Land-related institutional settings, climate variability and communal conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa

We analyse to what extent land-related institutional settings affect the likelihood of communal violence in Sub-Saharan Africa and whether this relationship is conditioned by climate variability. Using a country–year panel covering the period 1990–2024, we focus on the occurrence of communal violence and examine the role of legal transparency and predictable enforcement of laws. The empirical analysis relies on a panel probit model for binary outcomes, controlling for socio-economic characteristics, land-use patterns, demographic pressure, and conflict persistence. The results show that higher levels of legal transparency and more predictable enforcement are consistently associated with a significantly lower likelihood of communal violence. This relationship proves robust across alternative specifications and sample restrictions. To address potential endogeneity in institutional quality, we implement a set of complementary strategies to account for unobserved heterogeneity, while exploiting early post-independence institutional conditions to mitigate concerns related to reverse causality. These checks support the robustness of the baseline association. Climate variability does not emerge as an independent driver of communal violence. Instead, drought acts as a threat multiplier by conditionally weakening the conflict-mitigating effect of legal institutions. Interaction effects indicate that while improvements in institutional quality substantially reduce the probability of communal violence under normal climatic conditions, this stabilizing effect progressively diminishes as drought severity increases and becomes negligible under severe drought. Therefore, as drought severity increases, the mitigating role of institutions progressively weakens. Overall, the findings highlight the central role of legal transparency and predictable enforcement in managing land-related tensions, while showing that their effectiveness is contingent on environmental stress.