Growing conflict and pressures from a plethora of competing internal and external interests in Tanzania's land are leading to the generation of new policies to set the terms and conditions for accessing and using land. Parameters are being prescribed for a host of key players including foreign and domestic investors, village and non-village rural residents, urban and non-urban cultivators and pastoralists. One issue is the continued erosion of village power over land issues. In August 2016, Tanzania released the first draft of a new national land policy. It proposed changes to the current two-tier system of titling distinguishing leasehold properties (typically in urban areas) from village properties (reserved for village residents), and to circumvent the power of village governments over land issues by instituting a central government-appointed commission to oversee rural land. In November, 2016, the government issued another draft. Some government officials claimed the first was a fraud. The second draft was less radical in its circumvention of village jurisdiction over land issues yet pointed to the same extant problems used to justify the more extreme changes in the first version. This raises the question of whether the government will use the final policy to produce operational orders along the lines of SPILL (Strategic Plan for Implementation of Land Laws), which was used to implement previous land laws, as well as revise existing land legislation and determine how revisions to the constitution approach land matters. We seek to identify the powers and vested interests underlying national land policy changes.

In many African states, traditional leaders play a pivotal role at the local level. They allocate land, judge minor conflicts or preserve cultural matters. In few countries, however, the role of traditional leaders is formalized. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, only 23 countries constitutionally recognize the role of traditional leaders in one way or another. Even fewer countries provide a formalized role (for example mandatory consultations) of traditional leaders in the national decision-making process. Nevertheless, traditional leaders often use their authority to informally influence policies that concern them. Thus, the question arises, whether it is worth the effort to provide traditional leaders with a formal role in decision-making.

In this paper, we investigate how the institutionalized state-traditional interface relates to the national decision-making process. We compare land policy-making in Zambia, where the de jure state-traditional relationship is rather harmonious and well-specified to Malawi, where the legal framework on traditional governance is hitherto rather disruptive. Drawing on 203 interviews with traditional leaders, government officials, experts, activists in social society, and (ordinary) village members, we find evidence that unambiguous legal provisions that bestow traditional leaders with the formal voice at national level actually promote transparent and effective decision-making at national level, since traditional leaders refrain from compromising decision-making.

This paper analyses the Tanzanian national land policy reform process through the lens of public participation. First, it highlights the rushed nature of the 'consultative workshops,' which took place in eight zones across the country in April and May 2016. It also discusses the lack of clarity in the drafting process, manifested for instance by the circulation of a so-called 'fake draft,' which threw initial civil society coordination efforts into disarray. At the same time, it questions the exclusive nature of the consultative process, particularly how larger and more established non-governmental organizations received preferential access, and more importantly, how the vast majority of the citizens were pre-empted from participating, given the absence of a Swahili draft. Second, the paper examines how the reform process revealed an important fault line dividing Tanzanian civil society. At the heart of civil society struggles for land and agrarian justice is an important yet unresolved question of whether and how one should engage with and react to large-scale land acquisitions. The divisions among various civil society actors not only stem from their individual political differences, but also from their idiosyncratic relationships to the state, donor agencies, and their particular agendas on land governance. In sum, a critical examination of the national land policy reform process complicates the agrarian question in contemporary Tanzania; the question is not simply whether and how capital takes hold of agriculture, but how and in what ways different actors vie for control over rural land and livelihoods, and with what consequences.

Women's right to access and own land is one of the conspicuous markers that differentiate rural and urban Swaziland. Swaziland's exceptionality in Africa is its rigid attachment to its culture and tradition underscored by its pervasive patriarchal attitudes which exclude women from land ownership. Land reforms envisaged in the 1968 and 2005 post-independence constitutions and Swaziland's commitment to international conventions of gender equality are laudable but not far reaching in enough in terms of women's rights to own land. There is stiff resistance from the Chiefs in rural Swaziland to allow women to acquire and own land without passing through their husbands or sons. In the urban setting, it is a different scenario were increasing court litigation and the use of formal structures such as Swaziland's Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and City Councils have allowed women to legally acquire land in their names. This has created jurisdictional conflicts between the formal structures and traditional leaders who are still very relevant in Swaziland. Using the Swaziland Urban Development Project as a case study, this paper examines the development of the engendered bifurcated land ownership in Swaziland and the its concomitant jurisdictional conflicts. Employing qualitative methodology and the conceptual lens of institutional multiplicity, the article concludes that patriarchal attitudes and rival jurisdictional claims restrict women's access to land exclusively to urban centres and this impedes development.

The 1960s saw the first efforts to modernize rural agriculture, at the agency of the South African colonial regime. The aim was to transform the so-called traditional socio-economic background of the indigenous people in the then South West Africa, now Namibia. To achieve this, the Commission of Inquiry into South West Africa Affairs, well known as the Odendaal Commission was undertaken in 1962. The Odendaal Commission was to provide "recommendations on a comprehensive five year plan for the accelerated development of the various non-whites groups of SWA" (Republic of South Africa 1964:3). One of the recommendations was to modernize agriculture in central-north Namibia, with a view to convert "an existing subsistence economy to an exchange economy" (South West Africa 1966:94). More than six decades later - but under a different dispensation - the independent government of the Republic of Namibia with support from international development agencies revived the efforts to modernize agriculture. The new conception is commercialization of land-based production. This article traces the trajectories of efforts to modernize agriculture in Namibia's rural areas, with a particular focus on central-north Namibia. It analyses the changes brought about by this process, the experiences of the subsistence farmers and the overall reception from socio-economic to cultural perspectives. As is, farming is a difficult business. It is heavily subsidized by incomes from elsewhere, mostly incomes from salaries earned in urban centers. Thus in discussion of modernization of rural agriculture, the interface between the rural and the urban remain detectable.