EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Trust, tenure security and investment in high-value forests

Amanuel Hadera, Tewodros Tadesse, Woldegebrial Zeweld (), Girmay Tesfay and Bereket Gebremedhin

Forest Policy and Economics, 2024, vol. 166, issue C

Abstract: In customary tenure systems, the literature documents the limitations of land formalization in ensuring tenure security and fostering investment. One hypothesis put forward for this is that formalized tenure arrangements offer little legal protection; and as a result, farmers look for their socio-political connections to ensure tenure security and make investment decisions. By distinguishing trust in institutions from trust in social networks, this study examines their relationship with tenure security and investment in high-value trees. Using data from Liberian farmers who grow rubber, cocoa and coffee, we use two-stage IV regression to explore the divergent relationship of the trust indicators with tenure security. Moreover, using tenure security as an endogenous switching variable, we explore its correlation with investment. We find both trust indicators are positively related with tenure security while alternative specifications appear to show the more important role of trust on institutions for enhancing tenure security. We also find both trust indicators spur investment, and note of their divergent influence on investment in different trees. These results reflect a growing recognition of the need to decouple trust on institutions from social trust to give policy development a useful direction on the divergent influence of tenure institutions, such as social and institutional trust.

Keywords: Trust; Tenure security; Investment; Social networks; Institutions; High-value trees (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389934124001229
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:forpol:v:166:y:2024:i:c:s1389934124001229

DOI: 10.1016/j.forpol.2024.103268

Access Statistics for this article

Forest Policy and Economics is currently edited by M. Krott

More articles in Forest Policy and Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:eee:forpol:v:166:y:2024:i:c:s1389934124001229