Disentangling intra-kinship property rights in land: a contribution of economic ethnography to land economics in Africa

Abstract

The issue of property rights in land has taken central stage in research in institutional economics regarding developing countries. In the African context, numerous studies have dealt with the individualization and commodification of customary land rights. The issue of intra-family land rights tends however to remain a black box, regarding the content of the bundle of rights and duties, the identification of the right holders and the transfers of rights within the family. Drawing from the insights of institutional economics as well as economic and legal anthropology, this paper presents a conceptual framework to rigorously explore the issue of land rights through an economic ethnography.

Securing rural land transactions in Africa. An Ivorian perspective

“…This person usually has the right to manage the land, which empowers him to allocate cultivation rights to family members, and to assign parcels to non-family members on a temporary basis. However, he rarely has the right to sell, as this is a matter for the family council (Colin, 2008b). Thus, any contract signed by an individual raises the question of whether the various rights holders (i.e.…”

Sharecropping in Non-traditional Agro-export Production: The Abougnon Contract for Pineapple Cultivation in Côte d’Ivoire

“…Actors who leased out land under an abougnon contract in 2002 generally did not get themselves involved in pineapple production. They were sometimes relatives of landowners (spouses, children), who obtained the right to transfer some land from the family estate to an abougnon (Colin, 2008b). Women accounted for 40 per cent of these cases.…”

“…In the case under study, this possibility is constrained by the type of rights they hold on the family land (Colin, 2008b). The predominant means of access to land appropriation is inheritance of a family estate, of which the heir is an administrator rather than an owner in the strict sense of the word.…”

Innovations in Land Rights Recognition, Administration, and Governance

“…Recent empirical works (Chauveau, Jacob, Colin, etc. ) have enriched the grid and shown that it is operational to identify and describe the "bundles of rights" really held by the various stakeholders, even within family groups holding lineage-based land tenure heritages (see Colin 2005 andColin 2008). …”

“…Recent work on land tenure and on the "ethnography of land rights" (Colin 2006(Colin , 2008 helps to explain the issue of customary rights and allows describing precisely the bundles of rights relevant in a given context. It shows that PFRs' legitimate ambition to record land rights "as they are in the field" is quite contradictory with the concept of rights in terms of "customary ownership" and challenges the current methodologies for land rights surveys.…”