Resilience Pathways for Land Degradation Neutrality: How Informal Institutions Shape Community Land Governance Across the Global South

Abstract

A decade after Land Degradation Neutrality was incorporated into Sustainable Development Goal 15.3, implementation outcomes across the Global South remain uneven. Mainstream commons research identifies recurring institutional features, whereas critical institutionalism emphasizes their adaptive assembly; both traditions increasingly recognize interaction and context, but cross-regional evidence remains limited on which combinations distinguish resilient governance from failure. We treat the internal composition of the informal-institutional configuration as a set-theoretic analytical unit, not as a new institution or a standalone causal mechanism and examine how its components combine. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) of 50 community-level cases drawn from a PRISMA-screened Web of Science and Scopus search and triangulated against government, project, and media sources, with two independent coders applying an anchored codebook across four rounds (Cohen's κ = 0.87), we find that three internal conditions and one interplay condition reach the 0.90 near-necessity threshold; collective tenure clarity provides the strongest joint signal (consistency = 0.94; coverage = 0.98). Four overlapping sufficient configurations cover 97% of resilient cases: a customary-core path (AUTH*CONG; consistency = 0.92; raw coverage = 0.93; unique coverage = 0.13), an externally-supported congruence path, a co-management path, and an autonomous-customary path. Failure follows an asymmetric signature in which external intervention is present within a weakened customary substrate. These contingent, set-theoretic associations operationalize the Helmke and Levitsky (2004) typology and help reconcile apparently conflicting crowding findings. They also motivate a hypothesis-generating diagnostic for UNCCD reporting, donors, and community-level practitioners, while not establishing intervention effects.