Chiefs, Perceived Authority, and Land Titles: Evidence from Cote d’Ivoire

• In Event: Experiments in African Politics

Abstract

Why do formal land titles remain so rare across sub-Saharan Africa? This paper leverages a natural experiment in Cote d’Ivoire to unpack the role of customary chiefs in formalizing property rights. The village mapping process which precedes land titling in Cote d’Ivoire forces the issue of hierarchy among chiefs and villages. The combination of political pressure and bureaucratic discretion means that such shocks to chiefly legitimacy are quasi-exogenous to conditions on the ground. This paper combines administrative and survey data to show that chiefs respond to negative shocks to their legitimacy by facilitating land titling and respond to positive shocks by impeding land titling. By connecting the authority of chiefs to the uptake of land formalization, this work contributes to a growing literature on the political economy of informality and development in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Author

• Matthew Karol Ribar, Stanford University