Land Tenure and Resource Access in Africa Land Tenure and Administration in Africa: Lessons of Experience and Emerging Issues

30 Adopting land policies and laws for effective, equitable and sustainable land use 30 Implementing land legislation and policy 31 Reassessing mechanisms for land redistribution 31 Putting land in a broader picture 32 Understanding the political dynamics of policy processes 32 Strengthening civil society organisations 32 Identifying areas for further research 33 REFERENCES 34 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study was prepared for the CUREMIS II programme of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), and was presented in June 2003 at a workshop organised in Accra by the same programme. It capitalises on previous work by the authors, particularly an earlier study on land tenure in West Africa prepared for the FAO, as well as on other IIED research programmes. The authors would like to thank all those who provided input and comments to this work, particularly the participants at the Accra workshop. Funding for the publication of the study has been provided by SIDA and DANIDA Lorenzo Cotula is a Research Associate of the Drylands Programme at IIED, based in Edinburgh. Prior to joining IIED in 2002, he worked in two Italian non-governmental organisations as well as on several research projects at the Legal Office of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). His work has focused on the link between legal institutions (international, national/statutory and customary) and development processes, covering a wide range of issues (land tenure and access to natural resources, gender, international trade, human rights). Dr Camilla Toulmin became Director of IIED in February 2004. She was previously Director of the Drylands Programme at IIED until 2003, when she became a Senior Fellow. An economist by training, Dr Toulmin has worked mainly in francophone West Africa, on agricultural, pastoral, and tenure issues. She joined IIED in 1987, to set up the Drylands Programme, having formerly worked for ILRI and ODI. She wrote her doctorate on livestock-crop relations in central Mali, focusing particularly on the importance of manure for assuring good yields of millet, and broader issues of household strategies to ensure their longer term security. She was a member of the International Expert Panel supporting the preparation of the Convention to Combat Desertification. Ced Hesse became Director of the Drylands Programme at IIED in 2003, having joined the programme as a Research Associate in 1997. Previously he worked for Oxfam in Mali and Burkina Faso on food security and early warning programmes, and was a co-founder of the Arid …