# **5. Conclusion and policy implications**

The fact that a large number of studies on the impact of land titling in Africa have found, at best, mixed results has two possible explanations. One possibility is that measures to improve tenure security are, in the context of Africa, indeed unimportant (Pinckney and Kimuyu 1994). Alternatively, tenure security may be of great relevance but the interventions pursued by governments to increase such security may have been largely ineffective. The only way to distinguish between these two hypotheses is to use a measure of tenure security, such as conflict that can be observed, and test whether such a measure has a discernible impact on observed production outcomes.

In this paper, we conduct such a test for the case of Uganda. The fact that parametric and nonparametric analysis point toward a significant impact of conflict on agricultural output suggests that tenure security is of considerable economic importance. The estimated magnitude of contemporaneous productivity losses due to land conflict, between 5% and 11%, is very large, though in line with descriptive evidence that points toward a number of ways in which land conflicts lead to economically highly disruptive consequences. This suggests that the limited effectiveness of past interventions may have to do more with the fact that they failed to effectively provide tenure security within a complex institutional environment than with the lack of importance of tenure security per se.

For the case of Uganda, our results imply that greater attention to land conflicts would be warranted. First, the secular trends that underlie the high incidence of land-related conflicts (i.e. appreciation and increased scarcity of land due to population growth, non-agricultural demand, development of the off-farm sector, and HIV/AIDS) are unlikely to be reversed in the short to medium term. Second, we find negative equity consequences from land conflict in the sense that households headed by females and widows, who are likely to be highly vulnerable economically, face a higher probability of land conflict than others. Finally, government interventions that have aimed to reduce land conflict in the past do not seem to have been effective and, by de facto eliminating the institutions that had traditionally dealt with conflict without establishing new ones to take their place, may even have helped to increase the overall incidence of conflict, in addition to the possibility that the lack of attention to women’s rights may have made it more difficult for widows to avoid inheritance-related conflicts.

Our results imply that, in Uganda, land-related conflicts have a negative impact on productivity as well as equity. While further study of this issue in other countries would be desirable, the fact that other African countries are equally affected by the secular forces and the institutional inadequacies characterizing Uganda suggests that this is not an isolated case, a hypothesis that is supported not only by an increasing literature on land conflict but also the fact that a large number of African countries have recently started to reform their legal systems (Alden-Wily 2002). The fact that, in Uganda, legal changes aiming to reduce the incidence and impact of conflict did not automatically result in success implies that, in order to be effective, such legal initiatives need to be complemented by effective implementation. The evidence of a significant and 17