Resource information
Land Tenure Working Paper 13: Secure land rights are crucial if local populations are to engage actively as stakeholders in rural development. The task of identifying and protecting local rights in most African countries faces several major challenges like incorporating many different local land management systems within a single land management framework; devising a system that can adequately record dynamic and shifting patterns of land use that incorporate a range of de facto private, individualised customary rights and areas of common use and, finally, coming up with a technical approach that is cost effective yet still accurate enough to establish borders and other features on official maps. In this context conventional western concepts of discrete, fixed land holding units – ‘the farm’ - are entirely inappropriate. They work for the relatively small number of private investor land holdings, but are of little use for registering customary rights rooted in shifting agriculture systems and the use of a wide range of resources through the year. The community delimitation model which is the subject of this volume has grown out of the experience of Mozambique and its widely acclaimed 1997 Land Law. The policy and legal development process has been supported by FAO from its inception in the pre-policy research stage, through to policy and legal development, and now implementation. It offers an excellent example of how to create the policy and legal environment within which effective rights delimitation can take place.
