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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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    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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    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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    Book (series)
    Land access in the 21st century
    Issues, trends, linkages and policy options
    2006
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    The present paper seeks to cover the key issues, trends, constraints, challenges, knowledge gaps and policy options on a range of dimensions of land access. Land access is broadly defined as the processes by which people individually or collectively gain rights and opportunities to occupy and utilise land (primarily for productive purposes but also other economic and social purposes) on a temporary or permanent basis. These processes include participation in both formal and informal markets, lan d access through kinship and social networks, including the transmission of land rights through inheritance and within families, and land allocation by the state and other authorities with control over land and landowners. While understanding all of these processes and their operation for land users as a whole is of relevance to land policy, the concerns of this paper are: a) the opportunities to access and utilise land for the rural poor, considered as those who are landless or with limited, in sufficient and insecure access to land, and for whom land access is important for a livelihood and/ or for food security; and b) to assess the place of policy and programmatic interventions in influencing processes and opportunities for land access for these groups.

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