Customary land dispute adjudication forums and tenure security among smallholder farmers in rural Malawi: a comparative case analysis of forum accessibility and perceived enforceability

Customary land adjudication forums in rural Malawi are widely assumed to strengthen tenure security for smallholder farmers, yet the mechanism by which forum accessibility translates into perceived enforceability remains underspecified. Drawing on sociological institutionalism and legal pluralism, the analysis distinguishes four dimensions of accessibility (geographic, procedural, economic and social) and three dimensions of perceived enforceability (bindingness, consistency and finality), and it specifies how these dimensions interact to shape farmers' expectations about whether a favourable decision will hold. The framework is applied comparatively to three ideal-typical forum configurations observed in the Malawian customary land literature: village-level traditional authority forums, group village headperson forums, and hybrid district-level forums. High accessibility without consistent bindingness produces a distinctive failure mode in which farmers obtain decisions but do not obtain security, and it identifies the conditions under which hybrid forums may either resolve or reproduce this failure. The contribution is a conceptual specification of the accessibility–enforceability relationship that can guide comparative empirical work and that reframes policy attention from forum creation toward the bindingness and consistency of forum outputs.