safeguards (Nolte 2014) is often viewed as one a reasons for potential adverse effects from why large land transfers on locals’ welfare and access to natural resources (Merten & Haller 2008; German _et al._ 2013a).<sup>15</sup> Implementing this policy must contend with two main challenges. One is that their potential advantages in terms of accessing information and providing public goods <mark>(Baldwin 2018) notwithstanding, traditional authorities</mark> have no formal role in administering state land or influencing its use (Honig 2017). As it would gradually deprive them of power and income without reducing locals’ expectations for them to provide access to land and arbitrate land disputes,<sup>16</sup> transfer from customary to statutory tenure is resisted by chiefs (Ng'ombe _et al._ 2014). As documented more broadly for contexts of legal pluralism in Africa (Eck 2014), competition between customary and statutory authorities creates risk of decisions by one level of authority possibly being overturned by another for all land users (Jorgenson & Loudjeva 2005).

Rather than transfer land to the state, many chiefs or headmen have instead resorted to issuing informal documents (referred to as ‘chief certificates’ throughout the paper) to some or all of their subjects or enter into direct agreements with investors. As neither a legal basis nor a mechanism for recording/updating of such certificates exists and if they will be respected locally is at the discretion of the chief (or her successor), the security provided by such documents is limited. This has not prevented donors from supporting their issuance. Descriptive accounts suggest that in several cases this intervention led chiefs to cash in on land user’s demand for secure title in favor of well-connected individuals, thus making land access more unequal and possibly even making people worse off by forcing them to pay for worthless pieces of paper (Green & Norberg 2018). This would be consistent with the results from a randomized control trial that found no impact of these documents on investment or other relevant outcomes except (short term) subjective tenure security (Huntington & Shenoy 2021).

A second challenge is the high cost of service delivery implied by the Ministry of Lands’ centralization and limited adoption of modern information technology. Land registry offices exist in only two of the country’s cities (Lusaka and Ndola) so that some land users are located more than 700 km from the next registry office. Unclear manual workflows that offer ample scope for discretion and informal payments to ensure processing, together with formal fees for title processing close to US$ 500 over and above the cost of a high precision survey that can add thousands of dollars led many landowners to abandon the titling process midstream after having taken the initial steps and received an ‘offer letter’ including a sketch plan from the Ministry. Rudimentary filing systems and widespread reliance on paper records that are easily tampered

> 15 As documented among others in Deininger and Byerlee (2011), negative impacts of large scale land acquisition on locals even in cases where there is no direct competition for land by large farms that were initially established on marginal land either abandoning land after valuable natural resources have been destroyed or expanding to more fertile land already cultivated by smallholders to ensure economic viability. 16 A key concern raised informally by many chiefs is that, unlike traditional leaders who are aware of local demand, the central state is unable to repossess or re-assign land if an external investment fails and that therefore irrevocably changing its designation to state land makes little sense.

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