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Theme: Legal empowerment for secure resource access

Legal empowerment to secure local land rights

In much of rural Africa, most people depend on access to land for their livelihoods. Secure land rights are important for agricultural development, poverty reduction and sustainable land management. But in many parts of Africa, land rights are weak or unclear, and are undermined by overlapping land claims and intense competition. This is partly due to legislation that is not tailored on local contexts, or not properly implemented; and to lack of access to the law and to legal institutions for rural groups. Law reform and implementation coupled with better legal access can help secure local land rights.

Over the past few years, several African countries have adopted innovative legislation aimed at granting local resource users greater tenure security. For a review of this wave of law reform and of its implementation, read Land tenure and administration in Africa: Lessons of experience and emerging issues and Better land access for the rural poor.

Recording and protecting land rights
A key issue is how to document and legally protect local land rights. Most legal systems provide for a land registration process and grant legal protection to registered land titles. However, lengthy, costly and cumbersome registration processes are inaccessible to the rural poor, and are often manipulated by local elites who register land in their name to the detriment of poorer groups.

A three-year research programme has investigated the features that institutions and processes for land registration must have for registration to work for the poor; and promoted in-country and international policy debate on options to secure the land rights of poorer and more vulnerable groups. For more on this programme, read Can land registration work for the poor?

On the specific challenges of securing collective resource rights, read Securing the commons in an era of privatisation: Policy and legislative challenges [Securing the commons paper 10].

Building on local practice
Land legislation is scarcely implemented in much of rural Africa. Land relations are largely governed by “customary” (but continuously evolving) rules. It is now generally recognised that land legislation must build on local concepts and practice, rather than importing one-size-fits-all models. Therefore, a good understanding of complex local resource tenure systems is key to designing appropriate legislation.

For a study on local land tenure systems, read Changes in `customary' land tenure systems in Africa. For a paper on the role of action research in bridging national legal frameworks and local tenure systems, read Can research help bridge the gap between local rules and national legal frameworks? The case of local conventions for natural resource management in the Sahel (pdf 116 KB).

This body of work on securing local land rights is linked to our work on Land rights and tenure. Also, a large number of papers tackling land rights issues were published as part of our Issue Paper series. Click here to view a full list and to download them.

For more information on this work, contact Lorenzo Cotula at lorenzo.cotula@iied.org

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