Abstract
The formalisation of customary land rights in Africa, as an alternative to their privatisation, is gaining increasing attention from scholars and policy makers. In this article, we use findings from Petauke district in eastern Zambia to discuss the impact of such reforms, where so-called traditional landholding certificates were implemented by the Petauke District Land Alliance in 2010. Based on interviews with farmers, chiefs and the Alliance, we argue that the certificates have reinforced, rather than reversed, both commodification of land and increased inequality of access to land. The main reason is that the certificates provide chiefs and lineage seniors with an efficient tool to further impose institutionally induced scarcity, thereby failing to provide already vulnerable groups with more secure rights to land.
Highlights
‘All land is marketed; all land has value, all land. [...] Suddenly chiefs started to get allowances’.1 This quotation refers to the developments in customary areas in eastern Zambia in recent decades
We use findings from Petauke district in eastern Zambia to discuss the impact of such reforms, where so-called traditional landholding certificates were implemented by the Petauke District Land Alliance in 2010
The argument depends on a fundamental assumption: that customary land rights provide fairly equitable systems, in which the right to land is distributed without the involvement of monetary transactions
Summary
ISSN: 0305-7070 (Print) 1465-3893 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjss[20]. Traditional Landholding Certificates in Zambia: Preventing or Reinforcing Commodification and Inequality?.
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