Does securing the commons conserve resources and improve well-being?

Abstract

Policies to secure property rights extend over hundreds of millions of hectares of land claimed as common property. Well-being and resource outcomes from securing the commons are theoretically shown to vary, conditional on local institutional quality and the extent of resource dependence among policy recipients. A differences-in-differences framework is applied to micro-scale panel data to evaluate the impacts of securing forest commons in Malawi. We find short-term negative effects on food security and non-food expenditures but no impact on forest loss rates. Baseline institutional capacity and households' labour portfolios are empirically shown to condition outcomes, with implications for policy targeting.