Land Tenure Challenges in Africa Confronting the Land Governance Deficit

This book provides a significant contribution to the literature on land reform in various African contexts. While the economic evidence is clear that secure property rights are a necessary condition for catalysing broad-based economic development, the governance process by which those rights are secured is less clear. This book details the historical complexity of land rights and the importance of understanding this history in the process of trying to improve tenure security. Through a combination of single country case studies, comparative case studies and regional comparisons, the book is unequivocal that good governance is paramount for improving the performance of land reform programmes. All attempts at moving towards more formal secure tenure require congruence with informal norms, beliefs and values, and a set of clear systems and processes to avoid corruption and unintended negative consequences.

Chapter 1. ‘Caught in Between Policies’: The Intertwined Challenges of Access to Land and Housing in Gaborone, Botswana.- Chapter 2. Understanding minority land rights in Africa: The complexities of Mbororo land rights and its implementation contradictions in the northwest region of Cameroon.- Chapter 3. -State actors and land governance in the DR Congo: The trap of the human rights-led approach towards land tenure.- Chapter 4. Land Governance in Ethiopia: Challenges Facing Small Landholders.- Chapter 5. Developing hybrid institutions for land governance: explaining divergent trajectories in Ghana.- Chapter 6. Land reform legacies and contemporary struggles for land in Morocco.- Chapter 7. High levels of tenure security in Namibia’s informal settlements, yet residents challenged to upgrade living conditions.- Chapter 8. Land Governance in Zambia:  Confronting the Challenges of an Unsettled Dynamic Equilibrium in Land Administration.- Chapter 9. State-Based Tenure in Zimbabwe: Is it Retrogressive or a Panacea for Agrarian Underdevelopment.- Chapter 10. Challenges of Land Tenure Reform in the Land Grabs Era: The case of Zimbabwe.- Chapter 11. Land reform in Zimbabwe: implications for land restitution.- Chapter 12. The complexity of Litigating Ancestral Land Rights in Namibia.- Chapter 13. South African Land Expropriation without Compensation; A Threat to Botswana Food Security.- Chapter 14. tenure and airports building in Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal.- Chapter 15. Security of land tenure informing land reforms in Africa from a historical to current trajectory of land reform: Comparative analysis of Ethiopia and Zambia.- Chapter 16. Land Governance as a Restitutive Mechanism for Asserting Ownership and Tenure Rights in a Postcolonial Context: Insights from Namibia and Ghana.- Chapter 17. Land Governance and Tenure Reform in Southern Africa.- Chapter 18. Access to land to foreigners in West Africa: analysis in the context of land acquisition and new land policy era.-Chapter 19. Comparative Discussion of Land Tenure: South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya and Ghana.- Chapter 20. Evaluating the legitimisation of land wars as a form of organised crime: a review through secondary document analysis.