Platteau 1998), especially if “political entrepreneurs” capitalize on the underlying grievances to further their cause (Fred-Mensah 1999, Daudelin 2002). At the same time, there are few detailed studies of conflicts relating to land rather than general conflicts or efforts aiming to separate the impact of changes in the legal framework governing land relations as compared with the myriad of other factors that can have an impact on the incidence of conflict. As a result, it is far from undisputed whether land related conflicts are a serious enough issue to warrant attention by policy makers or outside support. To determine whether this is the case, it is necessary to show that over and above the social problems and direct costs that may be caused by land conflicts, these conflicts affect productivity of land use and thus reduce the scope for future growth.

This paper uses household-level data from Uganda to do so by exploring the economic impact of landrelated conflict, its incidence, and the extent to which recent legal measures have helped to bring about a reduction in land-related conflict. The paper is structured as follows. Section two provides a review of the literature, a discussion of the conceptual framework, the survey methodology and estimation strategy. Section three discusses descriptive statistics on the incidence and possible impact of land conflict. Econometric evidence that accounts for the possibility of conflict being endogenous is provided in section four. Section five concludes and discusses implications for land policy in other countries.

# **2. Background and conceptual framework**

While increased population density and demand for land can set in motion a virtuous cycle of increasingly precise definition of property rights, investment, growth, and productivity-enhancing exchange of land, failure to respond with the appropriate institutional innovations can lead to a downward spiral of conflict and strife over a rapidly shrinking overall pie. In this section, we draw on the literature to illustrate some of the underlying factors, highlight how they are operational in the case of Uganda, and on this basis formulate hypotheses and an estimation strategy that will allow us to test these with the data available.

# **2.1 Relevance of the issue and key aspects**

Before discussing the case of Uganda in more detail, it will be useful to put land conflict into a broader context of increasing land values and scarcity, and to identify some of the factors that, in African contexts, imply that, instead of leading to successively greater investment and productivity, these result in higher incidence of land-related conflicts.

Property rights to land are not static but constitute a social construct that responds to broader needs and evolves over time (Sjaastad and Bromley 2000). Given its spatial extension, defining property rights to land or to write contracts regarding their exchange is costly. Therefore, boundaries may, at low levels of population density, be defined only loosely, transfers will normally involve only usufruct and not ownership and often be confined to community members, thereby allowing much of the content of land rights and associated transactions to be defined informally by unwritten “custom”. Changing economic and social 2