worsen landowners’ position as they are reported to have done in Ghana (Adam et al. 2021) or Zambia (Green & Norberg 2018) where efforts to register customary rights without a legal basis, ways to hold customary authorities to account, or transfer rights, had no economic impact (Huntington & Shenoy 2021).

To make recognition of customary tenure relevant in practice, there is need for regulations on how such rights are to be documented and enforced (Firmin-Sellers 1995). This requires clarifying, among others, determining (i) the boundary and interaction between local authorities and central registries to ensure complementarity with each other rather than compete, including ways for chiefs to benefit from measures that increase land values and economic activity in their territory; (ii) how to commit to long-term contracts with outsiders that may transcend individual chiefs’ tenure; (iii) what information to draw on and standards to follow when planning land use; (iv) what avenues of appeal subjects of traditional leaders have access to; and (v) how to establish fora and mechanisms to resolve inter-community disputes.

Strong complementarities between traditional authorities and the state in basic service delivery (Henn 2022) suggest that defining the role of customary authorities _vis a vis_ formal ones especially at local level could harness significant synergies. Failure to clarify this relationship, on the other hand, may trigger <mark>competition between traditional and formal systems that increases uncertainty and encourages wasteful spending of resources on ‘</mark> forum shopping’, i.e. pursuit of claims <mark>to property i</mark> n formal and customary systems in parallel <mark>(Eck 2014). Competition between formal and traditional systems m</mark> ay encourage chiefs to start charging for services they previously provided for free (Honig 2021) and, in extreme cases, leave resorting to <mark>physical violence as the only way to settle competing claims (</mark> Greiner 2017).

Efforts at regulating the role of traditional authorities in land administration and management need to be cognizant of three issues. First, as their main allegiance is to the lineage, chiefs may be challenged to resolve inter-community disputes or to commit to long-term contracts with outsiders. For example, in West Africa, chiefs invited outsiders when labor was sparse but started discriminating against them as land became more scarce (Bambio & Bouayad Agha 2018), lowering productivity (Fenske 2010) and increasing insecurity and conflict risk (Linkow 2016). Pastoralists’ rights to seasonal migration routes, wetlands, or watering holes, though critical for herd survival (Moritz 2008), are vulnerable to unilateral alteration if representation in local decision-making or dispute resolution bodies is lacking (Bergius _et al._ 2020), secondary rights are not recorded (McPeak & Little 2018), or arbitration and negotiation venues absent (Eberle _et al._ 2020). Upfront mechanisms for decentralized decision-making and inter-community consultation are particularly important to avoid conflicts that, with overlaps between tribal, ethnic, and religious identity, can easily escalate and be hard to resolve (McGuirk & Nunn 2020).

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