Plural Inheritance Laws, Practices and Emergent Types of Property—Implications for Updating the Land Register

Abstract

Sustaining up-to-date land registers in the global south is an increasing concern for the protection of tenure, development of land markets and long-term sustainable planning practices and policy. It requires both the prompt reporting of land transfers and also an alignment between prevailing land rights and official recording systems. The literature on land registration highlights some effects of inheritance practices on the land register and land development. Taking these studies a step further, our research investigates how such effects evolve from the rules that guide inheritance practices using a qualitative research approach. We found that normative practices of inheritance mostly lead to communal property through numerous processes which have implications on the timing and likelihood of possible registration. Also, we found that the significance of land and buildings in the social context transcends the physical property per se and includes dimensions of spirituality and social identity. Our findings explain the misalignment between the official and social logics of property and suggest likelihood of non-reporting. We conclude that flexibility is required in recording communal rights in rural areas and that the transition to individual property is more likely in peri-urban and urban areas where the social logics of property have broken.

Evaluating Some Major Assumptions in Land Registration: Insights from Ghana’s Context of Land Tenure and Registration

“…In this section, we evaluate each of the assumptions outlined in Section 2. We do this through a meta-interpretation of our research conducted in Ghana between 2016 and 2019 on land transfer and registration, particularly the practices of holding, transferring, and registering inherited property [26][27][28]. By interpreting our findings through the lens of the three assumptions, we explain in the following how the outlined assumptions relate to the Ghanaian context in order to illustrate both convergences and divergences.…”

“…In this sense, the ability of a landholder to undertake land registration, say, at a one-stop-shop, is only the "tip of the iceberg", and represents a myriad of exchanges and interactions between varied actors in the governance scene. For example, many studies have found that females in many contexts of tenure are denied or given weaker land rights based on customs, social constructs, and local politics [26,34,53,54], and this is relatively worse for females with low levels of literacy [14]. Such studies explicate the position that access is partly determined by socio-cultural practices of land holding aside administrative ease.…”

“…We then put each theme into a simple expression that reflects conventional land registration thought as shown in the literature. Moreover, through our previous studies in Ghana over the past four years [26][27][28], we used interviews to gather information on existing land rights, landholdings, transfers, and practices of registration from landholders, traditional authorities, and actors within the hybrid administrative scene (both customary and statutory). Ghana's land registration started in the colonial era and evolved as a deed registration system until 1986 when the Land Title Registration Law (PNDCL 152) was passed and piloted for a limited part of Ghana alongside the existing deed registration system [29].…”

Innovating Along the Continuum of Land Rights Recognition: Meridia’s “Documentation Packages” for Ghana

“…The hybridity within the institutions (i.e. the customary and statutory) emerges from the evolved land tenure patterns in Ghana [12,13]. In precolonial Gold Coast (modern day Ghana), customary institutions had control over all land [14,15], but the situation changed during the colonial regime when some land was annexed by the colonial administration for administrative purposes [16].…”

“…For example after getting a vantage point to pick the coordinates of a boundary, one still has to wait for three minutes for farmlands and 15 minutes for residential properties. Although the land registration laws provide for the registration of diverse land rights, only leaseholds are mostly registered by the Lands Commission due to limitations in administrative capacity, multiple interpretations of land laws and the influences of multiple normative frames [12,13].…”