There has been for two decades a renewed interest for land issues and property relations in the field of social sciences. As an innovative contribution to this trend, this panel rests upon fine-grained ethnographies of land rights in West African contexts in order to analyse the interplay between moral and material constraints in producing specific patterns of government over people and natural resources.
Property regards social relations between social actors about ‘things’. Land property is a matter of power structures, distribution of wealth, politics of belonging, meaning and knowledge. Governance can be conceived of as an emerging – and continuously reshaped – plural institutional framework regulating access to - and control over land and eventually resulting in order and/or disorder in land affairs. From this non-normative point of view (but for policy makers too), the problem of description (of rights, norms, practices, etc.) reveals a relevant starting-point. A detailed ethnography of property rights and relations can highlight how social relationships regarding access to land are culturally and socially embedded. How they are both morally and materially constrained, respectively by justifying norms and principles and by their inscription in economic systems of activity and in an uneven distribution of resources. Within this framework, mobility plays a specific role, as a structuring feature in the production of social and political order in West Africa.
The papers presented in this panel will revolve around the issue of the complex linkage between mobility and its local anchoring in and through land politics. The centrality of mobility combined with an empirical ethnography of land rights will give us clues for a renewed understanding of the interplay between the governments of people, territories, and resources in Africa. Related issues such as the link between individual interest and collective action (public policy being part of the debate), politics and property, as well as between migration, the rhetoric of authochthony and intra-household relations, will be explored.
State economic and political strategies in Ivory Coast has contributed to transform the tutorat relationship linking customary landowners and migrants - a core institution of the moral economy of African peasant societies -, into a multiplex institution typical of an ‘internal frontier’ situation. In the contemporary context of economic and political crisis, the tutorat crystallises tensions, not only between autochthons and migrants, but between local political societies and the state too, as well as between generations within autochthonous families.
The paper deals with the relationships between intra-family land property rights and land sale/lease markets in Lower Côte d'Ivoire. Special consideration is given to: (i) the impact of intra-family land rights on the demand and the supply in these markets, and on the content of the transactions (e.g., on the type of lease contract), (ii) intra-family tensions and conflicts induced by market transactions, (iii) conflicts in land transactions that are rooted in landowners' intra-family tensions.
The paper offers an analysis of the dynamic and forms of the production of social order among the Winye of Burkina Faso. It shows that it is through the establishment of shrines (earth shrines, bush shrines...) and a diversified regime of ownership (making resources simultaneously common and private) that the polity resolves the paradox of collective action: how to build up a political body on the basis of autonomous individuals?
Central Benin bears the hallmark of a long history of mobility (as a buffer area and a refuge between slave raiding polities until the late XIXth century). Since the 1930s-40s, the nexus of local social relations (and pathways to accumulation) is made of complex linkages between control over labour force, access to land and natural resources, and out- and in-migrations. This contribution will discuss the interplay between the various institutional forms in the co-production of the local government of people and resources.
This paper analyses the administration of communal land in peri-urban Ghana, where - due to a rising demand for residential land - chiefs are leasing communal land to outsiders. Special consideration is given to the ideology, claims and actions of chiefs; local resistance to chiefs' behaviour; and to the constitutive effect of state policy and discourse on local land administration