Chiefs, Courts, and Upholding Property Rights: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Sierra Leone

Abstract

Abstract Land disputes are unavoidable and costly to resolve in the formal courts in contexts with weak property rights and low state capacity. In order to relax the pressure on strained formal courts, many countries permit parallel informal dispute-resolution forums. This paper studies the extent to which one such forum—Chiefdom Land Committees (CLCs)—in Sierra Leone is able to resolve land disputes. This paper constructs a data set of ligated cases at local courts across the country and 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 the formalization of land disputes.