Measuring Land Tenure at the Individual Level : Lessons from Methodological Research in Armenia

Evidence indicates that land rights are strongly associated with several indicators ofwell-being and development outcomes, including access to credit, resilience to shocks, productivity, and bargainingpower. Accurately capturing gender differences in land rights is thus critical for development policy, promptingthe need to shift from household-level land rights data collection to collecting more and better individual-leveldata on land rights. The importance of individual land rights has been recognized in the Sustainable DevelopmentGoals (SDG) agenda, with the inclusion of two key indicators on land rights—SDG indicators 1.4.2 and 5.a.1. Althoughclear guidance exists for computing and monitoring these, the choice of data collection methods may influence theresulting indicators and the understanding of the underlying land rights. Specifically, research has shown that the useof proxy respondents in the collection of data on assets, including land, results in a biased understanding of men’sand women’s holdings vis-à-vis self-reporting. This paper uses data from a methodological experiment in Armenia toassess the implications of survey design—namely, respondent strategy and the level of disaggregation of land data—on themeasurement of individual land rights and SDG indicator monitoring. The findings suggest that in the context ofArmenia, the measurement of SDG 5.a.1 and 1.4.2 (a) is robust to respondent approach and data disaggregation level,driven largely by the high rates of documentation. Meanwhile, land rights that are less objective, such as theright to bequeath and perception of tenure security, are sensitive to these survey design choices.