Regularising “informality”: turning the legitimate into legal? Land reform and emerging urban land markets in post-Socialist Mozambique

Land has been nationalised in Mozambique since Independence in 1975, despite the new 1990 Constitution which specified a market economy. Recent national land reform in 1997 maintained state custodianship of land, with usufruct titles, however land is becoming increasingly commodified – especially in the capital city, Maputo. This paper draws on research undertaken by the author in 1998/99 which identified the emerging urban land markets, and more recent research in late 2000, which has investigated the nature of “informal” land access and the impact of the emerging residential land markets on the urban poor. The weak nature of the state and the market in Mozambique and resulting unregulated speculative market activity in urban land is tending to lead to exclusive benefit of the political, administrative and economic elites and undermine any benefit of public land ownership for the urban poor majority. In this situation informal land management has more legitimacy than the formal system, as is reflected in central government’s promotion of urban land reform in Mozambique, where the stated objective is to “turn the legitimate into legal”. This approach assumes simplistic concepts of legality, which are based on the binary and negative concepts of “informal” as opposed to “formal”, and not on cultural attitudes to land. In addition, given the weakness of the state and the limited interests of the formal market, this approach runs the risk of further exacerbating the situation of the poor unless it draws on the resources of civil society. This paper reviews the conceptual and practical bases for alternative urban land management in Mozambique, with broader relevance for urban land access for the poor in the developing world.