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This study analyses the linkages between rural-to-rural migration as measured by rural population growth and land-tenure conflict in southwestern Mali. Land-tenure rules in Mali are characterized by legal pluralism, leading to ambiguity about who has legal access to land and thereby increasing land-related conflicts. Data from 69 communes (townships) show that communes with less land per person tend to have more land-related conflicts. However, localities that have effective means of allocating land and resolving land-tenure disputes have fewer conflicts. A negative association between population growth rates in the destination areas of major migratory flows and the frequency of land-tenure disputes suggests that migrants are ‘voting with their feet’ in choosing to move to communes that have more effective land-conflict resolution processes. Encouraging more cross-community learning about which conflict-resolution processes work well and developing local conventions that allow village-level decision-making regarding land-tenure conflicts may, therefore, help improve migration outcomes for both the migrants and the host communities.
Skidmore et al. (Sat,) studied this question.