Land tenure security and preferences to dispute resolution pathways among landholders in Nigeria

Abstract

The occurrence of land-related disputes remains inevitable due to conflicting interests often associated with land rights. However, how these disputes are resolved remains of great interest to development scholars and policy makers alike. In this paper, both perceived land tenure (in)security and dispute resolution pathway preferences of plot holders are examined using a nationally representative survey dataset from Nigeria. The degree of perceived tenure security in an ordinal scale is measured using the combined indicators of perception of occurrence of ownership dispute and the perception of not losing plot should dispute occurs. Further, a two-stage sequence of choice of institutions for land-related dispute resolutions was constructed from the data to obtain four categories of possible resolution pathways. Partially constrained generalized ordered logit and multinomial logit models were also employed to assess the effects of plot holders’ socio-economic and plot characteristics on perceived tenure (in)security and choice of dispute resolution pathway, respectively. Results reveal that the level of perceived tenure security decreases with increasing indicator combination and the choice of informal – informal pathway remains dominant even in the presence of legal pluralism. Policies that promote land documentation, strengthened extension services, and strengthened institutional capacities and access are envisioned to play significant roles in reducing land-related disputes and facilitating their resolution.