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Fractured Governance and Local Frictions: The Exclusionary Nature of a Clandestine Land Market in Southern Zambia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2011

Nicholas J. Sitko
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Abstract

This article explores the ways in which efforts to expand private land tenure, coupled with the continued centrality of customary land administration in Zambia, produce a fractured system of land governance in which localized markets for land emerge but are forced to operate in a clandestine manner. Using ethnographic and archival data sources, I argue that despite the historical and contemporary relationship between land rights and economic ‘development’, the clandestine nature of land markets in rural Zambia tends to (re)produce many of the social ills that ‘development’ seeks to resolve. Using a case study of a clandestine market for land in a Tonga-speaking region of southern Zambia, this article shows how these markets undermine women's rights to land, while allowing for the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few.

Cet article explore la manière dont les efforts de développer le foncier privé, conjugués à la centralité persistante de l'administration foncière coutumière en Zambie, produisent un système fracturé de gouvernance foncière dont émergent des marchés fonciers localisés contraints de fonctionner dans la clandestinité. À partir de sources de données ethnographiques et d'archives, l'article soutient qu'en dépit de la relation historique et contemporaine entre les droits fonciers et le « développement » économique, la nature clandestine des marchés fonciers dans les zones rurales de la Zambie a tendance à (re)produire beaucoup des maux sociaux que le « développement » cherche à résoudre. En se basant sur l'étude de cas d'un marché foncier clandestin dans une région de langue tonga du Sud de la Zambie, l'article montre comment ces marchés affaiblissent les droits des femmes à la terre, tout en permettant la concentration des richesses et du pouvoir dans les mains de quelques-uns.

Type
Research Articles
Information
Africa , Volume 80 , Special Issue 1: Interpreting Land Markets in Africa , February 2010 , pp. 36 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2010

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