Institutional work: how lenders transform land titles into collateral in urban Tanzania

Martina Manara and Erica Pani

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We examine the ‘institutional configuration’ that makes land titles work as collateral in Tanzania’s nascent credit market, through the ‘institutional work’ of local lenders. This work is effective and precarious: while lenders seek out and create institutional complementarities across diverse domains, they also require higher-level regulation to help stabilise land titles’ fungibility as collateral. Our results contribute to knowledge on path-dependency, contingency and uneven trajectories in the property-credit nexus development, and advance understandings of institutional interdependencies and coevolution in the situated economy. By combining deep contextualisation and institutional analysis, we progress an empirical engagement with institutional research in economic geography.

Keywords: institutions; institutional configuration; institutional complementarity; property rights formalisation; credit markets development; Tanzania; (ECF-2022-193); the Richard Oram Fund (through Regional and Urban Planning Studies at the LSE); (ES/W005719/1) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2023-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ban and nep-ure
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Published in Journal of Economic Geography, 1, December, 2023, 23(6), pp. 1213 - 1236. ISSN: 1468-2702

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:120208

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