The Persistence of the Commons: Economic Theory and Community Decision-Making on Land Tenure in Voi, Kenya.
Projects to secure land rights for the urban poor have been implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa for thirty years. A recurrent issue is providing sustainable land tenure for settlement residents/project beneficiaries. Commonly, individual titles have been used. Often recipients sell their land rights t...
| Publicado en: | African Studies Quarterly Vol. 9; no. 3; pp. 2 - 31 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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African Studies Quarterly
Spring2007
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=52222717&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 52222717 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 21522448 AV6 jtl: African Studies Quarterly issn: 21522448 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Spring2007 vid: 9 iid: 3 pid: 18480 pub: African Studies Quarterly artinfo: ui: 52222717 ppf: 2 ppct: 29 formats: fmt: @attributes: type: P size: 592KB tig: atl: The Persistence of the Commons: Economic Theory and Community Decision-Making on Land Tenure in Voi, Kenya. aug: au: BASSETT, ELLEN M. affil: Assistant Professor, Urban and Regional Planning Program, Michigan State University su: Commons Economics Land tenure Rural land use Decision making Kenya sug: subj: Kenya Commons Economics Land tenure Rural land use Decision making ab: Projects to secure land rights for the urban poor have been implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa for thirty years. A recurrent issue is providing sustainable land tenure for settlement residents/project beneficiaries. Commonly, individual titles have been used. Often recipients sell their land rights to more affluent city dwellers, exacerbating the growth of slums. Policymakers are investigating alternative tenure forms including community-based institutions. This paper presents a project in Kenya in which the Community Land Trust (CLT) model was used to provide tenure security as part of a settlement improvement project. The paper seeks to understand community decision-making on land tenure and why settlement residents selected a group or community-based title option over individual title when one theoretical perspective on property rights in Africa, the Evolutionary Theory of Land Rights, would predict a preference for individual ownership. The case study was constructed from qualitative interviews with settlement residents, coupled with informant interviews and document/archival analysis. The paper argues that Voi residents' decision to hold land together reflected their perception of themselves as a powerless group vulnerable to losing land to outsiders. The community, moreover, had a history of shared action to defend their land holdings that served to establish a level of trust which made the group tenure a possibility. The paper concludes that the decision to hold land together was entirely rational - a collective institution better served to protect their individual self-interest than the individual institution predicted by the ETLR. The Voi case underlines the notion that "history matters" in institutional analysis - to really understand institutional change we must understand the embedded context of decision-makers. The study also supports the perspective that there is no one-size fits all approach to land tenure. Policymakers should strive to provide a range of tenure options that can fit the context of the specific community. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of African Studies Quarterly is the property of African Studies Quarterly and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: African Studies Quarterly holder: African Studies Quarterly dt: @attributes: year: 2007 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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