Theme: Land Rights

Land tenure and resource access in West Africa

This programme aimed at increasing collaboration and exchange of experience on land tenure and resource access issues between English and French-speaking West Africans. The work has been jointly funded by the British and French governments and coordinated by IIED's Drylands Programme and the Groupe de Recherche et d'Echanges Technologiques (GRET), Paris.

The programme worked on two themes:

1. Negotiating derived rights to land and natural resources.   This work has aimed to document the various institutional arrangements by which people can negotiate access to resources for farming, and how the relations between benefactor and recipient have been changing over recent years. There are a wide variety of such arrangements, such as borrowing land, tenancy, sharecropping, gift and pledging of land. The research has sought to investigate the diverse terms relating to these different institutions, and their interpretation, given socio-economic changes and policy impacts. The project brought together ten research teams, five from English- and five from French- speaking countries of West Africa: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Senegal. Working to a common methodology and objectives, the research sites have been chosen to gain a degree of comparability between countries and covering: plantation agriculture, peri-urban areas, high value wetlands in dryland areas, and zones of new settlement with significant in-migration. The research aimed to generate findings to feed into debate at national and regional levels, concerning options for tenure reform, and means to generate greater security of derived rights claims. Outputs include selected case study reports, a synthesis of research findings, and briefing notes for a policy audience to highlight the main implications of the research for land administration and legislation.

2. Assessing the linkages between customary and local government structures. This theme focuses on the impacts of policies to decentralise government administration on customary, or local systems of land and resource administration. Currently a number of West African countries have recently or are in the process of setting up decentralised local government structures. This raises a number of important questions concerning the competence and legitimacy of different institutions which are meant to manage access to land and other resources, how they represent different interests, management of conflict, and overlapping powers. This area of research has taken a single case study in Ghana, at present.

Other activities and outputs generated by the programme include:

i. Organisation of a workshop in Gorée, Senegal, November 1996, to bring together 20 West African researchers and experts on land tenure issues to discuss and compare experience. Managing land tenure and resource access in West Africa: proceedings of a workshop. IIED/GRET/University of St Louis, Senegal (read the executive summary as a PDF file [18k]).

Edited papers from this workshop have been published as: Dynamics of resource tenure in West Africa, eds. Camilla Toulmin, Philippe Lavigne Delville & Samba Traoré. James Currey, Oxford. Also available in French: Gérer le foncier rural en Afrique de l'Ouest: Dynamiques foncières et interventions publiques, Philippe Lavigne Delville, Camilla Toulmin et Samba Traoré (dir) (2000), Karthala, Paris.

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ii. Land tenure and Resource Access in West Africa: Issues and Opportunities for the next 25 years aimed at illustrating why land policy matters, as well as key issues to consider for the future. The text was reviewed by West African colleagues, and benefited from their inputs and validation.

iii. Land tenure lexicon: A glossary of terms from English and French speaking West Africa, published by IIED 2000. This took a long time to prepare and finalise, and brought home some of the linguistic and conceptual challenges faced when working in English and French. It is based on an earlier French language version.