Piloting adaptation: The challenge of developing African indigenous land tenure to meet new needs

Dr John W. Bruce, senior counsel at the World Bank

Organization: in collaboration with the Van Vollenhoven Institute of Law, Governance and Development (Leiden), and Department of Legal Pluralism of the University of Amsterdam.

Prior to the first half of the 1990s, most international donor policy on land in Africa either treated customary tenure as irrelevant to development processes or as an obstacle to development, unfit for the needs of actors in modern economies. The viewpoint is still common, and popular models still often emphasize the need to formalize customary and informal tenure systems. But by the mid-1990s the World Bank and other donor institutions began to recognize that customary tenure systems were dynamic and sometimes did have the potential to adjust to new needs. African governments might think in terms of adapting their traditional tenure systems instead of replacing them with western tenure forms.

Over the past ten years, a number of countries in the region have been attempting to work with this proposition, including Ghana, Ivory Coast, Malawi, South Africa, Mozambique and others. The lecture will examine and evaluate that experience, and discuss directions forward.