members’ behavior. It may also offer opportunities to improve enforcement of pastoralists’ use rights and right holders’ ability to enter contingent contracts building on such rights, something that can increase flexibility of and most likely also effectiveness of PES, e.g., by including upfront payments (Jack _et al._ 2022) or tailoring interactions to the specific circumstances of target groups.

The combination of increased benefits and reduced cost of documented land rights creates opportunities for African countries to reap benefits that can translate into greater transparency, effectiveness, coverage, and fiscal impact of their land institutions through appropriate regulatory change. Such change would include (i) adjusting their regulatory and institutional frameworks to deliver services at scale by allowing use of digital technology (e-signatures, mass valuation, digital lodging of surveys, etc.), interoperability, and public monitoring; (ii) replacing high and distortionary transaction taxes by a recurrent land tax based on mass valuation techniques and public access to assessed property values; (iii) using access to registry information to catalyze operation of financial and other factor markets; (iv) clarifying modalities for registering group and secondary rights, including ways to decide on management and conflict resolution consensually and transparently; (v) establishing standards for transfer of use rights to public land to which no formal rights exist or for public land acquisition, in a transparent and competitive way; and (vi) allowing land users to capitalize on new opportunities to provide local and global public goods through climate change mitigation and adaptation by providing national land use monitoring to allow documentation and quantification of such contributions.

# **3. Land rights to help address challenges of structural transformation**

Institutions that clearly define rights to agricultural land and allow such land to be transferred easily can help reduce transaction cost in land markets and support functioning of other factor markets linked to land markets (e.g., those for insurance and credit). Africa is also richly endowed with land that, while traditionally often considered to be marginal, may become more valuable due to better infrastructure access or higher demand for services that can be derived from such land. Clarifying rights to such land, which may be public rather than private, and establishing competitive and transparent ways to assign them at the local level can open opportunities to bring in investment and access to global markets and know-how that bureaucratic processes were unable to tap into and that will be of increased importance to adapt to climate change and prevent temporary shocks from escalating into persistent conflict.

# **3.1 Rural factor market frictions, farm growth and structural transformation**

Rural land institutions are important to provide landowners and users with investment incentives and to reduce frictions in land and other rural factor markets due to the cost of acquiring information on land ownership and enforcing contracts. Reducing such frictions can increase productivity and support structural 19