Rural land titling adjudication and women's intra-household bargaining over crop income in Kenyan customary tenure areas: a boundary-discontinuity analysis of parcel demarcation

The framework treats the demarcation line not as a neutral technical device but as a social institution that reallocates claims over land, labour and output. Drawing on sociological theories of property, gendered bargaining and legal pluralism, the paper specifies three mechanisms through which boundary adjudication alters bargaining: the conversion of overlapping customary claims into exclusive registered rights, the reclassification of crop income from household to individual entitlement, and the shift in dispute resolution from lineage forums to state adjudication bodies. The bargaining consequences of titling are discontinuous at the parcel boundary: women whose claims fall inside the adjudicated boundary gain enforceable standing, while those whose claims fall outside lose customary recognition without acquiring statutory replacement. The analysis is methodological and conceptual rather than empirical; it does not report original field data. The contribution is a testable specification of how the spatial unit of adjudication, rather than titling per se, determines the distribution of bargaining power within households. The framework implies that evaluations of titling programmes should treat the parcel boundary as the unit of analysis and should measure bargaining outcomes at the discontinuity it creates.