is mandated, reports point towards limited compliance with such rules, lack of transparency and limited enforceability of rules (Ng'ombe et al. 2014). As it would irrevocably remove a piece of land from the chief’s to the state’s control and entail the loss of the flexibility (e.g., in terms of re-assigning land if an investor’s plans turn sour), conversion of customary to state land is resisted by chiefs unless facilitated by significant payments (German _et al._ 2013). A draft land policy, first adopted by the Cabinet in 2002, that among others was expected to clarify the role of chiefs and regulate state land conversion has not yet been finalized.

As a result, while farmers with title were found to have higher levels of fixed and long-term investment and productivity (Smith 2004), many of those who could have benefited from formal documentation were unable to afford it (Larson 2014). Titled state land seems to have often been acquired by individuals with non-farm jobs and the knowledge, resources, and connections to navigate the conversion process but did not affect productivity (Sitko _et al._ 2014).<sup>9</sup> This led scholars to conclude that, instead of furthering productivity and investment, Zambia’s land titling transfers land to ‘speculators’ who are unable to make productive use of the land, potentially jeopardizing the sector’s long-term potential (Sitko and Jayne 2014).<sup>10</sup> Case studies reinforce this notion and suggest that insecure property rights to land may trigger exclusionary processes favoring rich in-migrants over poorer locals whose access to natural resources and welfare (including children’s nutritional indicators) is compromised in the process (Merten and Haller 2008). Without countrywide data on extents of land under customary tenure, coverage with formal or informal documents, perceived tenure security and ability to transfer, assessing representativeness of case studies, defining the objectives to be achieved by the new land policy or ways in which they should be tracked is difficult and adding the SDG module to the LFS provided a cost-effective first step towards closing this gap.

# **3. Data and descriptive statistics**

To illustrate how integrating the SDG land tenure module into ongoing surveys can inform the policy debate, we describe descriptive results, noting that less than half of households can bequeath land to their offspring or sell it; only 11% have title; with 43% concerned about losing land within the next 5-years, levels of perceived tenure insecurity are high; and the share of informal documents (14%) outnumbers that of formal ones and 54% of those without formal document would want to acquire title and pay more than a systematic process based on streamlined regulations and implemented efficiently would cost.

> 9 Before 2000, retired or retrenched civil servants accounted for a significant share of land acquisition whereas after 2000, speculative land acquisition by those who made a fortune outside agriculture seems to predominate (Sitko and Jayne 2014). 10 “Land titling may be implicated in process of elite capture of land at the possible expense of future small-scale farm growth and farm consolidation” (Sitko and Jayne 2014, p. 199) so that growth of the emergent farm sector is not a reflection of small-scale farmers transitioning towards higher productivity, investment (capital accumulation), commercialization, and job creation, but largely due to policies that allow disproportionate capture by a rural minority with little or no effect on agricultural growth.

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