Publication: Chiefs, Courts, and Upholding Property Rights: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Sierra Leone
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2025-05-26
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2025-07-31
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Land disputes are unavoidable and costly in formal courts in contexts with weak property rights and low state capacity. Many countries permit parallel informal dispute-resolution forums to relax the pressure on strained formal courts. This paper studies the extent to which one such forum, Chiefdom Land Committees (CLCs), in Sierra Leone can resolve land disputes. This paper constructs a data set of ligated cases at local courts nationwide. It implements a difference-in-difference design to estimate the effect of the CLCs on land caseload in the formal courts. Contrary to the policy goals, this paper finds that on average, chiefdoms with CLCs have higher land caseload in the formal courts three years on. By adopting the CLCs, chiefdoms plausibly made land issues more salient, but instead of providing final resolutions, CLCs are conduits for formalizing land disputes.
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“Kpaka, Henry Musa. 2025. Chiefs, Courts, and Upholding Property Rights: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Sierra Leone. World Bank Economic Review. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/43529 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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World Bank Economic Review
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