long way towards improving and broadening access to documented rights. This is particularly important as the wealth bias introduced by high fees-that are affordably only for a few-may undermine public trust in the registry and, in many African settings, give rise to speculative acquisition of public or customary land with negative environmental and distributional impacts.

_Public land management and operationalization of group rights:_ Unless rights to them are registered, large amounts of public land and the benefits they provide may be lost to the public. Moreover, documented rights need not be individual to encourage investment or sustainable resource management; demarcation of group or community boundaries together with regulations on how to internally manage rights or transfer them to outsiders can be effective in protecting against encroachment if groups are cohesive and able to rely on internal sanctions and means of conflict-resolution (Ferraro & Agrawal 2021). This was the rationale for legal reforms adopted by many African countries in the 2000s to recognize customary rights, possibly contingent on groups’ meeting certain criteria, by demarcating and registering traditional authorities’ outer boundaries and using low-cost internal registers.

In many settings, these efforts did not have the desired effect. One reason is that, instead of being recognized as having value on their own and providing sufficient security in more remote locations where land values are modest but environmental risk high, documented group rights were often viewed as a first stage towards title for individual fields. For example in Benin, low-cost village boundary clarification reduced tree cover loss and fires, land clearing, and inter-village border conflicts (Wren-Lewis _et al._ 2020). As subsequent systematic (individual) titling was never implemented, in part due to a high-cost approach, this was instead followed by titling in response to individual demand. Such on-demand titling provided no economic benefit (Fabbri & Dari-Mattiacci 2021) but <mark>increased conflict (</mark> Arruñada _et al._ 2022) and raised suspicions <mark>about elite capture in communities less well connected to markets</mark> (Fabbri 2021).

A second reason for initiatives to document community rights not having the desired impact was that regulations often increased the complexity of procedures to demarcate community land to the point of making them unaffordable and defeating their purpose. By mimicking procedures for issuance of titles that the legislation had set out to simplify, they thus often ended up replicating the wealth bias of on-demand titling and threatening to hollow out community rights from within. One example is Tanzania where nearly two decades after a law establishing ‘certificates of village land’ (CVLs) to document village boundaries at low cost was hailed as a major innovation (Alden-Wily 2003), less than 10% of villages had been able to comply with complex regulations to create a village land use plan (VLUP) as a first step towards CVL (Huggins 2018). Government is unwilling to enforce boundaries registered in CVLs if land is considered to be ‘unused’ and subject to investor interest (Bluwstein _et al._ 2018; Engström & Hajdu 2018), an issue of great relevance for potential outside investors that is now litigated in court. Unregistered VLUPs lack 14