Land rights are essential assets for improving the livelihoods of the rural poor. This literature based paper shed light to some land rights issues that are crucial for the effectiveness and sustainability of implementing technological innovations in marginalized rural areas of Ethiopia, Ghana,...

Rules of customary law figure prominently in today’s law and policy. Across policy fields, courts and policy-makers are called to interpret and apply customary law. However, it is still a bit of a mystery how rules of customary law emerge and how they can be identified in the first place. In...

This article offers a concise typology of spontaneous norms - i.e., norms that are formed or sustained through decentralized collective behavior in a community. The typology combines three criteria for identifying spontaneous norms: (i) implicit formation of (customary) rules, as opposed to...

Customary law has been criticized from very different angles. Rational choice theorists claim that what looks like custom is nothing but self-interest. Positivists doubt that anything beyond consent assumes the force of law. In this paper, we adopt an experimental approach to test these claims....