Much of the promise of the good governance agenda in African countries since the 1990s rested on reforms aimed at 'getting the institutions right', sometimes by creating regulatory agencies that would be above the fray of partisan politics. Such 'institutional fix' strategies are often frustrated because the new institutions themselves are embedded in existing stat...

This paper argues for seeing African land tenure regimes as institutional configurations that have been defined and redefined as part of state-building projects. Land regimes have built state authority in the rural areas, fixed populations in rural territories, and organised rural society into political collectivities subject to central control. Land tenure regimes...

The debate over land law reform in Africa has been framed as a referendum on the market ? that is, as a debate pitting advocates of the growth-promoting individualization of property rights against those who call for protecting the livelihoods and subsistence rights of small farmers. This article argues that the prospect of land law reform also raises a complex bun...

Land law reform through registration and titling is often viewed as a technocratic, good-governance step toward building market economies and depoliticising land transactions. In actual practice, however, land registration and titling programmes can be highly partisan, bitterly contentious, and carried forward by political logics that diverge strongly from the mark...