Rural Interdisciplinary Sociology of Community Land Adjudication Cost-Sharing and Parcel Abandonment in Zambian Customary Tenure: A Boundary-Discontinuity Analysis of Fee Waiver Thresholds

Community land adjudication in Zambian customary tenure typically requires households to contribute a cost-sharing fee, with a waiver available below an income or land-value threshold. The framework treats the waiver as a discontinuity in the effective cost of adjudication and specifies the conditions under which households just above the threshold abandon their parcels while those just below retain them. Because no observational data are used, the paper characterises the operating characteristics of a before-after-control-impact design under a declared variance structure: between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0, residual standard deviation of 4.5, and an intraclass correlation of 0.64. Power was estimated across 2000 replications per design cell for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The design requires 52 clusters to detect a 5-percentage-point effect at 80 per cent power. Waiver thresholds function as administrative boundaries whose sociological effects are discontinuous, and that cost-sharing schedules should be evaluated at the threshold rather than at the mean.