The Campbell Collaboration (C2) was founded on the principle that systematic reviews on the effects of interventions will inform and help improve policy and services. C2 offers editorial and methodological support to review authors throughout the process of producing a systematic review. A number of C2's editors, librarians, methodologists and external peerreviewers contribute. The Campbell Collaboration

This Campbell systematic review examines the effect of interventions to strengthen land property rights on outcomes such as investment, agricultural productivity and farmer incomes in rural areas in low and middle‐income countries. The review summarises evidence from 20 quantitative studies (quasi‐experimental studies with statistical adjustment for bias) and nine qualitative studies. Land property rights improve productivity, consumption expenditure and income. However, caution is needed in interpreting this finding as there are few high‐quality studies available. The studies suggest that land property rights interventions contribute to welfare through improved perceived security and resulting long‐term investment. No studies showed that land property rights interventions improve access to credit. Executive Summary BACKGROUNDSecure and predictable access to land as a productive resource is key to the livelihoods of millions of farmers around the world. Secure land tenure enables farmers to invest in long‐term improvements to their farms and soils in the expectation that they will reap the benefits of those investments without fear that their land be confiscated arbitrarily. Formal and informal land rights are therefore seen as key to improving the conditions of the poor in developing countries in terms of economic growth, agricultural production, food security, natural resource management, gender‐related inequalities, conflict management and local governance processes more generally.Existing evidence on the effects of land property rights interventions is mixed and to a considerable degree dependent upon the initial land rights conditions. In many cases where existing rights are already secure through stable informal and customary systems, the formalization of rights through land titling, one form of strengthening rights, may have little impact. In other cases, mechanisms for formalizing property rights where no formal institutions had previously existed are argued to have increased productivity and slowed forest loss.Much of the literature underscores the complexity of attribution and the importance of context to understanding relationships between security, registration and productivity, and to understanding gender dimensions. They also suggest tenure security alone is not a ‘silver bullet’ leading directly to higher farmer incomes, or that it is solely attributed to tenure reforms– that is, context matters.No known systematic review or meta‐analysis on the relationships between land property rights and productivity or welfare has been undertaken to date, and concerns have been highlighted by others over inconsistent effects and design limitations in some studies of tenure reform. This has therefore provided strong motivation for a systematic review that serves as an independent review of the quality and reliability of findings offered in the available literature. In particular, this review sought to examine the specific impacts of two types of land rights interventions: Conversion of communal or non‐demarcate...

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