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flip side of forum shopping is that NGOs and humanrights stakeholder groups working on behalf ofthe poor also have multiple venues to seek redressof their grievances, so, again, the implication isnot that institutional pluralism is inherently bad forLegal Empowerment of the Poor. Still, it is a complicatingfactor that makes empowerment policiestrickier to plan and execute.There may be temptation to clarify anambiguous informal legal structure simplyby replacing it with a more orderly statutory code,but as it might conceivably backfire on the poor,any approach must be carefully reasoned. Sudanis an acute case of what can happen when changeis suddenly rushed though. Urban elites in Sudanaggressively moved to take land at less than itstrue value by shifting land out of community-basedtenure systems and into a standardised Islamictenure system. The civil war that raged for years inthe south of the country was set in motion for manyreasons, but one was the resistance by rural peopleto the imposition of an unfamiliar tenure systemthat destroyed their traditional land rights (Bruceet al. 1998: 195). The conflict in Sudan’s Darfurregion also grows in part out of conflicts aroundcompeting systems of land tenure, representedby group-based camel nomadism, on the onehand, and more individually oriented sedentarycultivation, on the other (Abdul-Jalil 2005).Ambiguity additionally clouds lines of accountabilityand responsibility among implementing agenciesand allows them to ‘pass the buck’ during implementation.In post-tsunami Sri Lanka, the housingauthority allocated land to the displaced which waslater found to have been under claim by the municipalityas a waste dump, and had been classifiedby the water board as uninhabitable. Straighteningout mix-ups like this takes time and energy thatcould have been used more productively.DiscordThe distributional strife unearthed by policy ambiguityin countries such as Sudan merges into thethird stylised internal influence on implementation,which is a policy’s inbuilt potential to generatedissension. An ‘iron law of public policy’ saysthat most acts of government, no matter what thebroader merits, create winners and losers. If thegains and losses are seen as significant, they willbecome the object of intense political attention.This is particularly likely where the policy redistributesa right or benefit from one group to another,as happens when there are mutually exclusiveclaims to a fixed resource such as fertile land orminerals. Legal Empowerment of the Poor attemptsto minimise redistributive conflicts by expandingeconomic opportunities so that different interestscan be negotiated to meet every side’s needs, butthere is still plenty of potential for confrontationbecause important stakeholders believe others’gains come at their expense. The mutual payoff tolegal empowerment is in the future, but the individualsacrifices must be borne now.A concrete example of this ‘iron law’ is the titlingand registration programmeme implemented in Perustarting in the 1980s. According to a World Bankreport, the main winners were: settlers, who accruedthe economic and social benefits of formal ownership;the President of Peru, who earned the politicalcredit for the programmeme; local mayors, whoshared the political credit, and congressmen, whobacked the legal framework for formalization. Theprincipal losers were reportedly the public officialsin charge of regularisation processes who previouslybenefited from bribes; lawyers and notaries, who lostthe monopoly they enjoyed in the traditional registrationsystem, and former community leaders, whowere replaced by new leaders elected by the communitiesduring the reforms (Palacio 2006: 41).In conflict equations, defenders of the status quo310