Resource information
The Government of Zambia is embarking on an ambitious program of legal and administrative reforms in land policy. Although the need to liberalize the land market is universally shared, the ideas on how to accomplish this transformation are not. Two decades of underinvestment in field research have resulted in the present situation of micro-level data on land tenure and farm-level production, consumption, and resource management inadequate to guide policy decisions. This report was prepared to help assess the state of knowledge and identify important land policy issues as a foundation for recommending future research directions and to facilitate informed policymaking. Some will feel that the current state of research is adequate and that the report does not go far enough with policy advice. Others will disagree with the level and nature of policy recommendations that are given. Should this report have erred in either direction, it is due to the very difficult task of finding the appropriate balance, rather than to any willful decision by the research team.
The research was carried out between September 1993 and March 1994 with funding from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Lusaka. Further comments and suggestions were incorporated between March and September 1994. An action plan for land tenure and administrative reforms based on these research findings was developed in close collaboration with the Ministry of Lands (MOL) and is contained in a follow-up document entitled "Land Reform and Institutional Transformation in Zambia: Recommendations for Policy Change" (July 1994). That action plan has now been incorporated into a master planning document for the MOL, and its recommendations are under review by USAID/Zambia for possible financial support.
As will be seen, many Zambian authors have made important technical contributions through their respective chapters and more generally to the report. The Land Tenure Center (LTC) is grateful for their support and that of the staff of the MOL who so generously gave their time in responding to the many questions and calls for data. Important comments on the report were also received from the land committee (S.P. Mulenga, T. Bull, L. Handahu, S.M.J. Zaloumis, and T.H. Phiri), David Straley of USAID, the Overseas Development Agency, G.H. Sichalwe of the Department of Resettlement, and various senior officers in the Central Statistics Office. The authors would also like to gratefully acknowledge those people who willingly gave interviews or assisted with the analysis. Special thanks are due David Musona, who managed in-country travel, banking, and other logistics, and Jane Dennis and Steven Smith, who spent considerable time on editing and assembly. There are no doubt many knowledgeable individuals in Zambia who should have been contacted for contributions but were not. If research deficiencies have resulted, we can only hope that such an oversight can be corrected in future research endeavors.
