WHY REJECT CUSTOMARY LAND PRIVATISATION
Most of the world’s land is still stewarded by communities under customary systems. Billions of people rely on communally managed farmland, pasture, forests and savannahs for their livelihoods.
This collective management of resources is viewed in the colonial or capitalist economic model as an obstacle to individual wealth creation and private profit.
PhD research provides key inputs to strengthen our knowledge base on land access, land governance and challenges related to development, crisis and resilience. This is why LANDac reserves a special place in the programme to discuss their contributions.
The world has changed in the year and a half since Habitat for Humanity closed Solid Ground, a 4-year global advocacy campaign to increase access to land for shelter. The significant impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout are still unfolding. The Solid Ground campaign helped to change policies and systems to improve access to land for shelter for over 12 million people.
Across much of Africa, land is not allocated and inherited under statutory law but through customary practices rooted in kinship. In patrilineal systems, land belongs to men’s families and is inherited through the paternal line.
In Zambia, many ethnic groups follow a matrilineal system, where women own land and pass it down the maternal line.
By Ben Cousins, Emeritus Professor, Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), University of the Western Cape
* This article originally appeared in the The Conversation on 22 June 2021
* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Malcolm Childress is co-director of Prindex and executive director of Global Land Alliance
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