Donor-Assisted Land-use Planning in the Philippines: Insights from a Multi-Level Survey

Abstract

Land requires fair and transparent management to allow for equal participation and for its sustainable use among rivaling stakeholders. Land use planning is the mechanism to allow for this kind of resource management and the reconciliation of diverging interests. It is thus not surprising that the governance of land resources has become a prominent topic among donors and development practitioners in the last decade. It is theorized that good administration and management of land is crucial to poverty reduction, conflict transformation, disaster risk management, improvement in the quality of local governance and ultimately sustainable economic growth. The report at hand presents first results derived from a quantitative impact evaluation of an intervention for enhanced land use planning in the Philippines. The SIMPLE (Sustainable Integrated Management and Planning for Local Government Ecosystems) approach embedded in the Philippine-German cooperation’s “Environment and Rural Development (EnRD)” program was implemented between 2006 and 2015, managed by the Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). The report draws upon quantitative cross-sectional data collected in 2012 on household, village and municipal level. It provides first insights into program outcomes and impacts. A follow-up impact evaluation of the intervention, based on a rigorous before-after design, will be published in 2017.