Klaus Deininger reviews the approaches to the analysis of distributional impacts of key land policy issues. Land reforms typically have far-reaching distributional implications. Moreover, because land policy reform is often controversial politically and must usually be sustained beyond the term of governments that introduce the reform, information from the analysis can be employed to build a consensus and establish and monitor clear performance indicators so as to limit the scope for corruption in the reform process. Examples from individual countries demonstrate the scope for employing this approach to evaluate the position of various stakeholders toward reform options, identify policy interventions for the benefit of the poor, determine the most appropriate sequence of initiatives, and reduce the potential for capture of the benefits by elites.

Major areas of land reform include the improvement of the security of land tenure and efforts to facilitate broad-based access to land. The section in the chapter on securing land tenure highlights ways to enhance tenure security and the positive impact of greater tenure security on investment, conflicts over land, and land market participation.

The section on access to land covers the important principles and policies, including ways to develop land rental and land sales markets, as well as direct interventions to render land use more productive, such as reforms involving land redistribution.

For land reforms, this analysis typically depends on quantitative information that is often not available through standard household surveys. For this reason, the note addresses practical questions about sampling and about questionnaire design, which would allow household and community surveys to be useful in the analysis if land policies. The analysis will also invariably require qualitative methods to complement the quantitative data. Focus group discussions, personal interviews, and other types of qualitative methods will be essential in plumbing the views of actual and potential beneficiaries so as to formulate or confirm hypotheses on the impacts of specific interventions. Finally, the work must be conducted and the results of the analysis communicated in a transparent and credible way likely to contribute to a broader public policy discussion.