Suchergebnisse

AbstractIn its quest for development, Zambia is pursuing a land policy that facilitates privatization of customary land. This article investigates the effects of privatization in terms of how it shapes people's behaviour and perception of private tenure and related tenure dynamics. Findings have shown that the appetite to privatize land is growing stronger in peri‐urban areas as land becomes more scarce. Furthermore, privatization of land appears to be a threat to traditional political structures as allegiance and loyalty towards chiefs diminish and tension and struggles over land in peri‐urban areas increase. Similarly, privatization of land erodes people's faith in the role that cultural and ancestral beliefs play in traditional land management. Also, people in rural areas tend to favour private tenure more if 'privatization of customary land' means allocation of land to outsiders. If, by contrast, the phrase is taken to mean communities registering their own land, peri‐urban communities tend to have a stronger desire to register land. Furthermore, rural communities were found to be less informed about land policy and seemed less keen to be involved in land policy processes when compared to peri‐urban residents. However, rural people may have no reason to inform themselves about land policy until they realise that the policy is likely to affect them.

The subject of participation is now at the core of many contemporary development debates. This is promoted within the emerging context of moving away from 'government' to 'governance' as stakeholders are increasingly getting frustrated by governments' continued application of the mundane Decide, Announce, and Defend (DAD) approaches to policy making. However, despite the voluminous amount of literature on participation, there is little scholarly work on whether or how communities, particularly those in rural and periurban locations, participate in land policy processes. This paper examines the extent to which Zambia's land policy process is participatory on the part of rural/periurban communities. The paper argues that despite its potential, genuine participation of rural communities in land policy processes in Zambia is constrained by cultural/social norms that defer the views of rural communities to those of their traditional rulers. On the other hand, periurban communities are excluded from the participatory agenda by the dynamics surrounding struggles over land and proceeds accruing from land transactions. The implication of these findings is that, since participatory requirements/expectations of rural communities may not necessarily be similar to those of periurban communities, there is need to explore the potential of designing 'bespoke' policies that would accommodate the needs of the individual communities.