# **Incidence and impact of land conflict in Uganda**

**Abstract:** While there is a large, though inconclusive, literature on the impact of land titles in Africa, little attention has been devoted to the study of land conflict, despite evidence on increasing incidence of such conflicts. We use data from Uganda to explore who is affected by land conflicts, whether recent legal changes have helped to reduce their incidence, and to assess their impact on productivity. Results indicate that female-headed households and widows are particularly affected and that the passage of the 1998 Land Act has failed to reduce the number of pending land conflicts. We also find evidence of a significant and quantitatively large productivity-reducing impact of land conflicts. This suggests that, especially in Africa, attention to land-related conflicts and exploration of ways to prevent and speedily resolve them would be an important area for policy as well as research.

**Keywords:** Conflict; Land, Sustainable land use; Agriculture, Productivity; Gender; Nonparametrics.

## **1. Introduction**

A large literature has described causes and impacts of land-related conflicts in countries that inherited a highly unequal distribution of land ownership, such as Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Zimbabwe, and South Africa (Moore 1966, Wickham-Crowley 1991, Kriger 1992). More recently, evidence from these settings has been complemented by increased awareness of the economic and political importance of landrelated conflict even in African countries, such as Rwanda, Burundi (Kairaba 2002), Côte d’Ivoire (Chauveau 2000), and Ghana (Firmin-Sellers 2000), which, with relatively low population density, had traditionally been characterized by relatively egalitarian land access.

One of the main reasons underlying the increased incidence of land conflict in these countries is the failure of the prevailing land tenure systems to respond to the challenges posed by appreciation of land in a way that would enhance effective tenure security and thus provide the basis for higher levels of investment and productivity-enhancing land transfers rather than the dissipation of resources in conflict over land. Such appreciation can come about due to increased population and other exogenous factors including technical change, improved terms of trade for agriculture, or non-agricultural demand for land. Factors that have made an effective response difficult include a lack of clarity about the role of formal and informal institutions in land administration, the limited outreach of the former, and the fact that reaching a consensus on land policies is made difficult by the structural inequalities inherent in these systems, e.g. along gender and ethnic lines. As a result, traditional interventions such as titling, which were very effective in other parts of the world, have proven inadequate in many African contexts where, instead of fostering growth, they may even have led to higher levels of conflict.

The increasingly widespread incidence of land conflicts in Africa is well documented in the literature. It has been shown that even limited land conflicts can erupt into large-scale civil strife and violence (Andre and 1