Communal land reform in Namibia - Implications of Individualisation of land tenure
Final Report Abstract
In an interdisciplinary cooperation between social anthropology, social geography and soil sciences, we analyse land use patterns and land rights regimes in northern Namibia’s communal areas and accompanied the ongoing land registration and land reform process. The project has closely cooperated with the relevant Namibian stakeholders. In a practical perspective, the project’s findings will contribute to a better design of future land rights policies in Namibia and beyond. In basic research, the project’s outcomes broaden our understanding of the social, political and economic role of land, of different land rights regimes and the transitions between them, and of social relations attached to land and transformed by changes in land regulations. The project’s main findings concerned local uses of land on the one hand, the effects of a securitization of traditional tenure regimes by state land boards on the other. We found that productive uses of agricultural land have become economically less important to peasants than uses of land as a means of organising networks of distribution. By providing a major resource of belonging, access to land mediates family redistribution between urban and rural areas. Different land rights - e.g. to crop farming, grazing, hunting, water, rights of passage - have for a long time been regulated informally and partly independent of official land partitioning by traditional authorities. This informal distribution of land rights continues after registration, but the rights of the second degree right holders have been weakened in relation to the official landholders. At the same time, local elites with access to capital intensify their land use, often effectively privatising commonage areas for livestock and crop farming. The land registration process, which was intended to securitize land tenure for poorer households, has in many instances led to a formalisation of larger private landholdings through their transformation into officially registered leaseholds. Overall, the Namibian registration process is fairly successful in securing land rights without fully privatizing them, but it has led to a redistribution of economic and social chances in favour of local elites.
Publications
- 2013. Namibia - eine weitreichende Landfrage. Traditionelle Autoritäten verlieren an Macht. Afrika Bulletin 151, 8-9
Nghitevelekwa, Romie/ Laura Weidmann
- 2014 Traders and trade in colonial Ovamboland, 1925-1990. Elite formation and the politics of consumption under indirect rule and apartheid. Basel, Basel Africa Bibliographies
Dobler, Gregor
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S000197201500073X) - 2016. 'Work and Rhythm’ revisited: Rhythms of peasant work in Northern Namibia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 22(4)
Dobler, Gregor
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12490) - 2016. Multiple Futures? Comparing Approaches to the Future in Africa, China, and Europe. Introduction. Comparativ -Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 26, 2: 7-16
Bröckling, Ulrich/ Gregor Dobler/ Nicola Spakowski
