What Is Tenure Security? Conceptual Implications for Empirical Analysis

Security of property rights, or tenure, is central to the economics of development and is recognized as important for the adoption and implementation of sustainable forest management. Despite the potential importance of tenure security, this paper shows that there is a great deal of variation in how security is defined and measured, which may be responsible for difficulties that empirical studies have had in linking tenure security with economic behavior. The objective of this paper is to clarify concepts of tenure security that will hopefully allow for improvements in empirical studies.