ABSTRACT
Beginning in the early 2000s, many African countries introduced programs aimed at providing smallholder farmers with low-cost certificates for land held under customary tenure. An underlying assumption of such programs is that land held under customary tenure without state-sanctioned documentation is insecure. In Southern Africa, agricultural reform has focused on redistribution of land, expropriated by white colonists, to African smallholders who were left landless or with access only to small holdings on marginalized land in “communal” areas. We apply realist synthesis methodology to explore how the socio-political and economic contexts in Benin, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe, influenced how intended beneficiaries responded to the interventions, and how contexts and beneficiary responses shaped outcomes. The synthesis elucidates where, how, and for whom interventions increase tenure security, incentivize agricultural investments, enhance agricultural productivity, and support social inclusion with respect to land rights and access. We find that inadequate attention is paid by reform planners to Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) rural social systems, obscuring the benefits of customary tenure while overlooking the scope for reforms to reduce the gaps in social status among customary community members.
