Land Governance and Conflict in West Africa through Interdisciplinary Empirical Lenses

Abstract

This working paper addresses the following central questions: (i) How does the commodification of land challenge distinctions between rural and urban spaces? (ii) What new forms of differentiation emerge from commodification, for example the alienation of land markets from land governance regimes? (iii) How does commodification help our understanding of the resilience of custom and egalitarianism? (iv) How useful are property rights frameworks, whether customary, statutory or new forms of tenure, for land management and sustainability? Four authors, members of the MIASA Interdisciplinary Fellow Group (IFG 6) on Land Governance, applied ethnographic and cross-sectional research methods to examine case studies in Ghana, Mali and Senegal. This research contributes to an understanding of the perceptions, discourses and practices relating to land commodification and conflicts, as well as the way in which endogenous perceptions of access to land in West Africa are expressed and adapt to changing circumstances.