Strengthen the rights of women and other vulnerable groups;

• Preserve community and cultural practices and values; and

• Foster community empowerment by strengthening community cohesion/unity and promoting local democracy.

• For full data analysis see: www.namati.org/work/community-land-protection-program/publications/

Findings overview

Final Remarks: Design and Challenges (1)

• A number of significant challenges occurred in the sampling and orchestration of the experiment; these are discussed in detail in the project final report.

• Aspects of these challenges are being dealt with using:• Simultaneously nested and crossed hierarchical effects models • Complex survey models

• But (as usual in experimental settings where both are called for) neither meets all of the challenges.

Final Remarks: Design and Challenges (2)

To attempt to resolve this, we’re working on:• Contributing to theoretical discussions about unifying these modeling

strategies, to allow something like complex survey design within levels of hierarchical models.

• Testing parameter robustness and prediction of models as a way to compare competing models within these different frameworks.

• Considering the effects of known and possible contamination of treatments into control communities using observation and binary data of community borders, and considering extending this to proximity data. (Treatment Spillover)

On-going research: Namati’s community land protection work is currently being scaled up, and a 7-year longitudinal RCT is being carried out in Liberia.