Legal and institutional reform often requires a distinct evaluation methodology and sampling approach from the evaluation of clarification and recognition of land rights and boundaries. The beneficiary streams stemming from each differ yet their interactions with one another are key to understanding and capturing results. Beneficiaries of these two types of activities can be distinct as often stakeholders in more planned parts of the city with formal land rights and incomes can more quickly benefit from legal and institutional changes, that allow for improved land markets and improved access to finance. Those who sporadically demand and access land rights from institutions are also more likely to be those who carry out secondary land transactions. In contrast, those who are for the first-time receiving land rights are not always bankable or interested in transferring their land.
When beneficiaries of these activities overlap, the interplay of beneficiary streams is key to consider. Clarification and recognition of land rights occur only in certain locations and allow for control groups in nearby areas who will not receive support. Legal and institutional reforms in comparison are often at the national or regional administrative level. As such, control groups in the clarification and recognition of land rights may have benefitted from the policy and institutional work. These reforms allow people to sporadically demand rights leading to increased land investment and secondary land transactions like what one would see with direct provision of a title by the project. This means the household surveys of control and treatment groups for the recognition of land rights are only measuring the additional benefits of the land rights recognition work. In some evaluations this has led to a loss of power for the evaluation to detect results as people in the control areas gain land rights as well.
Like other early MCC land evaluations, the original Land Administration Reform Activity (LARP) impact evaluation design planned to measure the effects from both the land leasing activities and the legal, policy and institutional reform activities using the same household sample of treatment and control populations whereby the treatment population was considered those who received a lease by LARP. However, the legal and institutional reforms were at a national level and capital city, respectively and hence affected both treatment and control populations in a similar manner. The treatment group received intensive site-specific public outreach around recognizing women’s land rights and related systematic land regularization resulting in leases, while the comparison group did not receive the systematic land regularization but was a beneficiary of the legal and institutional reforms. In Lesotho’s case, the initial beneficiaries from the legal and institutional reforms and those that were expected to demand formal land services and mortgages, were largely those who registered sporadically and not those who received systematic leases. This was not unexpected as the banks had noted that residents in informal settlements were not expected to access formal bank services in the initial 10 years as the households were not “bankable” due to issues such as insufficient or irregular income and distrust of the formal banking sector.
In 2013, the Lesotho LARP evaluation design was revised during the Compact to allow for a more effective evaluation of both the legal and policy reforms and the clarification and recognition of land rights; however, administrative, and geospatial data, in addition to the household surveys, were key in determining the effects of each. Similar evaluation redesigns to capture PIR effects occurred for Mongolia and Mozambique as well.