Property-Rights Reform in Post-Conflict Transition Economies and Institutional Lessons from Kosovo

Secure and enforceable property rights underpin investment, credit, land-market activity, and post-conflict recovery, but legal recognition alone is insufficient where registries, courts, and administrative systems are fragmented. This structured integrative review synthesizes institutional economics, development studies, land administration, geomatics, and housing, land, and property scholarship using a documented evidence-selection and appraisal framework, complemented by a reproducible targeted literature update conducted in September 2026. Evidence is organized around five functions—claim recognition, verification, enforcement, record maintenance, and legitimacy—and assessed across causal, comparative, case-based, and administrative studies. Kosovo is examined alongside Bosnia and Herzegovina and Ukraine. The synthesis shows that formalization has conditional effects: tenure security and investment may improve, while credit, productivity, inclusion, and market liquidity depend on enforcement quality, transaction costs, data quality, registry maintenance, and access to remedies. Kosovo-specific administrative data and recent domestic jurisprudence show that conflict-era claims coexist with current challenges in formalization, adjudication, expropriation compensation, and registry updating. The review contributes a five-function diagnostic framework linking institutional reform to real-estate outcomes, including transfer, mortgageability, valuation, taxation, and formal–informal-market segmentation. Reform should therefore sequence claim clarification and verification with enforceable remedies, maintainable interoperable records, and legitimacy safeguards rather than treat titling or digitalization as sufficient reforms.