By Greg Udvaros, Ladd Serwat, Aoife Ossendorp
The following blog is inspired by the research report: Understanding Institutional Access, Strengthening, and Coordination for Land Dispute Resolution | Land Portal
Context
Across many LAND-at-scale countries, plural land tenure systems prevail, blending customary, statutory, and hybrid forms of land governance. These systems are not always clearly defined, and institutions responsible for resolving disputes often overlap in authority and mandate. In many cases, land disputes are handled at the local level by customary leaders or community mediators. Statutory courts exist but are frequently under-resourced or backlogged. This patchwork of actors and rules can result in inconsistent decisions and unresolved grievances, especially for marginalised groups. Institutional arrangements vary by context, but common challenges include unequal access to justice, unclear property rights, gender-based discrimination, and limited coordination across administrative levels. Women, youth, refugees, internally displaced persons, and poorer landholders often face additional barriers to justice. These range from lack of legal literacy to outright exclusion from mediation processes. In many areas, even when statutory reforms are enacted to promote gender equity or decentralised land governance, customary norms persist in ways that undermine implementation.
LAND-at-scale Interventions
LAND-at-scale, funded by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and managed by The Netherlands Enterprise & Development Agency (RVO), utilizes a range of strategies to improve land tenure security and aims to provide access to dispute resolution mechanisms that aim to increase tenure security through institutional development. Across the seven countries studied, LAND-at-scale has supported a variety of interventions tailored to local conditions, called the Fit-for-Purpose approach. These include enhancing the legal capacity of mediators, improving legal awareness among land users, supporting the registration of customary rights, and investing in data systems that track land disputes. Importantly, the programme takes a flexible approach, acknowledging that successful land governance reform cannot rely solely on statutory frameworks. Instead, it works within the pluralistic reality of legal and institutional landscapes. These efforts also include ways to provide special attention to women and youth as mediators, support paralegals, and promote equitable dispute resolution procedures. Examples such as from Rwanda, showcase such willingness by for instance including, statutory quotas for female representation in mediation bodies. While in other countries like Mali and Uganda, community leaders have been encouraged to include representatives from vulnerable groups.
However, implementation varies, and so do results. In Burundi, even newly created statutory institutions often rely on customary inheritance norms that disadvantage women. In Mozambique, although women were permitted to attend mediation hearings, many reported that their views were not taken seriously. In Somalia, women still require male representation in some dispute processes. These examples show that legal reform must be matched by shifts in norms, practices, and resources.
Toward Inclusive and Coordinated Land Dispute Resolution
One of the study’s core insights is that institutional strengthening is not only about building technical capacity or clearing case backlogs. It is also about examining the actors who have the power to initiate, mediate, and resolve disputes. The research shows that disputes involving women, refugees, or ethnic minorities are often harder to resolve, not because the issues are more complex, but because the actors involved have less power or voice.
Institutional access, then, must be viewed in two ways: who can bring a case to a dispute resolution body, and who can serve as a mediator within these bodies. LAND-at-scale supported interventions have attempted to improve both dimensions by reducing costs, bringing mediation services closer to communities, and training mediators in both statutory and customary law. Nonetheless, persistent challenges remain, such as unpaid mediators, political interference, and low representation of marginalised groups.
Coordination between institutions is another vital challenge. In many LAND-at-scale countries, different dispute resolution bodies operate with minimal collaboration. This limits the ability to resolve cross-boundary or inter-communal conflicts, which are increasingly common due to migration, urbanisation, and commercial land investment. Moreover, coordination failures can exacerbate confusion over jurisdiction, legitimacy, and rights recognition. The programme has supported mapping exercises and collaborative platforms to improve this, but deeper integration and political will are still needed.
Main Takeaways
The findings from Ladd Serwat’s research reveal that while institutional strengthening remains a priority within LAND-at-scale programming, it cannot be assumed that stronger institutions automatically produce more just outcomes. His analysis shows that without targeted attention to the power dynamics between actors, particularly those that shape access and outcomes for vulnerable groups, efforts to increase dispute resolution capacity may unintentionally reinforce inequality.
Building upon his findings that that while dispute resolution rates have improved in some contexts through local mediation efforts, deeply embedded norms and informal practices often continue to shape outcomes. This leads to persistent inequality in who can seek justice, who is heard, and whose claims are upheld. Insider-outsider dynamics persist in many contexts, and institutional bias often favours wealthier or more powerful landholders, including private investors and government actors. Mediators, many of whom operate without financial compensation, face pressures that can compromise impartiality, while the inclusion of vulnerable groups as mediators themselves requires precise definitions of marginalisation, something current programming still struggles to fully articulate.
A core argument of the study is that access must be understood both in terms of using institutions and in having a voice within them. In questioning long-standing assumptions, the study also challenges the prevalent binary between formal and informal institutions. Drawing on legal pluralism, Serwat argues that institutions are rarely wholly statutory or customary. Instead, they are often hybrid in nature, drawing simultaneously on laws, norms, and social expectations. Recognising this complexity is key to understanding how land disputes are mediated and resolved in practice.
Future efforts must move beyond institutional form and capacity to focus on how institutions operate in context, who they empower, who they exclude, and how their authority is legitimised. In this regard, the study calls for deeper, more nuanced engagement with the actors, identities, and rules that shape dispute resolution outcomes on the ground. Want to read the full study ? Follow: Understanding Institutional Access, Strengthening, and Coordination for Land Dispute Resolution | Land Portal
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Program: LAND-at-scale.
Related projects: LAND-at-scale Burundi: Amahoro at Scale, LAND-at-scale Chad: Towards inclusive land governance, LAND-at-scale Mali: Managing land conflicts and protecting customary rights, LAND-at-scale Mozambique: Community land rights and climate resilience, LAND-at-scale Rwanda: Access to justice and land dispute resolution, LAND-at-scale Somalia: Saameynta – Scaling up solutions to displacement, LAND-at-scale Uganda: Community-based land registration and land use planning.
Originally published on the Land Portal. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.