Do farmers normalise land tenure insecurity? Evidence from a choice experiment in Uzbekistan

Land reforms can create tenure insecurity for farmers, a critical issue in developing countries with a dominant role of the state in agriculture. Our study focuses on Uzbekistan, characterised by a state-led transition from a more collective and socialist to a more individualistic and market-based approach to land allocation and management. To understand how farmers normalise tenure insecurity under land reallocation in Uzbekistan, we examine farmers' perceptions of tenure security under ongoing risks to their land tenure. We conducted a farm survey (n = 153), employing a novel approach to explore farmers' perceptions of tenure security and to elicit their preference patterns for key attributes of the land contract through a discrete choice experiment. We find that despite the institutionalisation of tenure insecurity, most farmers do not perceive it as a normal phenomenon. The choice model results show that farmers have the highest mean willingness to pay for contract security compared to other contract attributes. Our findings suggest that understanding and incorporating farmers' strong preference for secure land tenure is a crucial consideration for the design and implementation of land reform policies. Theoretically, our findings challenge the need for a dominant role of the state in agriculture.