1. Evidence to Inform Liberia’s Land Policy:
Land Governance in an Interconnected World
Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty
Washington D.C., March 19-23, 2018
Evidence to Inform Liberia’s Land Policy:
Evaluation Findings from Namati’s Community Land Protection Program (CLPP)
Authors: Kate Marple-Cantrell, Heather Huntington, Ph.D. , and Alexandra Hartman, Ph.D.
Poster Design: Aidan Schneider
THE PROGRAM
THE EVALUATION
Communities in the CLPP Evaluation
Developed by Namati and implemented by the Sustainable Development Institute
Evaluation supported by USAID and IDRC and implemented by the Cloudburst Group
Focused on:
Community legal empowerment
Boundary harmonization and conflict resolution
Includes mapping land
Fostering good governance
Developing rules for community land and natural resource management
Electing a diverse governing body
Questions: Whether and How the CLPP-
Strengthens rural land tenure security
Improves perceptions of governance and local leaders’ accountability
Documents community land boundaries
Codifies rules to protect community land and natural resource claims
Protects land rights of women and marginalized groups
Leads to conservation and sustainable natural resource use
Mixed Methods
Compares control and treatment villages after the intervention, in 2017 (N=818)
Compares control and treatment over time (2014 to 2017)
(difference-in-difference, N=683)
Data collected in Lofa, Maryland and River Gee counties
Includes:
Household survey
Leader survey
Key informant interview
Town chief, women, youth and minority leaders
Focus group discussions
Women, youth, hunters, elders and members of minority groups
FINDINGS
Community Land Development and Natural Resource Condition
Place higher value on communal lands
Less participation in communal development
Men plant less rice and fewer trees on community farmland
No effect on perceptions of forest resource conditions
Land Governance
Significant increase in trust, satisfaction, perceived accountability, capacity and transparency of leaders
Households report:
Fair decision-making about land use and access
Greater ability to protect forests
More ethical behavior
More community consultation
An enumerator and a household head in Lofa county, Liberia.
“To me, the resources are finishing [being used up]… We used to have forest from here all the way, but they are cutting it down now… We get people from other land coming onto this land, taking some of this land because they want to make farms.”
—Focus group discussion with Elders, Lofa
Tenure Security
Absence of strong changes in perceptions of tenure security
Possibly due to program incompletion; data collected mid-implementation
Community Empowerment
CLPP increases knowledge of community land boundaries (Qualitative)
Upward trend over time in all households’ (treatment and control) legal knowledge
High overall support for land reform
With and without prompt that it will involve giving women equal rights to land
The Women’s Leader of a study community listens as the survey team introduces themselves in Lofa county, Liberia.
Qualitative researchers (center and right) conduct a focus group discussion with youth in Lofa county, Liberia
DISCUSSION
Large, positive CLPP effect on how households perceive their leaders
Land governance programs are most successful with long-term, on-going support, training and capacity building
Boundary harmonization components could be scaled-up to all of Liberia
Widespread satisfaction with: boundary negotiations; identifying boundary landmarks; and planting boundary trees
Need for longer term data collection to fully understand how trends develop
Inconclusive indicators include perceived threat of encroachment, prevalence of land conflicts and women’s empowerment
Long-term outcomes such as improvements in natural resource condition and livelihoods indicators
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