Land Tenure Reforms, Poverty and Natural Resource Management: Conceptual Framework

Land reforms have played a central role in the political economy of many countries in the world and have been subject to massive disagreements between different political interest groups and ideologies. The 20th century included many of the largest social land reform experiments in history, as in the erstwhile Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam and Ethiopia. Many of these reforms have since been partly reversed. In other countries with a colonial history, there have been tensions between the property rights established during the colonial period and traditional (customary) land rights; the ways to adapt these to changing conditions have become critical issues. Some countries have had very skewed land distributions rooted in ethnic, colonial and other historical circumstances, and this skew has created demands for land redistribution, both to reduce discrimination and poverty, and to stimulate economic development.