Insight, Land & Restoration
A US$2 billion restoration programme has launched for Asia and the Pacific. The evidence says the constraint on restoration is not agronomic and not even ownership of the land. It is whether the person who plants a tree is allowed to cut it down.
The Asian Development Bank and partners have launched the FIELD Initiative, aiming to mobilise at least US$2 billion by 2035 for land restoration and anti-desertification programmes across Asia and the Pacific, explicitly linking degraded landscapes with rural livelihoods, food security and water resilience.
Two things about that are worth noting before anything else. A commitment running to 2035 is the correct timescale for restoration, which produces nothing measurable for years, and it is rare in adaptation finance. And framing degraded land as inseparable from livelihoods is right, and is the framing most restoration programmes have historically avoided because it makes the work harder.
Both of those are good. What the programme will run into, quickly, is not agronomic.
A 2023 study in Communications Earth and Environment establishes something that ought to reshape how these programmes are designed. Areas with the highest restoration potential are disproportionately found in countries with weak rule of law and frequently in those with substantial areas of unrecognised land tenure.
That is not a coincidence, it is close to a definition. Land degrades where nobody has a durable enough claim to protect it, where use rights are contested, or where the person using it will not be there long enough to bear the cost of maintaining it. The places with the most degraded land to restore are, systematically, the places where the question of who owns what is least settled.
So a restoration programme is a land-rights programme whether or not it says so, and it will be staffed and evaluated as a forestry programme unless somebody decides otherwise.
The tenure literature is often summarised as "secure land rights lead to long-term investment", which is true enough to be useless as a design instruction. A more precise finding is available and it changes what a programme should actually fund.
A study of Chinese smallholders following the collective forest tenure reforms found that complete logging rights over standing timber had a significantly positive effect on tree-planting investment, while the effect of secure land tenure was insignificant. Smallholders confident of obtaining a harvest permit invested on average 52 per cent more in total and 36 per cent more in seedlings.
Read that again, because it inverts the usual policy conclusion. Owning the land did not predict planting. Being permitted to cut the tree down did.
Which makes sense the moment it is stated. A tree is only an asset to the person who planted it if they can eventually realise its value. Where harvest requires a permit that may not be granted, planting converts usable land into a liability: something you must protect, cannot use, and cannot sell. Rational people decline.
This has a direct and cheap implication. The lowest-cost intervention available to a restoration programme may not be seedlings, nurseries or extension. It may be a functioning, predictable harvest-permit system, which costs a fraction of the planting budget and determines whether the planting survives.
There is a second finding that turns the problem around, and any programme distributing seedlings at scale should understand it before it starts.
Tree planting has been documented as a means of establishing informal claims to land in Nepal, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Bolivia and the Philippines. Smallholders plant trees to mark and assert rights, and later use or commercialise them.
The corollary appears in West African evidence, where an outsider commonly reads the planting of trees as an assertion of permanent right over the land, and landowners therefore resist tenants doing it.
So a tree is a legal instrument as much as a biological one. A restoration programme handing out seedlings is handing out claims, in places where claims are contested. That will produce three things: enthusiastic adoption by those seeking to establish a claim, active obstruction by those whose claim it threatens, and conflict between them that the programme did not budget for and will experience as low survival rates.
This is the part that a livelihoods framing obliges a programme to face.
Degraded land is rarely unused land. It is typically used lightly, seasonally and by many people: pastoralists moving stock, women collecting fuel and fodder, seasonal water access, gleaning after harvest. Who in a household holds the right and who does the work are also different questions, as we set out in Resilience Is Downstream of the Buyer. None of this appears on a land-use map and most of it produces no cash transaction, which is exactly why it is invisible to a feasibility study.
Restoring that land into a managed system converts a diffuse resource used by many into a defined resource used by fewer. The same study notes that upholding individual user rights can undermine those who claim ancestral rights, such as pastoralists and less advantaged groups who rely disproportionately on access to the commons, and that plantations on individually used land can conflict with communal rights and generate social costs.
The people who lose access are, predictably, the ones with the weakest claim to begin with. Hectares restored will be reported. Access lost will not be, unless somebody measures it deliberately, and the same failure of instrument we described in The Benefits Nobody Was Looking For applies with the sign reversed.
The tenure story is not universal and a piece arguing it should say so.
Place and Hazell's work in Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda concluded that land rights were not determinants of agricultural investment, and later work finds farmers without formal tenure investing in soil fertility, tree planting and conservation anyway. The Chinese finding that formal land-tenure security was insignificant while harvest rights mattered points the same way from the other direction.
What that body of evidence supports is not "secure title first". It is that the operative variable is perceived security over a specific right, that which right matters varies by system, and that it cannot be read off a national tenure classification. It has to be established locally, by asking, before the planting plan is drawn.
Establish the rights position before the planting plan.
Who may plant, who may harvest, who may exclude, and who currently uses this land in ways no map records. That is a field enquiry, not a desk review, and it costs a small fraction of what it protects.
Fund harvest rights and permits, not only seedlings.
The permit system is plausibly the highest-return line item available and it appears in no restoration budget.
Measure access lost, not only hectares restored.
Baseline the seasonal and informal users specifically, because they will not appear in a household survey of landholders. If nobody counts them at baseline, their displacement is undetectable afterwards.
Measure to 2035, not to disbursement.
Restoration reverses after programmes end, and a ten-year funding commitment is only useful if the measurement runs to the same horizon. This is the rare programme whose own timescale makes proper longitudinal work possible.
Stated plainly: this is a land-rights programme with trees in it. Whether it is designed as one will determine most of the outcome, and that decision is being made now.
The Lab works on this in regenerative agriculture and climate and ecosystems, through field research that starts with who uses a place rather than with what grows on it, and our work in Lombok sits on exactly this question.
If you are designing or funding restoration at landscape scale and want the rights position established before the planting plan, tell us what you need to know.
This is an independent insight piece by Transitions Lab. For the Lab's applied work, see Regenerative Agriculture & Land Systems and Climate Resilience & Ecosystems. See also Europe Has Enough Demonstrations on why capital and tenure decide who adopts a practice at scale, and Whose Field Becomes a Wetland on the same tenure problem inside Europe's Nature Restoration Regulation. To discuss a study, see Contact.