Land, Power, and Property Rights: The Political Economy of Land Titling in Sub-Saharan Africa

Only 15% of African households possess a formal title for their agricultural land, despite the widespread availability of titles and their documented benefits. Local politics combine with national land regimes to explain this empirical anomaly. I combine 170,216 household-level observations of titling across 22 African countries with a novel geospatial measure of land values and the returns to agricultural investment. Households in areas with high returns to potential agricultural investment title more. However, in countries with centralized land tenure regimes, strong customary institutions attenuate this relationship; in countries with decentralized land regimes, strong customary institutions reinforce it. I use a case study in Côte d’Ivoire, including an original survey of 801 households and 194 customary elites, to trace these mechanisms at work. This research documents granular variation in the uptake of land titles, illustrates how local politics explain this variation, and outlines conditions under which customary elites impede development.