Rural customary court boundary adjudication and post-ruling farm investment in Malawian villages: a boundary-discontinuity estimation of dispute-resolution jurisdiction

Customary court boundary rulings in rural Malawi establish which lineage holds adjudicative jurisdiction over a disputed field, yet the investment consequences of that jurisdictional assignment remain unquantified. No observational data are used or claimed. Under a declared variance structure with between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0, residual standard deviation of 4.5 and intraclass correlation of 0.64, power was estimated across 2000 design cells spanning 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. The analysis specifies the estimator, derives the minimum detectable effect curve, and identifies the conditions under which jurisdictional assignment can be treated as locally ignorable. The contribution is a design protocol for causal inference on customary adjudication, not an estimate of its effects.