Participatory land allocation is feasible and desirable but is not necessarily sufficient to avoid post-allocation complaints without attention to the organizational capacity of producer organizations to distribute allocated land in alignment with expected formulas. The Land Tenure Security Activity implemented a detailed multi-year strategy to develop and apply land allocation principles and criteria with full and transparent participation of all categories of stakeholders. The conflict-free post-allocation outcome attests to the success of this approach, which included allocation of land to significant numbers of previously landless actors. However, the adopted approach was to allocate land to producer groups legally chartered as Economic Interest Groups (GIE), based on the chartered number of members. The membership of some of the newly established GIEs, including women’s GIEs, grew after the chartering and allocation of land to the GIE. As a result, in some cases a fixed amount of GIE land had to be divided among a larger number of members than anticipated, which resulted in smaller plots for recipients, including for women and landless residents. The project had not anticipated the need to address internal organization of the farmer associations that distributed land and its relationship to expectations around parcel size.
Lesson Learned