Land disputes settlement in a plural 'institutional' setting: the case of Arsii Oromo of Kokossa district, Southern Ethiopia

Abstract

Land tenure policies are highly contentious political issues in Ethiopia. Most of the debates dwell on the public/state versus private land ownership options. At present, although 'public' land ownership is the only officially recognized one, people may also ac- quire land through inheritance in the framework of customary rules. One of the outcomes of co-existence(but without integration) of the state instituted land rights and the custom- backed ones is the proliferation of disputes over land. This paper attempts to focus on such land disputes and mechanisms of land disputes resolution, taking the case of Kokossa district of Oromia Regional State in Ethiopia. Since 1991, disputes over land have been rampant in Kokossa district. These disputes appear before plural settings for the subsequent settlement. These plural settings can generally be categorized into two: formal, which refers to structures and associated rules that represent the state at various levels, and informal, that refers to institutions(with associated norms) that can be grouped under such generic terms as indigenous, customary or local. In this paper, I briefly discuss the current state of land disputes in Kokossa district and an- swer the following questions: (1) How do people employ, and sometimes manipulate, the plu- ral settings for disputes settlement? (2) How do these settings for dispute settlement interact? (3) What does the existence of these plural dispute settlement settings mean to the disputants and to the processes of dispute settlement?