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Land Policy and Land Reform in Sub-Saharan Africa: Consensus, Confusion and Controversy - November 2002
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4. Summary: Consensus and Controversy
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In the first part of the paper, I focused on property rights in land-what most would describe as "land tenure" or "land policy" issues. There is a broad new consensus on analysis and solutions.
The second part looked at the redistribution of property rights in land. We seem to be reaching consensus around the problem-count the number of times you have lately heard people say that "we all agree that the land issue needs to be solved"-but we differ on the solutions. The biggest controversy is on the different approaches to land redistribution (expropriation, negotiation, and community-initiated).
In order not to let the controversy be an excuse for inaction, I suggest that we agree to disagree ex ante on the optimal approach. Instead, we agree on a policy framework which allows a menu of options to be pursued, which we can then evaluate ex post. So rather than debating the pro's and con's of each particular approach, we create a policy arena in which the particular models can show their relative performance in competition with each other. Of course, one would need to agree on some rules of the game, so that the performance of each model can be compared. In the short-term these would be the fiscal cost per beneficiary, the speed of the land transfer, the construction of complementary social and agricultural infrastructure, and the establishment of agricultural production. In the medium-term, the performance measures would include the impact on poverty reduction and agricultural and rural development.
Finally, because the jury is still out on the relative merits of the various approaches, agreeing to disagree, while allowing for learning-by-doing, on the how does not just make sense from a technical perspective. It also makes sense from a political perspective. Clearly, the politics of land reform can be such that talk about "partnerships" is just that-talk. In many cases, the best that can be achieved is a negotiated "deal", an arms-length compromise, between the various stakeholders in Government, the private sector, and civil society. But given the downside risks associated with not addressing the land question, a negotiated deal-formal or informal-will be a tremendous improvement over in-action caused by land reform's political sensitivity.
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