ABSTRACT
Our preferred definition of land reform is ‘legislation intended and likely to directly redistribute ownership of, claims on, or rights to current farmland, and thus to benefit the poor by raising their absolute and relative status, power, and/or income, compared with likely situations without the legislation’. However, one and the same law could well be a genuine land reform in some national circumstances, but not in others. We identify five main institutional environments of farms in developing countries. These help to determine whether a particular law is likely to meet our preferred definition of land reform.
