Tenure Responsive Land-Use Planning as a Tool for Improving Quality of Life: The Perspective of Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Land tenure security is a condition commonly associated with land-use and ownership. Land-use planning is a process often applied to (re)set socioeconomic and environmental conditions to enable sustainable use of land. Together, land tenure security and land-use planning are powerful development tools because they influence the quality of lives of land users (and owners) and those of communities in general. However, they are often implemented in isolation from each other in many developing countries. Empirical studies carried out in selected countries have shown that where the two are combined as a development intervention, their outcomes generate quality of life improvements. This chapter argues for a land management intervention that combines land tenure security and land-use planning—otherwise called, tenure responsive land-use planning—as a path to improving the quality of life of people in sub-Saharan Africa. The chapter uses the narratives about quality of life by African experts to draw its conceptual (and contextual) meaning about quality of life in the region. It identifies eleven Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are primarily land-based in implementation—provides localised indicators (with examples of possible data for measuring the localised SDG indicators—and suggestions on how a Tenure Responsive Land-Use Planning (TR-LUP) process can play a role in actualising them.