Informal Land Management in Tanzania and the Misconception about its Illegality

ABSTRACT

Tanzania represents one of the countries with the fastest growing urban centres in Sub-Saharan Africa. Rapid urbanisation amidst acute public resource deficits has given rise to peculiar urban housing land development patterns inexperienced before. Over the past three decades, policy makers and researchers have consistently witnessed poor performance of formal (public) land management in providing land for housing, registering titles and land transfers, regulating access to and use of urban land as well as providing basic infrastructure services. The deficits of the public sector have, however, been partly compensated by increasing informal sector initiatives.
While acknowledging the inevitable role the formal sector has in urban land management, this paper reports on the actors, norms, procedures and competence inherent in informal land regularisation. It demonstrates with empirical evidence from the settlements recently studied in Tanzania the active role accepted by some Subward (Mtaa) leaders and organised community groups in authenticating and registering land rights, arbitrating land disputes, checking land-use development and spatial orderliness and providing basic services.
It is argued that the "illegality" notion that is often times used by bureaucrats and policy makers to underscore the status and characteristics of informal housing land development is a misconception that largely seems to stem from shear ignorance on or unawareness about the potentials, mechanisms and norms underlying the informal housing land development sector. The paper points out the urgent need for policy reform necessary to reconcile and make the formal and informal sectors complement each other.

ESF/N-AERUS: International workshop - Leuven and Brussels, Belgium, 23-26 May 2001

N-AERUS: Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanisation in the South
http://www.naerus.net