Building a Path to Land Consolidation in Azerbaijan 

Guest blog by Gunay Novruzova, IPP ’26

One of the findings I highlighted in my notebook during the second week of the Implementing Public Policy program concerned how public-policy success is measured. It was mentioned that success can be assessed at two levels: whether an intervention delivers its planned outputs and whether those outputs produce lasting development outcomes. A 2018 study¹ examined 416 World Bank projects, 387 of which had data on both measures. Only about 42% performed well in immediate project delivery while also facing relatively low risks to longer-term development outcomes. These figures are difficult to ignore, aren’t they? 

As the program progresses, it becomes clearer why apparently successful interventions may fail to produce lasting outcomes. IPP encourages a balance between the natural impulse to move quickly towards solutions and a more deliberate effort to understand the problem first. 

This reorientation — from solutions to problems — is the most fundamental shift the course produced. The Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) approach, fishbone diagnosis, AAA analysis, and the discipline of iteration all reinforce the same insight: time spent understanding a problem is not wasted time.  

The people in the room with their different perspectives, questions, and blind spots are not separate from the problem-solving process. Colleagues brought experience from different institutional contexts, questioned assumptions, and demonstrated how collective reflection can improve individual analysis. This is why one message from Matt and Salimah stayed with me: “Your team is your gift.” That was perhaps the most lasting learning of all.  

My implementation challenge was: 

How do you design an effective policy response to agricultural land fragmentation in Azerbaijan and establish oversight mechanisms that help implementation actors deliver the intended outcomes without having direct operational control? 

Land fragmentation is not a single condition. It may refer to agricultural holdings composed of very small parcels, one farm operating several geographically scattered plots, or a single parcel divided among multiple legal or informal rights-holders. Fragmentation may also arise when ownership transfers and inheritance remain unregistered, or when the person cultivating the land differs from its legal owner. 

As climate pressures intensify and global food markets become more volatile, fragmented landholdings make it harder to introduce modern technologies, improve production efficiency, and connect farmers to value chains.  

Viewed in this way, land consolidation is neither an isolated land-management measure nor a complete solution. It is one possible instrument within a broader policy response. Before selecting the appropriate combination of instruments, however, it is necessary to understand how fragmentation develops and why it persists. 

Working through the assignments clarified why land fragmentation persists even when its costs are visible. The fishbone analysis organized the drivers into four connected groups: 

• Inheritance and intergenerational transfer: Division among heirs and increasingly complex co-ownership produce smaller parcels, multiple rights-holders, and harder collective decisions. 

• Economic risk and attachment to land: Owners may retain underused parcels as security. Family history and fear of permanently losing an asset discourage transfer. 

• Institutional sequencing: The post-Soviet land framework initially prioritized land distribution and the protection of newly established private ownership, while legal and institutional mechanisms for voluntary parcel reorganization developed more gradually — leaving limited procedures for parcel exchange, joint investment, and voluntary consolidation. 

• Hidden and deferred costs: The costs of fragmentation often remain invisible until land is needed for finance, investment, or a formal transaction requiring clear ownership. 

These drivers reinforce one another and allow fragmentation to continue across generations. The fishbone exercise made this system of mutually reinforcing constraints visible. 

 The fishbone is not a final answer. It is a living diagnostic: you return to it, revise it, and allow new evidence to make it more accurate. 

Moving from the broad policy challenge to its practical implementation reveals a closely related issue: consolidation depends on reliable information about who owns and uses each parcel. Land registration makes fragmentation visible and enables it to be addressed, but registration is also shaped by incentives. People often register when a concrete transaction makes formal title necessary rather than in anticipation of a future need. 

A related observation emerged from work on non-residential building permits: demand for registration often stayed dormant until another state transaction — a loan, a sale, an inheritance settlement — made formal title indispensable. This suggested that standard prescriptions (digitize, centralize, automate) address only part of the challenge. Processing capacity matters, but so do citizens’ incentives to initiate the process. The connection between formal systems and individual behavior became sharper through the fishbone exercise than through any prior analysis. 

Once the problem had been decomposed, the next question was how progress could be supported when implementation responsibilities were distributed across institutions. The exercise clarified that oversight is not only a monitoring problem; it is also an alignment problem. Policies move from text to reality through people, and those people work under different mandates, incentives, and operational constraints. 

This alignment challenge becomes visible in routine administrative decisions. A land surveyor determines when a site visit occurs; a registration officer decides whether a file is complete; a clerk identifies the precedent that may resolve a case. Michael Lipsky’s concept of street-level bureaucracy reminds us that citizens experience policy through such frontline judgements. Effective oversight therefore depends not only on performance information but on sustained engagement with the people whose decisions produce results. 

Germany’s Flurbereinigung, the Netherlands’ institutional tradition, and experience from other countries show that consolidation is not a quick technical exercise. It requires iterative work, fair treatment of land rights, landowner engagement, and sustained institutional commitment. 

Azerbaijan’s cooperation with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to develop a National Land Consolidation Strategy, an initial village-level pilot, and the gradual construction of a legislative foundation illustrate what we call capability for policy implementation: not capacity declared before reform begins, but capability accumulated through doing. Pilots test assumptions, institutions learn to coordinate, and legislation gradually becomes specific enough to implement. 

The recently adopted State Program in Azerbaijan for 2026–2030 on the development of agricultural production and processing establishes land consolidation as a national priority. The next phase covers 19 villages and approximately 20,000 hectares. International experience therefore provides valuable reference points, while Azerbaijan’s existing pilots and emerging framework provide the basis for developing a context-specific model. The next stage can build on experience already acquired and use implementation to refine that model further. 

The photograph shows Khinalig, an ancient high-mountain village in Azerbaijan, surrounded by the demanding landscape of the Greater Caucasus. Known for its pastoral traditions, Khinalig is connected to highland summer pastures and lowland winter pastures by the 200-kilometre migration route. This cultural landscape was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. 

Khinalig is not an example of land consolidation, but its transhumance system offers a useful lesson in coordinated land use. Its dispersed pastures function as a connected system through shared routes, water access, and community rules. This illustrates that addressing fragmentation does not only require merging ownership or creating larger parcels; it should also involve coordinating access, infrastructure, and land use so that separate areas function effectively together. 

Three shifts offer a durable approach to implementation. 

First, policy work should devote more time to diagnosis before moving towards solutions. PDIA shifts attention from predetermined solutions to binding constraints. Because each constraint may require a different response, every iteration should be adapted to local conditions.  

Second, pilot projects should be treated as learning mechanisms rather than scaled-down versions of national programs. They should test assumptions about participation, valuation, coordination, disputes, and infrastructure benefits. Evidence should determine whether an intervention is expanded, redesigned, or discontinued. 

Third, policy processes should pay as much attention to implementation actors as to the documents guiding their work. Frontline implementers belong in the learning process because they see where written policy encounters practical constraints. Understanding their mandates, incentives, and operational realities is part of policy design, not a separate matter to be addressed later. 

The lasting lesson of IPP is that complex reforms cannot be delivered through plans and formal authority alone. They require careful diagnosis, iterative learning, institutional coordination, and attention to frontline implementation. The program may formally end, but its approach continues shaping how problems are understood, how implementation is supported, and how policy success is assessed throughout a professional journey. 

Thank you to everyone who taught, challenged, debated, and shared throughout this program! 

It has been one of the most honest professional experiences – not because it gave me answers, but because it gave me better questions and the confidence to stay with them! 

This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Implementing Public Policy Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 33 Participants successfully completed this 5-month hybrid program in September 2026. These are their learning journey stories.