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Regulating access to land and water in Africa: implications for local governance

Consensus is emerging that only decentralised management and tenure security for existing users can prevent degradation of Africa’s rural resource base. What role should customary authorities play in allocating rights to land and water? What are the consequences of individualisation and commoditisation of land? How do recent research findings illuminate debates about governance and land tenure reform?

A report from the University of Manchester’s Institute for Development Policy and Management (IPDM) assesses the findings of recent research around water and land use in sub-Saharan Africa and their implications for policy debates which are still largely shaped by the colonial era dualism between statutory and customary systems of land tenure. Four case studies illustrate different approaches to local governance of natural resources in regions which have been relatively isolated and marginal to larger economies and into which immigrants have been drawn by the recent growth of commercialised agriculture.

The Kenyan experience illustrates the conversion of customary rights to private freehold while the Botswana case studies looks at the administration of customary rights by a government-constituted Land Board with locally elected representatives. Examples from South Africa and Mali look at how local councils, elected under recent devolution reforms, are grappling to define their relationships both with customary authorities and central government.

Findings from the case studies, supported by evidence from elsewhere in Africa, suggest:

the invalidity of the (World Bank-promoted) view that customary tenure is an obstacle to increasing productivity and the alarmist ‘crisis narrative’ view of dire environmental degradation often promoted by development agencies
when competition for land intensifies, customary tenure cannot constitute a guarantor of security for the poor: the most vulnerable can be excluded by the more powerful who take advantage of ambiguity
local land markets are just as likely to develop under customary tenure models as under state-administered enclosures of rangeland
although decentralisation initiatives designed to strengthen customary authority may increase productivity, they do not necessarily promote long-term sustainability and can enhance socio-economic differentiation among land and water users
the case for strengthening customary rights over land is based less on the ‘realities’ of customary tenure than on mistrust of government officials whose disproportionate control of land allocation has in the past created insecurity which is detrimental to the interests of vulnerable groups of resource users
Botswana’s Land Boards, often cited as an institutional model for renegotiation of land rights, have actually widened inequity of access to grazing and disproportionately benefited large cattle owners.

Recommendations arising from the findings suggest:

the importance of a dialogue between professionals and land users to identify agreed criteria for sustainability in land and water use
the need for transparent allocation procedures in which the ‘legitimacy’ of customary rights and the entrepreneurial initiative of resource users is balanced by wide representation of land use interests – including pastoralists, women and youth
the need for a pragmatic approach towards tenure registration which is able to recognise overlapping and secondary rights on a particular piece of land, protect the rights of vulnerable social groups, and focus effort on areas of competition and conflict.
the need to recognise that if political goals such as defending access to land for vulnerable groups are not identified and pursued by the (central) state they are unlikely to arise spontaneously at a ‘local’ level.

Source(s):
‘African enclosures: a default mode of development?’ by Philip Woodhouse, Institute for Development Policy and Management Full document.
‘African Enclosures? The Social Dynamics of Wetlands in Drylands’, James Currey Publishers, by P. Woodhouse, H. Bernstein and D. Hulme, 2000
‘Natural Resource Management and Chronic Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa: an overview’ Full document.

Funded by: ESRC Global Environmental Change Programme

id21 Research Highlight: 18 October 2002

Further Information:
Institute for Development Policy and Management
University of Manchester
Crawford House, Precinct Centre, Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9GH
UK

Tel: +44 (0)161 2752800
Fax: +44 (0)161 2738829
Contact the contributor: phil.woodhouse@man.ac.uk

Institute for Development Policy and Management (IDPM), UK

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