Mechanisms Linking Consumer Guarantees Warranties to Institutional Resilience in Uganda: A Comparative Mixed-Methods Framework

Rather than treating guarantees as a discrete legal instrument, the analysis conceptualises them as a relational mechanism that can generate feedback loops between market actors and regulatory institutions. It argues that institutional resilience is not a direct product of warranty enforcement but emerges through three intermediate pathways: information generation, dispute channelling, and legitimacy building. Each pathway is theorised in relation to Uganda's institutional landscape, including the Uganda National Bureau of Standards, the Competition and Consumer Protection Tribunal, and customary dispute resolution fora. The proposed framework integrates qualitative comparative analysis with survey-based causal mediation modelling, allowing researchers to examine both contextual configurations and generalisable mechanisms.