Synthesizing the dilemmas and prospects for a peri-urban land use management framework: Evidence from Ethiopia

Abstract

The discourse on peri-urban land management frameworks cuts across different scientific domains and different tiers of government. The complexities of constructing effective framework lead to increasing land use conflicts, a consistent high rate of informal settlement patterns, frequent occurrence of illegal land acquisition, inequality in land access, and social unrest in most parts of peri-urban areas. These problems call an effective peri-urban land use management framework. Hence, the main objective of this paper is to conceptualize and synthesize the existing land management frameworks with the view to support the design of a new effective peri-urban land management alternative/framework. The study predominantly relies on a concept-centric literature review followed by a contextualization within the current Ethiopian land management systems. The scientific and grey literature reviewed have been selected based on their connection to the conceptual, methodological and operational discussions on land use intervention and spatial management in peri-urban areas. In addition, government-based land policies, frameworks, and directives are also included in the critical review, and are interpreted qualitatively in a content-wise based on the contemporary land management concepts and paradigms. The preliminary synthesis result of this paper was presented in the Ethiopian national annual land conference in 2019 and inputs were obtained from different stakeholders such as government officials, experts, researchers, and non-state actors. The review signals that the existing peri-urban land management frameworks consisting of the institutional arrangements related to land use intervention and the associated land information infrastructures are missed up, incoherent and far from being integrated. The legal frameworks, data standards, and structures between urban and rural land sectors are also different. These missed up urban and rural dichotomies, the isolated urban and rural land use policies and the different tiers of urban and rural land administration institutions result in a situation where managing peri-urban land use is ineffective. The result signals both a methodological and a technical gap in peri-urban land management in Ethiopia which hampers the effectiveness of decision-makers and practitioners. These limitations call for an urgent need towards an effective peri-urban land management framework/alternative through the alignment of land management indicators and requirements both horizontally and vertically. This could help to realize effective and evidence-based land management practices.