Overlapping Land Rights and Deforestation in Uganda : 20 Years of Evidence

The majority of the world's land is held in customary tenure systems, often with overlapping claims. Designing effective policy to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation requires understanding land management choices within these systems. Using a nation-wide random sample of over 300,000 hectares of forested land in 2000, we examine deforestation trends in Uganda across customary, private, and a system of overlapping rights known as mailo from 2001-2019. Graphical analysis reveals that mailo land has always had higher deforestation rates which increased relative to other tenure types beginning in 2010. Statistical analysis controlling for spatial and time effects shows that prior to 2010, trends across tenure types were similar. After 2010, deforestation increased significantly on land with overlapping rights and then began to decrease in these areas after 2017 relative to rates on customary or fully privatized land. We hypothesize that the uptick in deforestation resulted from increased uncertainty generated by 2010 amendments to laws that changed owner/tenant relations on land with overlapping rights. The decrease in deforestation rates was consistent with greater tenure security from an acceleration in the uptake of permanent certificates of occupancy. These findings demonstrate that customary rights can yield conservation outcomes similar to privatized land, that such outcomes under systems of overlapping rights can be destabilized by well-intentioned reform, and that securing tenant rights can reduce deforestation