Identifying the channels through which a particular land administration project operates is also important to derive hypotheses related to the outcomes that can be expected to change (the second link). And almost equally important, it should also allow deriving hypotheses about which outcomes are unlikely to be affected. For instance, while higher security might well increase investments, its impact on access to credit is ambivalent (see above). And impacts on credit are likely to be higher when a particular land administration intervention also affects transferability. Failure to make this type of distinction, which is common in the literature, makes it hard to draw more generalizable lessons from any particular evaluation. Overall then, to maximize lessons from an evaluation it helps to focus on measuring the actual mechanisms leading to the changes in outcomes, in addition to quantifying the changes in outcomes themselves. When designing impact evaluations, project leaders should consider explicitly how the evaluation will enable us to answer each of the questions above regarding all three parts of the chain. Answering the `how’ questions may require complementing the quantitative impact evaluation design and related data collection with more qualitative data. An additional approach that may also be useful is to exploit heterogeneity and complementarities with other interventions, which we will discuss later in this section.
2.2 Unpacking property rights: what are we evaluating? Let us now consider theoretically the first step of the chain – that is, how our interventions of interest may change effective land rights. There are several channels through which interventions can change property rights. Property rights can be imperfect or incomplete in many different ways. Indeed, land rights are made up of a bundle of different rights, including the right to use land, the right to derive income from it, and the right to sell, and each of those rights can be imperfect. In order to understand how land administration interventions may have an impact, it is useful to distinguish how they might affect this bundle of land rights along three different dimensions: i) increased expected security; ii) individualization of land rights; and iii) facilitation of transfer. A land administration intervention can lead to: 1. Increased expected security This includes any part of an intervention that makes the land rights less likely to be expropriated or contested, or that reduces the perceived likelihood of such events. Here we use expropriation to mean any transfer without the owner’s consent, with two typical forms 6