This Research Agenda positions land and resource governance (LRG) within USAID’s goal of promoting the journey to self-reliance and provides the foundation for USAID and others to undertake a carefully considered, systematic approach to reducing key knowledge gaps in the LRG sector. This is the first attempt in almost two decades to synthesize USAID's experience with LRG programs and the state of theevidence into a single document, which will guide USAID’s learning priorities on LRG in the coming  years. In revisiting these issues, this Research Agenda relies upon others’ efforts to synthesize, systematize, and render accessible the enormous amount of accumulated evidence on the relationship between LRG and key USAID development objectives.

For more than 50 years USAID has been a significant donor in the LRG sector. The Agency’s LRG programs historically focused on the development nexus with agricultural outcomes, although these programs now cover a wide-range of sectors. Over the years, the Agency has also committed resources to learning and adaptive programming, most notably with establishment of the Land Tenure Center at the University of Wisconsin. For the first three decades of USAID’s existence, the Center provided the Agency with extensive programmatic and technical expertise. Much of what we understand today about LRG programs is a result of USAID-funded research by the Center. Unfortunately, due to multiple factors, including an 86 percent decline in evaluations across the Agency, as of 2003 USAID produced only one counterfactual study on the development impact of its significant LRG programs.

In the first decade of this millennium, LRG research and evaluations experienced a revival. Over the last 15 years, USAID produced a large and diverse volume of research and evaluations on LRG, with more than 150 research products, including eight impact evaluations and eight performance evaluations. USAID has thus been instrumental in improving the evidence base and advancing evidence-based programming.