The Impact of Customary Land Certification on Land Tenure and Resource Governance: Results of the Tenure and Global Climate Change RCT in Zambia

This paper draws on panel data collected from 2413 households and 6234 fields in Zambia to investigate whether stronger property rights related to land might influence smallholder farmer likelihood to adopt agroforestry. The data was collected in the context of a randomized control trial of the Tenure and Global Climate Change (TGCC) program in Zambia. TGCC was developed by USAID to explore the relationship between secure resource tenure and agroforestry extension. The evaluation uses a four-arm randomized design to determine the impact of agroforestry extension and to investigate whether stronger tenure security leads to marginal increases in farmer investment in sustainable agroforestry beyond improvements gained through agroforestry extension alone. Through the first cross-cutting RCT of a customary certification and agroforestry program, this study sheds light on the relationship between perceived land tenure security and likelihood of agroforestry adoption in a customary land context in sub-Saharan Africa.