Rural development cooperative arbitration-forum convening rules and women's land-dispute escalation in Rwanda: a regression-discontinuity analysis of claim-value thresholds

Rural development cooperatives in Rwanda convene arbitration forums only when a land claim's assessed value falls below a threshold; above it, disputants are routed to formal courts. the present analysis treats that convening rule as a sociological mechanism rather than an administrative detail. Drawing on the sociology of law, dispute-processing theory and the gendered political economy of land, it develops a threshold model of escalation in which the claim-value cut-off interacts with women's weaker bargaining position inside cooperatives, their thinner documentation of customary claims, and the reputational cost of appearing before formal tribunals. The paper specifies the conditions under which a regression-discontinuity design around the threshold would identify the causal effect of forum convening on escalation, distinguishes that estimand from the selection effects that confound naive comparisons, and derives testable propositions about heterogeneous effects by gender, claim type and cooperative governance. No original data are analysed; the contribution is conceptual and methodological. The argument is that claim-value thresholds are not neutral sorting devices but gendered institutions whose effects are invisible to evaluations that treat forum assignment as exogenous. The paper closes by identifying the boundary conditions under which the threshold model applies and the design requirements for testing it.