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Statutory recognition of customary land rights in Africa

An investigation into the best practices for lawmaking and implementation












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    Document
    Improving tenure security for the poor in Africa: Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda - Case Study
    Formalization and its prospects
    2006
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    This paper identifies the key issues of land tenure security for the rural poor, vulnerable and marginalized in the East African countries of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The report finds that most of these issues are common across the three countries, both in terms of the challenges that the communities face and imperatives that inform policy interventions and responses. In all three countries, customary and statutory systems operate side by side and, in all three, there is a tendency for policy and legislative frameworks to privilege the modern systems of property relations over traditional ones, even as national rhetoric indicates recognition and support for the latter. The paper concludes that formalization has not always benefited the rural poor. Instead, an elite minority has tended to benefit from reforms while the majority of the poor and vulnerable end up worse off as institutions and systems that supported their livelihoods and gave them a sense of security are marginalized and replaced by modern institutions.
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    Book (series)
    Changes in in "customary" land tenure systems in Africa 2006
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    Across rural Africa, land legislation struggles to be properly implemented, and most resource users gain access to land on the basis of local land tenure systems. Although such systems claim to draw their legitimacy from “tradition” and are commonly referred to as “customary” (and for easier reading we will follow this terminology), they have been profoundly changed by decades of colonial and post-independence government interventions, and are continually adapted and reinterpreted as a result of diverse factors like cultural interactions, population pressures, socio-economic change and political processes. Such land tenure systems are extremely diverse, possibly changing from village to village. This diversity is the result of a range of cultural, ecological, social, economic and political factors.
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    Book (series)
    Pacific land tenures: new ideas for reform 2008
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    Land reform is never easy but, after many decades without much change in their land laws, there are signs of a mood for change in the countries of the Pacific. With legal systems which place great emphasis on custom, traditional authority and customary land tenures, land policies and legislation in the Pacific must steer a middle course between the need to encourage growth and economic development, and the fundamental importance of protecting the social, political and cultural values reflected b y customary land tenures. Their land systems aim to protect land ownership at the customary group level, and land use at the individual land developer level.

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