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Land Rights and Land Conflicts in Africa: The Benin case Country policy study

Pierre-Yves Le Meur, Groupe de recherche et d’échanges technologiques

October 2006

Research report, Field mission, 16th to 31th March 2006 Groupe de recherche GRET-DIIS, for the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs et d’échanges technologiques

Groupe de recherche et d’échanges technologiques 211-213 rue La Fayette 75010 Paris, France Tél. : 33 (0)1 40 05 61 61 - Fax : 33 (0)1 40 05 61 10 [email protected] - http://www.gret.org

Contents

CONTENTS ...... 1

I. INTRODUCTION: THE CONTEXT ...... 3

II. APPROACH & METHOD...... 5 1. The study...... 5 2. Land governance and land conflict ...... 6 3. Policy orientation ...... 7

III. THE NATIONAL CONTEXT ...... 8 1. Political economy: extraversion and the development rent ...... 8 2. Regional/ethnic politics and institutional pluralism...... 9 3. Access to land, citizenship and boundaries...... 11

IV. LEGAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE FRAMEWORK ...... 13 1. Colonial origin and weak definition...... 13 2. Recent and current reforms ...... 15 2.1 A delayed decentralisation...... 15 2.2 The future rural land law ...... 16 2.3 Development aid and the legislative rent...... 17

V. REGIONAL SITUATIONS AND CASE STUDIES ...... 18 1. Zoning ...... 18 2. The conservation issue: state forests, national parks, and conflict management in Northern Benin...... 19 2.1 Laws, projects and decentralisation...... 19 2.2 Boundaries, displacements and conflicts...... 21 2.3 Alliance building, institutional mediations and consultation forums ...... 23 3. Decentralisation, boundaries and conflicting interests in south Benin ...... 24 3.1 The periurban issue...... 24 3.2 Development projects, expropriations and blurred rights and boundaries ...... 25 3.3 Environment, urbanisation and tourism...... 27 4. Natural resource management, rural migrations and customary institutions in Central Benin ...... 28 4.1 Environmental interventions, customary institutions and localised initiatives...... 28 4.2 Rural migrations, autochthony and locality...... 29

VI. POLICY ISSUES AND PROPOSALS ...... 32 1. Pluralism, uncertainty and exclusion ...... 32 1.1 The state as a factor of uncertainty ...... 32 Land rights and land conflicts in Benin P.-Y. Le Meur, GRET-DIIS, October 2006

1.2 The exclusion issue...... 32 2. Tracks & proposals ...... 33 2.1 Knowledge diffusion, networking and building a common view...... 33 2.2 Working with customary institutions...... 34 2.3 Decentralisation and the periurban interface ...... 35 2.4 Getting out of the short-term and segmentary logic of development: what about a national policy? ...... 36 2.5 The supra-national level...... 37

ANNEX 1 – INFORMANTS ...... 38

ANNEX 2 – ACRONYMS...... 40

ANNEX 3 – BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 42

Preface This report composes part of a policy study on Land Rights and Land Conflicts in Africa carried out for the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and coordinated by the Danish Insti- tute for International Studies, Copenhagen. The results of the study are presented in three reports: ‘A review of Issues and Experiences’; ‘The Tanzania Case’ and this report pre- senting the results of the Benin case study. The opinions expressed in the report are those of the author and do not necessarily correspond with those of the Danish Ministry of For- eign Affairs.

2 Land rights and land conflicts in Benin P.-Y. Le Meur, GRET-DIIS, October 2006

I. INTRODUCTION: THE CONTEXT

Benin has experienced in 1989-1991 a peaceful transition toward democracy that revealed very innovative as well, from the institutional point of view (Bierschenk & Olivier de Sardan 1998, Banégas 2003). This turn was furthermore consolidated through several democratic changeovers of ruling political coalitions and the implementation of a political and administrative decentralisation. The first communal polls took place in 2002-2003. However, particularly as far as land policy is concerned, the current political situation remains a situation of transition. As long as there is no election at village level, decentralisation remains uncompleted. The rural land law has not yet passed the parliamentary step and there is no urban land law. The current context is of course very important if we are to understand what is at stake in Be- nin around access to, and the control of land and natural resources. However, in order to grasp current dynamics, we need to put them in historical perspective. The national trajectory of Benin bears the hallmark of two structural features: the strong extraversion of the political economy (export crops, development aid, transborder trade) and the importance of regionalism in national politics. Those two dimensions are of major influence as far as land rights, land conflicts and land policy are concerned. We will see the importance of the development aid in the conception and implementation of environment and forest policy and natural resources management. This is obvious in the case of areas located in the northern part of the country, around the national parks of W and Pend- jari as well as in the case of state forests development. Regional politics (which does not equate to ethnic politics) is very crucial in terms of the linkages between the politics of belonging and access to landed resources. The politicisation of land issues along identity lines is mainly observed in zones of agrarian colonisation, especially in central Benin. The dichotomies between firstcomers versus latecomers and autochthons versus migrants are instrumental in accessing land and resources. Ethnic cleavages play of course a role but identities are multiple and beside ethnic belonging, clan, generation, religion, occupation or gender can be dominant alone or combined, according to the social and political context. Ethnic identity is not a primordial nor is it given for all time (Peters 1998: 401). A third factor we must take into account is the position of so-called ‘traditional’ or ‘customary’ authorities as regard land issues. The post-colonial trajectory of chieftaincy in Benin is one of relative exclusion from the national political arena (Bako-Arifari & Le Meur 2003). This is not the case at the local level where the chiefs often reveal key players in conflicts settlement. The recovery of traditional authorities is an outcome of the democratisation of the 1990s and the current tensions around forest and conservation areas combined with the participatory discourse paradoxically offer new rooms for their involvement in local arenas. Traditional chiefs do not necessarily work against the communal authorities born out of the decentralisation, however. The institutional, moral and legal pluralism that structures the land issue in Benin, as elsewhere in the world, can influence local situations in both ways, toward conflict, fragmentation and the permanent reopening of cases, or toward compromises and

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appeasement. From a historical and strategic point of view, these two tendencies are not mutu- ally exclusive, as it is the very possibility to reopen a case later and/or elsewhere that contributes to peace through provisional arrangements. Pluralism as a discursive resource is moral as well as it implies ideas of justice and equity. A stake here is the compromise between legality and legitimacy (Lavigne Delville 1998), peace and justice (Hagberg 1998). The historical perspective also helps understand boundary issues. As we will see, boundaries are more often sources of uncertainty and strategic resources than consensual or naturalised definitions of lines demarcating areas. Boundaries originating in different policy eras and interventions tend to pile up without superimposing, equating spatially to the process of institutional pluralism (Bierschenk & Olivier de Sardan 1998). Boundaries are thus at once sources of, and resources in conflicts. We will illustrate the points as regards the recent decentralisation and older development projects based on land expropriation and redistribution in south Benin. In the first section, I will first expose the approach and methods that have underlain this study. Conceptual clarifications will be given. I will then present the legal framework (chapter 2) and then briefly sketch out the historical context, as far as political economy and identity politics are concerned (chapter 3). The following chapters will be devoted to the analysis of significant case studies: on boundary conflicts linked to decentralisation and development programmes, the conservation issue, autochthons/migrants relations, the “youth factor” (Richards 1996). The final section will outline policy orientations. I will rely for this on current experiences and interventions in order to avoid reinventing the wheel, unfortunately a widespread reflex in the field of development policy.

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II. APPROACH & METHOD

1. The study

This work belongs to the field of the policy studies. This means first that the time for fieldwork was brief: two weeks in Benin (March 17-31, 2006), together with Rie Odgaard from March 23 to 29. The purpose of this phase was to collect information from actors involved in land issues from different points of view, policy-making, development intervention, research, and conflict settlement (see the list of the informants in annex). These interviews were to a certain extent second-hand data collection as I was not in a position to carry out classical case studies relying on interviewing the very participants of social situations and conflicts. Nevertheless, discussions with social scientists, development & conservation projects staff, NGO representatives, decentralisation authorities, pastoralist and farmer leaders, helped delineate issues revolving around land and natural resources. As we will see later, these interviews have highlighted the dynamism and the diversity of initiatives aiming at dealing with land conflicts and natural resources management. It also showed the lack of connection and mutual knowledge between them. We will come back the issue of bridging the gap between interventions of various orders and scales. The contextualisation of the data collected during the stay in Benin mainly relies on two sources: (1) a review of the literature, comprising social sciences production, ‘grey literature’, and legal and policy writings, (2) my previous research on politics, land, development and mobility in Benin, where I have been doing research for more than a dozen of years. The knowledge generated by fieldwork (mainly in South and Central Benin; e.g. Le Meur 1998, 2006a) was very helpful, combined with the insertion in scientific networks and long term relations with Beninese and foreign researchers. I have also been involved since 2002 in the support of the new land legislation (Lavigne Delville et al. 2003) and especially the assessment of the Rural land plans a procedure of identification and recognition of customary/local land rights (Edja & Le Meur forthcoming, Le Meur 2006b). We focused on areas where I have not carried out research. These are located in south Benin, in the area of oil palm plantations and strong development intervention, and in central Benin, where agrarian colonisation and the relations between autochthons and migrants are at stake. We stayed a few days in the area of Kandi, in north Benin, so far a relatively quiet zone of cotton cultivation. There are now raising tensions between farmers, pastoralists and authorities around protected areas (national parks, state forests) due to a new strengthening of the environmental policy. In south Benin, we visited the area of Grand-Popo where tourism, land speculation and uncontrolled urbanisation collide with farmers’ interests and environmental concerns. Banté/Manigri in central Benin was the third area where we had interviews mainly on the respective roles of customary institutions (for instance Nago hunters associations) and development programmes in environment and forest protection and management.

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2. Land governance and land conflict

Studies of land conflicts have shown that the groups and persons involved in dispute seek very often to reach a local solution and are reluctant to “invite” external actors in the conflict- solving process. This widely observed phenomenon results at least partly from a rather nega- tive opinion of external, namely state institutions suspected of partiality and corruption. Second, conflict solving might be a misleading expression as it implies the idea to reach a solution whereas what is looked for is much more to calm down the situation (see case studies on local politics in Rural Benin in Bierschenk & Olivier de Sardan 1998). Specific sets of social relations are mobilised to reach this objective of peace. The strategy to calm down conflicts instead of solving them explain why conflicts can re-emerge due to a new context or opportunity allowing one of the parties to renegotiate the former compromise. This does not mean that the local handling of conflict is merely a strategic matter of political compromise. It implies ideas of justice and equity too as well as shared moral principles (Wid- lok 2003). At the same time, “to claim the rights is to disrupt the social relation and instead to refer to higher moral or legal principles” (Hagberg 1998: 22). The reconciliation of legitimacy and legality (Lavigne Delville 1998) is no easy thing. In this respect, the widespread situation of moral, legal and normative pluralism plays a key role, acting as a set of discursive resources used by social actors to achieve their ends. This observation does not give us, however, any general indications as regards the overall effect of pluralism, allowing continuing reopening of disputes or playing a moderating role. In the frontier area of central Benin for instance, different levels of integration or communities defining specific belongings compete about the control over migrants and natural resources: a principle of autochthony (that can be trans-ethnic) and a principle of locality or “terroir”, linked to uncertain administrative boundaries (Le Meur 2006a). Conflicts are thus part of social relations of property and as such, they must be understood historically, within chains of events made of tensions, negotiations, compromises, ruptures. In this respect, conflicts contribute to the production of land governance, defined as the emerging mode of regulating land tenure relationships and the social field they define (Le Meur 2006d). Conflict trajectories and land governance are shaped in Benin by varying degrees of legal pluralism, a proliferation of institutions and the politicisation of the land issue. Modes of regula- tion and arbitration are emerging that seek to instil an element of predictability into the land arena. It has to be remembered, however, that actors are endowed with different material, social and cognitive resources; institutions enjoy different degrees of authority and legitimacy; and the various participants have different interests, which may include an interest for stability or disorder (Moore 1978, Lund 2002). Analysis in terms of governance enables us to raise the question of public policies without either overestimating their capacity to transform the way that land tenure works or underesti- mating their role. The very fact that those public policies exist creates specific constraints and opportunities.

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3. Policy orientation

Beyond the identification of the types and effects of socio-economic and political conflicts about land and the presentation of the political economy and legal framework, the terms of reference of this study emphasise the possible solutions and consequences of these in terms of legal framework needed, administration and land operation (“including cadastre”) and the overcoming of social and political barriers, all this being related to the overriding poverty issue. One must be very careful in the policy and development field where a strong inclination for reinventing the wheel without taking account of what exists is permanently at work. The first step is about the complex link between knowledge and policy. We can formulate as a starting point the following observation. There is no such thing such as “the right technical solution” as regards land and natural resources policy. Processes revolving around access to, and control over land and natural resources are inherently political processes. They are shaped by the action of local and non-local stakeholders who mobilise differentiated resources and interpreta- tions of the situation according to specific principles and expectations. Policy-making is thus about negotiating compromises and not about imposing technical and institutional packages. Common history and shared principles could constitute a good starting point in this respect. Second observation, conflicts happen. One must conceive conflict as normal social facts (in the sense of inescapable and expressing social dynamics (and not social pathologies). The objective is thus not an illusory avoidance of conflict but about the crafting of institutional spaces (public forums) for negotiating solutions to disputes. Third point, indirectly related to the poverty issue, exclusion is a central element to take into account. It has to be characterised however. It is a matter of effective access to resources (in relation to the bundle of rights) and of access to politico-legal authorities and public arenas. This means that any institutional solution (rights allocation or securing, the creation of resources management committees, the implementation of political and administrative decentralisation) must be monitored in order to evaluate its inclusive or exclusive effects. In this respect, land rights are part of human rights. Furthermore, rights over natural resources contribute to the definition of specific forms of citizenship. Any policy making process in the field of natural resources management is unavoidably about human rights: rights to citizenship, to political voice, to livelihood, to justice (see Wisborg 2002, Ikdahl et al. 2005).

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III. THE NATIONAL CONTEXT

The national trajectory of Benin is characterised by the strong extraversion of the political economy (export crops, development aid, transborder trade) and the importance of regionalism in national politics. Benin is a small country (110,000 square kilometres), rather densely populated (more than 6 millions inhabitants), especially in the southern part of the country where rural densities can reach more than 200 inhabitants per square kilometres (the urbanisation rate is about 40/45%). The shape of the country, a strip of land linking the gulf of Guinea to the Sudanian and Sahelian hinterland and blocked between Togo and Nigeria, its huge eastern neighbour, is a direct product of the colonial scramble for Africa. Benin is characterised by a wide ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity.

1. Political economy: extraversion and the development rent

After 12 years of political instability, Benin (Dahomey at that time) knew a new coup in 1972 led by ‘progressive young officers’. This one revealed successful in that it brought 17 years of stability to the country. The military government officially turned in 1974 to Marxism- Leninism and Dahomey became in 1975 the People’s Republic of Benin, a one-party state (PRPB: Parti de la révolution du peuple du Bénin). The motto of the Military-Marxist regime was “agriculture is the basis for development, industry its engine”. This Stalinist rhetoric cannot be separated from the State project of local anchoring (Allen 1989, Bierschenk 1993). The main tools of this policy were the territorial and politico-administrative reform of 1974 and the expansion to the whole national territory of the state agricultural extension services (CARDER) in charge of all the dimensions of rural life and development. Despite this strategy of state penetration down to the local level, its effectiveness has remained questionable and the modes of social and economic reproduction of Benin bureaucracy has been characterised by a strong extraversion up to now. The material basis rests upon customs duty, re-exportation activities and the development rent, more than on the extraction of a peasant surplus. While cotton represents around three-quarters of the national exports, re-export trade and development aid reached more than twice as much as official exports in the 1990s (respectively around 7% and 15% of the gross national product). By the mid-1980s, in a global context of economic crisis and as the funding of a rapidly growing bureaucracy drained the bulk of the state budget, the end of oil boom in Nigeria closed a major outlet for Benin agricultural products and labour force (migrants were brutally expelled in 1983) and dramatically reduced customs revenues. This regime of accumulation characterised by a disconnection between the state and the national economy went into a financial, economic, political and social crisis that resulted in the democratic transition of 1989/91. The extraversion of Benin political economic did not decrease during Kérékou regime nor since the democratisation, which revealed to be the achievement of changes that had started by the mid-1980s rather than a rupture in this respect. The main transformation regards the decentralisation of development aid that tends to by-pass state administrations for the sake of a

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liberal ideology. This phenomenon, externally driven, has interacted with the state crisis and its withdrawal from the economy and paved the way to the flowering of intermediary organisations of various forms (hometown associations, NGO, churches, ethno-regional organisations, traditional chieftaincies), often led by high-ranking or former high-ranking civil servants and politicians (Bako-Arifari 1995). At the regional and local level, the simple mediation State/peasants gave room to complex mediations and to a proliferation of state and non-state canals draining external and internal resources. The new situations favoured the emergence of a new category of social actors, the so-called ‘development brokers’ (Bierschenk et al. 2000 and especially the five case studies about Benin by Bako-Arifari 2000, Edja 2000a, Le Meur 2000, Mongbo 2000a, and Sodeik 2000a). Functioning at the interface between the development apparatus and local societies and endowed with specific social features and trajectories, they contribute to the orientation and the circulation of development aid. In this context, the recent political decentralisation can add to this proliferation of institutions competing for the access to and control of external and local resources. It can reproduce at the local level regionalist and ethnic tensions explored in the next section. It can also polarise local and regional arenas and contribute to the construction of a more democratic state. The result of it will largely depend on development agencies’ policy. Bilateral and multilateral donors (EU, MCA, GTZ…) develop environmental strategies that seem to bypass decentralisation and state instances on behalf of nature conservation and local development at once. As we will see, this is not the choice of all development agencies and other environmental programmes strive to co-ordinate their action with decentralised communes.

2. Regional/ethnic politics and institutional pluralism

Besides economic extraversion, political polarisation along regional and ethnic lines is another key feature of Benin recent history. The late colonisation was a phase of political liberalisation with in 1946 forced labour and poll tax abolition and the end of code de l’indigénat. Political parties were authorised and elections rapidly turned out to be structured along regional lines that take root in pre-colonial political rivalries, wars and alliances during the colonial conquest – The Porto-Novo kingdom on the French side against Abomey kingdom – and the ‘divide and rule’ applied by the French during the colonisation. The French administration resorted to local brokers to rule the country (mediating meaning: interprètes; and coercion: garde-cercle), who mainly belonged to the southern elites, especially the group of Christian Afro-Brazilians; they were former slaves returned from Brazil, locally called ‘aguda’. As Bako-Arifari (2005) puts it, the Afro-Brazilians and later the Fon, the dominant ethnic group and rulers of the pre-colonial Abomey kingdom acted as ‘colonial elders’ – we’d better say ‘colonial firstcomers’ – in the sense of the precedence of their relations with the colonial conquerors. The time gap in the military (1894/98) and administrative (until the 1910s) conquest of the South and North parts of the country explains thus why the Northerner tended to see the Southerner auxiliaries as French allies. They perceived them as strangers benefiting from the colonisation and invading their territory.

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The conflation of these historical layers generated a “third-party system” (Staniland 1973) based on shifting coalitions between representatives of the North, the South-East (Porto-Novo) and South-Central Benin (Abomey/Cotonou), each region being embodied in a leading politi- cian (respectively Maga, Apithy, and Ahomadegbé). The central part of the country (mainly Mahi and Nago/Yoruba ethnic groups) continued to function as a sort of buffer zone between north and south, as it was at the time of slave raiding. This configuration was at work up to 1972 and the successive military coups (1963, 1965, 1967, 1969, 1972)1 were always led by militaries from another region than this of the president. At the same time, electoral violence was endemic, expressing and strengthening a regional xenophobia. Diverse political formulas were experienced in order to deal as peacefully as possible with regionalism: Dahomey was in this respect somewhat of a chaotic institutional laboratory. After the successful coup of 1972, the new regime followed a line of national unity and fight against all the signs of the old regime, namely feudal, ethnic, regional and religious affiliations and their political use. The fight against feudalism was combined with an anti-imperialist rhetoric. The strategy of territorial anchoring and local penetration of the state mentioned above was part of the objective of national unity2. The radical phase (1974/1979) gave progressively way to a less ideological and repressive era in the 1980s. The regime played local identities against the former regionalism, what Bako-Arifari (2005) calls the “pragmatic rules of the positive politicisation of ethnicity”, playing on mechanisms of “reciprocal assimilation of the elites” (Bayart 1989), among other things, through the creation of linguistic commissions recognising “nationalities” in the Marxist sense of ethno-linguistic belonging.. In the same vein, the local development policy followed ethnic and regional lines under the guise of the co-optation of “fils du terroir” and the support of local development associations (see Bako-Arifari 1995, Le Meur 1998, 2006a). These associations functioned as platforms for the new political parties that blossomed from 1990 onward, generating a new regionalism, partly anchored in the three-region configuration, partly renewed along more localised and fragmented lines. The recovery of traditional chiefs that followed the democratisation pertains to this trend too (Banégas 2003, Bako-Arifari & Le Meur 2003). The constitution of 1990 guaranteed inter-regional balance to prevent xenophobe violence, but without specifying any modality for implementing this principle. As Bako-Arifari puts it, the main question at this stage, also as far as conflicts over land and natural resources are concerned, is how a multiethnic country, characterised by a wide plurality of religious affiliation, cultural and geographic settings, a political history studded with acute crisis, coups and xenophobe electoral violence (Bierschenk 1999, 2004), where the resort to violence in popular self-justice is frequent (see Paulenz 1999), an ‘over-politicised’ country counting around one hundred political parties (for less than 7 millions people), how such a country can remain below the fateful threshold of ethnic or regional explosion? How does the country manage the potential sources of conflict and transmute them into resources for the crafting of a political and social compromise that has been holding for more than thirty years?

1 I only mention the successful coups. 2 See also the change of name of the country : ‘Dahomey’, referring too explicitly to the Fon/Abomey pre- colonial domination was replaced in 1975 by ‘Benin’ devoid as historical connotation (the Kindgom of Benin was located in South Nigeria).

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Bako-Arifari answers the question by highlighting an ethos of forgiveness and tolerance, which acts as the compensatory side of tendencies towards cleavage and fragmentation (see the National Conference held in February 1990). He also mentions a relatively low level of political violence in the national arena (compared to other African countries), despite a high instability in the 1960s, episodes of acute crisis, and the 17 years of Military-Marxist dictator- ship. The Beninese political elite would behave as a village society, moving back and forth between ‘face-to-face’ and ‘back-to-back’ society, but avoiding irreversible clashes. Politi- cians manage the balance the North and the South in a pragmatic fashion, but on the basis of a fundamental asymmetry: the administrative power an the intellectual capital are mainly located in the South. This renders the management of regionalism more difficult for a president from the South, as it happened for Nicephore Soglo, the first president of the “democratic renewal” (1991/96). Recent measures tend to restore the regional balance: the creation of a second university in the North (Parakou) and an increasing rate of Northerners in the state administration (from 3% in 1991 to 13% in 2005). The recent election (in March 2006) of a Nago president from central Benin, Yayi Boni, constitutes a kind of new deal in this respect, all the more because he does not belong to the national political class.

3. Access to land, citizenship and boundaries

At the local level, this regional and ethnic question takes a specific shape where the land issue plays a key role associated with diverse forms of mobility. “Establishing control over immo- bile resources, such as land, in regions where people, including agriculturalists, have been continually on the move, constitutes a particular challenge” (Lentz 2005: 163). The history of settlement constitutes a central resource in the articulation of land claims. In Benin, migrations have followed different patterns and rationales since the pre-colonial era where slave raiding and the search for fertile and safe lands were central. Exit options developed during the des- potic phase of colonisation and turned to be more ‘accumulative’ after the abolition of forced labour. After the independence, rural-rural migrations developed within Benin. Out-migrations came from three main regions: the Adja plateau in south west Benin, the Ata- kora hills in the north west and the region of Abomey in central-south Benin. They have been converging in the central part of the country, which used to be a buffer zone between slave raiding polities in the XVII/XIXth centuries (Wasangari chieftaincies, Abomey kingdom, Oyo Empire). Migrations create tensions about access to land and the control of the settlers. Autochthonous groups responses go through the transformation of traditional forms of strangers’ integration into written contracts and land rents (Edja 1997, 1999, Biaou 1997). Traditional authorities try to forbid land sales to ‘foreigners’, namely Southerners, in Kandi, Parakou or Savè, but there is no unified autochthonous land policy and cleavages occur (see Le Meur 2002a). Access to land for ‘migrants’ does not only follow the traditional cleavages between firstcomers and late-comers and autochthons and strangers. It is also a matter of rural/urban relation as many land buyers (and cattle buyers too) are urban dwellers, civil servants and busi- nessmen.

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The issue is not only a matter of transactions and rules, but also of citizenship. One observes the collision between two forms of citizenship. Migrants and urban dwellers can invoke the national citizenship as a justifying principle for accessing land wherever they want on the national territory. This is likely to be the result of the ‘land-to-the-tiller’ slogan widespread during the revolutionary era. The resort to this principle is not automatic however, and the migrants tend first to access landed resources through traditional forms of strangers’ integration, such as the ‘tutorat’ (Chauveau 2006, Le Meur 2006a). Migrants are integrated as strangers, endowed with a social status and involved in a web of rights and duties vis-à-vis the local community. They thus access at once land (more precisely a specific bundle of rights) and local citizenship. The break in this moral economy can occur when the behaviour of one of the protagonist is judged as a ‘bad behaviour’. It also appears through rising competition over land between youths, elders and migrants. Youngsters coming back to the village accuse the elders to have ‘given’ too much land to the strangers, at the expense of their own sons. They thus invoke another principle of the peasant moral economy, the principle of intergenerational justice. Conflicts between autochthons and migrants can hide intergenerational conflicts for land access or about the patrimonial strategy (sale versus lease for instance). As far as the sense of citizenship and belonging is concerned, decentralisation and natural resource management programmes (as well as oil palm projects in the 1950-1970s) play an important role by drawing boundaries and redefining locality and community. The policy of ‘gestion des terroirs’ works as a new form of ‘villagisation’, although such a policy no longer functions through the creation of villages around a core of social infrastructures as had been the case in Tanzania (Scott 1998: 223) and elsewhere in colonial and postcolonial Africa in the 1950s through 1970s (in Northern Benin in 1960-1963, with enduring effects on local politics). Instead it begins from the delimitation of a well-defined territory encompassing – producing — a locality that manages “its” agricultural lands and natural resources (Le Meur 2006a & b). Contradictions occur between territoralising policies and the creation of boundaries, and the mobility and multilocalised action space many rural dwellers, not only the herders (Painter et al. 1994).

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IV. LEGAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE FRAMEWORK

1. Colonial origin and weak definition

The legal apparatus regulating land access is extremely limited in Benin3, as in other West African countries. The first colonial land decrees of 1904 (23.10.1904, ‘organisation du domaine’) and 1906 (24.07.1906, ‘régime de la propriété foncière’) promoting official land enti- tlements and individual private property were never actually implemented. There were based on the principle of the ‘terres vacantes et sans maîtres’, whereby land belongs to the state as long as local users have not furnished a formal - according to the code civil - proof of landholding. This attempt to import the French code civil was not as straightforward as it looks. The 1904-1906 land decrees mention that the ‘collective properties of the natives’ or those held by ‘their representative chiefs’ cannot be sold or hired without the approbation of the governor, entailing a first differentiation between chiefs and ‘commoners’ regarding land. Minor modifications were brought about (1925 & 1932 decrees) without breaking with the underlying philosophy of the first laws. The principle of ‘vacant land’ was abandoned by 1935 (15.11.1935 decree)4. Land issues were de facto transferred to administrative chieftaincy and judicial native courts (courts de justice indigène), although no text of law ever mentioned customs, customary laws and customary authorities as a legal basis for this transfer5. This first (but still implicit) step toward the transfer of land management to the chiefs was never accompanied by a clear definition of their tasks, competencies or means of sanction. This indetermi- nacy was strengthened by the policy of the coutumiers. They aimed at registering ‘all’ the customary laws as a guideline for the native courts of justice, but actually opened space for contested claims over land rather than helping to solve them. Imagined as an exhaustive collection of the customary laws of the colony, the final grand coutumier never became operational (see Colonie du Dahomey 1933). This institutional vacuum was hardly filled in by the 1955 decree, which nevertheless transferred the burden of the proof of landholding from the land user to the potential purchaser. After the independence of Dahomey in 1960, the law of 1965 (n°65-25, 17.08.65) did not bring any change to the colonial legal framework (especially the decree of 26.07.32 on land property in French West Africa). The state is the legal landowner and customary rights are postulated rather than clearly defined. The 1977 constitution (loi fondamentale, 27.08.77) elaborated during the radical phase of the Kérékou Military-Marxist regime (1972-1990) did

3 The sources I used about land laws in colonial and postcolonial Dahomey-Benin are Coquery-Vidrovitch (1982: 73-77), Desanti (1945), Comby (1998, Bako-Arifari (1999: 394-395), Le Meur (2005a). 4 “Appartiennent à l'État les terres qui, ne faisant pas l'objet d'un titre régulier de propriété ou de jouissance (…), sont inexploitées ou inoccupées depuis plus de dix ans”. 5 See Phillips (1989), Berry (1993) about the compromise negotiated between colonial administrations and customary authorities as regards the management of land and labour.

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not mention customs anymore: private collective and individual rights over land were ac- knowledged but the state remained the official owner of land. Post colonial land laws never attributed clear competencies to defined officials whereas the chieftaincy was progressively marginalised from political arenas (Bako-Arifari & Le Meur 2003). Furthermore, the boundaries of administrative units were never conceived as clear-cut lines. “In the case of Benin, the boundaries between the communes rurales are determined by the territories of the villages belonging to this administrative entity. However, the village territories are neither well known nor precisely delimited. Their boundaries are negotiated according to factors beyond state control (e.g. limits between cultivated fields)” (Bako-Arifari 1999: 400). Beyond the compromise between the state and customary authorities, there was a turn toward a more ‘intrusive’ (Berry 1993) action of the developmental state from the 1950s. State projects aimed at increasing agricultural production through land reform measures. The origins of these programmes in the oil palm sector is colonial but their philosophy was adopted by the postcolonial regimes, through the 1961 Law 61-26 (10.08.61) allowing the state to expropriate landowners in areas declared of ‘public interest’ (périmètres d’utilité publique)6. This law replaced the colonial decree of 25.11.30 on expropriation for public interest. It provided oil palm projects with a legal basis for land expropriation/redistribution and compulsory co- operatives. Beyond the economic failures of the programmes, they have profoundly reshaped the agrarian landscapes. The lack of information and discussion during the phase of preparation, the opacity of the expropriation and redistribution practices, the delay of sometimes several years between the two steps and the uncertain policy dominating since the end of these projects contributed to the fuzziness of land relations in the areas concerned in southern Benin (Le Meur 1995). They constitute a showcase of how the state contributes to the production of informality and institutional uncertainty. Beside the areas declared ‘of public interest’ within the formal legal framework, state farms were created in the 1970s-1980s outside any legal procedure. Farmers were expropriated and land was given to state instances (e.g. public banks that were to collapse in 1988-1989) and high-ranking ‘clients’ of the regime. These state farms were technical and economic failures and former owners and other actors have progressively grabbed these areas thanks to democratisation, but without any legal clarification of the land tenure. The Ministry of agriculture, livestock and fishery (MAEP), with the support of FAO, plans to register the zones that are still not re-appropriated as part of the state estate and to allocate them to young farmers. Land settlement of young people through state/development interventions has existed elsewhere in Africa (see for instance the origin of the Rural Land Plan/PFR in Côte d’Ivoire) without any consideration for target groups’ expectations and action space that is in no way restricted to the countryside nor to agriculture (Chauveau 2005).

6 “Après étude d’une région, le président de la République pourra par décret, sur le rapport du ministre de l’Agriculture et de la Coopération en décider l’aménagement et la mise en valeur compte tenu de la vocation des sols et des débouchés offerts”.

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2. Recent and current reforms

The democratic renewal of the 1990s continued with this weak apparatus without carrying out any substantial reform. The 1990 constitution formally recognised the private ownership of land but the colonial apparatus was still the basis for land management. As noted by two consultants in 1994, “there is no law concerning the private and public domains in the Republic of Benin” (Hernandez & Tribillon 1994: 16). Actually, political hesitations, delays and eventually an uncompleted implementation of the decentralisation were at the centre of the stage in the 1990s and 2000s as far as legal change is concerned. However, one must mention the For- est Law n°93-009 of 02.07.93 and the related decree n°96-271 of 02/07/96 that distinguish state forests (‘domaine forestier classé’) mainly of colonial origin, and protected forests (non state forests).

2.1 A delayed decentralisation Decentralisation was planned by 1990 in the new constitution of 11 December 1990 (art. 150/153). The general meeting (‘états généraux’) of territorial administration as well as the president at that time, Nicéphore Soglo confirmed this option and gave indications about organisation and time schedule (MISAT 1993). Decentralisation and the transfer of competencies were to be gradual and the commune was put at the centre of the stage (Law n°97-029, art. 2). Actually, decentralisation was implemented lately since legislative texts were eventually voted in 1999 for four of them (laws n°97-029, 98-005, 98-007, 98-034 of 15 January 1999. The fifth law on communal election modalities was adopted after having been rejected several times by the constitutional court. Communal polls took place in two rounds, in De- cember 2002 and January 2003. As local elections (at arrondissement and village levels) are still pending, one must see the current phase as a transition both in terms of accountability and competence transfer and as regards the achievement of the electoral process. Political decentralisation is profoundly modifying the land tenure policy landscape in Benin. The commune, as the key level of decentralisation, is the central locus of land management. The sub-prefecture has vanished as an administrative entity and the prefecture is now the last state level, but contrary to the commune, the prefecture is not endowed with financial auton- omy as a legal entity. There has been a transfer of jurisdiction from the prefecture to the commune for issuing administrative deeds in the field of land tenure (for instance dwelling per- mission – permis d’habitation) and the implementation of urban land plans (RFU: registre foncier urbain). The rural land law project (see below) comprises a chapter on rural land plans (PFR: plan foncier rural), which is procedure of identification and recognition of ‘customary’ or local land rights. The commune is also in charge of the implementation of rural land plans (on the request of village council). The communes thus become the principal locus of centralisation of land tenure information, by archiving and managing land tenure documentation. This a matter of both physical and computerised storage as regards RFU and PFR (together with village committees for land management, COGEF, in the latter case). Benin is one of the few West African countries were decentralisation and land management are explicitly linked from a legal point of view. This raises the question of the co-ordination of rural and urban land tenure through the harmonisation of land tenure information production and management procedures (RFU & PFR), this in a country where the rural/urban dichotomy

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has no legal basis – contrary to Senegal for instance. Land tenure information will be managed in the communes but they do not yet have the necessary means and skills to do so. One must therefore reflect on the support needs for both equipment and training. Two linkages must be considered: one “vertical” with the territorial administration (préfecture) and the other “horizontal” with neighbouring communes (inter-commune). A third will arise from the completion of decentralisation with local elections (village and arrondissement levels). Village chiefs were elected in 1990 with a great deal of improvisation and supposedly for a transitory period necessary to prepare the law of decentralisation. This delay entails a weakening of their position of ‘provisionally elected’ local authorities facing an active civil society.

2.2 The future rural land law The ministry of agriculture (MAEP) has launched in dialogue with the ministry of justice, legislation and human rights (MJLDH) and the ministry of finance and economy (MFE) a process for reforming the national land legislation. It mainly originates in a development project, the natural resources management programme (PGRN) funded by the World Bank and the German and French development agencies (GTZ & AFD). The feasibility study commis- sioned by the World Bank in 1992 has put legal change on the programme agenda7. The rural development policy declaration (MAEP 2001) states that “investment security requires the implementation of an appropriate legal framework giving people a full confidence in the structures of extension and promotion of the different activies”. The operational strategic plan (Plan stratégique opérationnel : 58) makes it clear that “as far as (agricultural, forest, pastoral, fishing) lands are concerned, the objective is still adapting customary law to modern constraints through the use (and the preservation) of its dynamism and adaptability”. The process went through various field studies and workshops from February 1999 to Sep- tember 2001 in order to collect information on rural land tenure, socio-economic features and the main concerns of rural development stakeholders (farmers, herders, fishers, customary landholders and landowners, researchers, technicians, surveyors, legal experts). Relying on the conclusions of these inquiries and seminars, a national experts committee has elaborated a draft law on rural land under the aegis of an inter-ministry committee created by the same order and under the joint supervision of MAEP, MFE and MJLDH. The bill on rural land tenure passed in the council of ministers of 16 March 2005. The law foresees for each village the elaboration of a PFR (art. 115) on the village chief’s request following village council deliberation (art. 118). It results in the issuing of a land deeds which is an “acte de constatation et de confirmation de droits fonciers établis selon la coutume ou les pratiques et normes locales (…) faisant foi jusqu’à preuve du contraire établie devant le juge” (art. 121). The possibility of the later land titling of a piece of land registered in the PFR is left open (art. 130). This extension planed by law was preceded by a pilot phase within PGRN (1993-1997), later PGTRN (1998-2003; T for terroir). A GRET team led by Philippe Lavigne Delville has carried out a feasibility study of the national agency that could manage and monitor rural land plans. Recently, a new player entered the game. The Millenium Challenge Account, directly funded by the US Presidency (and bypassing even USAID!) comprises an important component on

7 The following information mainly comes from Lavigne et al. (2003) and Edja & Le Meur (forthcoming).

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land policy. They plan a quick extension of PFR (300 PFR in 5 years) without being completely (1) aware of what it means in terms of training and logistics, (2) clear with the objectives of the operation. They seem to see PFR as a provisional step toward land titling rather than as a full-fledged recognition of customary rights. Furthermore, co-ordination is still lacking – though things seems to have change in the last months – among institutions involved in the issue (MCA, AFD, GTZ, ProCGRN, MAEP).

2.3 Development aid and the legislative rent One comment here combined with an interpretative hypothesis, as regards the current legislative production. One has been observing for some years the flowering of bills and draft laws from different ministries, often in the absence of any explicit policy charter or co-ordination between ministries. For instance, some question the rural land law on the pretext that there is no legal reason for separating rural from urban land, and thus that an overall land law is needed. Though the point is right, there is no reason preventing from starting with the existing (the forthcoming land law) in order to further elaborate a common legal framework as regards land. The idea of an urban land law is not new, but it was never put in practice. Legislative initiatives touch environment and land development too. One could ask – here is the announced hypothesis – whether this poorly co-ordinated bill proliferation does not express an evolution of the development apparatus. Still a structural feature of the national political economy, it refocuses on the state realm, namely the domain of law and decentralisation. In other words, the legislative rent could appear as an avatar of the development rent. We will test this hypothesis in the field of environment conservation and forest management, where the impact of externally driven/funded projects is at it highest in Be- nin. More generally, analysing the political economy in which legal change is embedded shows a degree of extraversion – of structural impact of development aid – which is probably higher than in other West African countries such as Côte d’Ivoire or Cameroon8.

8 See for instance Chauveau (2000, 2006b) for a political economic analyse of the rural land law in Côte d’Ivoire.

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V. REGIONAL SITUATIONS AND CASE STUDIES

In this section, I present in a synthetic form the main results of the interviews combined with previous field research and the literature review.

1. Zoning

The first step about case studies was a rough zoning of regions with a specific problematic as regard land conflict and land governance. It helps identify regional configurations as regards land and resource access, issues and actors and highlight areas of tension or conflict. We have selected the following areas: > The cotton belt in the north, with a strong agricultural development, the extension of cultivated surfaces, economic differentiation (mechanisation of agriculture), the question of agriculturalist/pastoralist relations > The area of oil palm plantations and former co-operatives in the south, with an extremely complex and blurred situation as regards territorial boundaries, property relations, land transactions and the policy of land restitution. > The agrarian frontier of central Benin with a strong immigration from other rural areas (Atakora, Adja Plateau, Abomey) and tensions structured around the triangle elders/youths/migrants > Peri-urban area as a moving interface as regards actors (urban land buyers) and actors’ strategies (anticipations), land use (plantation and housing), land & taxation policy (RFU vs. PFR) > Protected areas: state forests, national parks: spontaneous encroachments and pastoralists presence, forest administration strategy, logging > The laguna area (in the south west) constitutes an interesting case combining a strong pressure over land and water, the development of (rather uncontrolled) urbanisation and tourism, and the implementation of an environmental policy (protected areas). The zoning is not systematic and some areas are absent: the Adja plateau in the south-west, with a high rural density, a strong land pressure and a flow of out-migration (Daane et al. 1997), the Atakora hills in the north-west where land degradation and out-migrations are strong. Two issues go across the regional differences: > Decentralisation as a new level of land policy: the communes are now in charge of land administration, but the linkage between urban and rural land policy is still to be done and their capacity to polarise local arenas (instead of adding to the prevailing institutions pluralism) questionable.

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> Development and conservation programmes as a source of resources and rules. As observed in many cases, external interventions implies the in-flow of resources of various orders (financial, technical, political, symbolic) beyond the sole project objectives. The rules of the (new) game are often poorly defined and their legitimacy is weak, the intervention thus adding to the existing legal pluralism. Furthermore, one must take account of embeddedness of regional situation in wider contexts at national level and beyond. For instance, the land issue in central Benin agrarian frontier is narrowly linked to out-migration in other regions (Atacora hills, Adja plateau, Abomey region). The presentation does not follow the geographical zoning outlined above as issues are often transverse. I have tried to synthesise sensitive and significant situations and issues in terms of land governance and land conflicts. I will firstly (and mainly) focus on the situation in the northern part of the country where one finds a concentration of tensions and conflicts revolving around diverging interests, uses and land and environment policies.

2. The conservation issue: state forests, national parks, and conflict management in Northern Benin

As stated in the issue paper of this study, “conservation and issues of land rights, tenure and conflicts are closely interlinked”. This is also the case in Benin where one has been observing for a few years a strengthening of conservation policy as regards national parks (W, Pendjari) and state forests, especially in the central and north Benin. Several programmes are devoted to the issue and we observe a renewed interest for the issue in Benin, especially in Central and Northern Benin were most of the state forests and the two national parks are located.

2.1 Laws, projects and decentralisation The 1993 forest law distinguishes state forests and protected forests, the latter being nega- tively defined as non state forests, lying thus outside forest administration responsibility. State forests (forêts classées) were created during the colonial time in the 1930-1950s for many of them, but their management was largely neglected, especially since the late 1980s (loosening of the presence of the state), and little was known about what was happening inside their boundaries. Actually, the very term of “forest” is here misleading as one could hardly find concrete forests in them, but cotton fields, churches and pumps, herds and schools, agricultural extensionists, villages and compounds, gold diggers, Fulani and migrants of various origins, trees too… We’d better see state forests as an administrative territory defined by its boundaries and the authorities ruling it (theoretically the forest administration) than by its contents. The same definition applied for the W national park, and to the Pendjari national park (created in 1954, the former from a game reserve created by 1937), but to a lesser extent as it has been a tourism resource for a long time. In both cases, the management of these areas re- lied on informal and localised arrangements rather than on the enforcement of official texts. Informal arrangements could of course include on forest officials’ side bribe and threat backed on the state monopoly of violence. The renewal of a conservationist policy takes the form of an in-flow of externally funded projects. By 1993, UNSO funded projects aiming at rehabilitating three state forests in Borgou

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(La Soto, Goun-Goun and Goroubi). Since then, different programmes have dealt with forests, generally in the form of forest development plans (plan d’aménagement forestier) including participatory zoning of forest use. Difficulties arose out of the delays in the implementation of forest development plans. Forest agents were recruited but as there was still no planning, they ‘spontaneously’ returned to their usual approach, made of repression, bribe and informal arrangements, but with more means, as they were more on the ground. The situation is very similar in the different state forests, but the more or less conflictive dimension of the situations arises out of the interplay of contextual elements: ratio state forest/agricultural land, pre-existent conflicts, flow of pastoralists (especially cattle herders coming from neighbouring countries: Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria). Beside and after the UNSO programme (1993/97) were launched other programmes devoted to forest and environment conservation: PGRN (1993/97, became PGTRN 1998/2003 and then, from 2004, ProCGRN in charge of the Pendjari national park), PGFTR funded by World Bank, ECOPAS, a EU initiative for the W national park launched in 2001 (the park has beeen declared by MAB/UNESCO transnational biosphere reserve). Programmes also generate institutions at different levels. The paradigmatic product of participatory development approaches is the ‘local committee’, generally implemented at the ‘village’ level, whatever the village is, local community or administrative entity. AVIGREF are localised on the borders of national parks and COGEF (committee for land management) in the villages were the rural land plan is operational. PGFTR has also created CGRN (natural resources management committee). The local committees are in charge of a management unit in state forest (created by the forest development plan) grouping 1 to 3 villages. The composition of AVIGREF around the W and Pendjari national parks in interesting (and would need further inquiries). Administrative village chiefs are not necessarily members and traditional authorities and hunters associations seem to be by-passed. One has the feeling that they mainly recruit among young men who unemployed (or under-employed) along a logic of mobilisation of the youths for repressive tasks (against poaching and pastoralism, both seen as jeopardising the environment). The possibility to get access to income and jobs is of course an incentive for them. In the village of Alfakouara work for instance also (as driver or tracker) for the private manager of the hunting reserve (a concession) surrounding the W national park. This entails the risk of confusion between private and public interests around the environmental issue. The local/community level is not the only level of institution building. CENAGREF (Centre national de gestion des réserves de faune) was created for the management of the two national park as a conditionality imposed by the donors (mainly EU within theECOPAS initiative). CENAGREF is a state institution with a scientific and economic mandate, financially autono- mous and directly accountable to the ministry of agriculture, livestock and fishery (MAEP), thus bypassing the forest department seen as corrupt and inefficient – this was a condition imposed by donors. Furthermore, there are two CENAGREF offices, one in Tanguieta, funded by the German aid (GTZ) for the Pendjari park, one in Kandi, funded by EU, for the W park. Last but not least, a specific project is in charge of the buffer zone surrounding the park, the PEGEI, operated by IUCN, but the funds devoted to this zones are very limited and there is no real policy for supporting resettlements outside the park. Tamou Nanti Boukoukenin, a soci-

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ologist working for CENAGREF on the buffer areas, reports that the populations ‘do not understand all his done for the animals and nothing for them’, an emic statement of the conservationist bias of ECOPAS. Last point, decentralisation authorities are also bypassed through a policy favouring the local/community level. Donors discourses promoting the democracy are always accompanied by a subtext of distrust vis-à-vis elected authorities, ‘the politicians’. Hence, a strengthening of the tendencies already mentioned toward institutional proliferation and a weak definition of competencies and hierarchies. The mayors vigorously contest the direct transfer of resources and responsibility by the projects to the village level. This ‘contradicts the spirit of the law’ asserts Allassane Seïdou, the mayor of Kandi, all the more when one considers the weak legitimacy of village institutions like AVIGREF created ex-nihilo by natural resources management programmes. The programme specifically devoted to the buffer zone surrounding the parks (PEGEI) eventually got in touch with the mayors to search funding together, as it fell short of money. Before, mayors were not associated to the discussions about the planning of these areas although there are communal development plans. It must be said that CENAGREF creation (2001) predates decentralisation (2003). However, according to SNV representative in Parakou, Henk Nutgeren, prefects were also bypassed by the logic of this programme… It seems however that the recent workshops organised for the preparation of new forest development plans (within PGFTR; Alibori Supérieur, Ouénou Bé- nou, Trois Rivières forest) have involved a stronger participation of communal authorities. At the supra-national levels, legal discrepancies and pluralism are also the rule. There are conflicts between border districts (Alibori in Benin and Dosso in Niger). Herders are driven back according to a governmental bylaw forbidding international transhumance in Benin but herdsmen and Niger authorities invoke CEDEAO treaty warranting the free circulation of the citizens of the member countries. It must be here reminded that a border conflict (that turned briefly to war in 1960) exists between Benin and Niger regarding islands on the Niger River (Bako-Arifari 2004).

2.2 Boundaries, displacements and conflicts The situation is a tricky one for the newly elected mayors (decentralisation polls took place in 2002-03). They are officially in charge of land issues and natural resources management but state forests remain legally out of reach. Yet, conflicts arise outside forests that directly result from the current hardening of the forest policy. In Borgou and Alibori départements, autochthonous farmers in search of new land began to encroach on state forests. In other cases (Toui- Kilibo forest), migrants from Atakora were literally “pushed” into the forest by autochthonous farmers. As Alidou Takpara (NGO APIC involved in natural resource management land policy in northern Benin) puts it, “one wants that both agriculturalists and pastoralists get out of forests at the same time. This will necessarily create conflicts”. This is what is currently happening. The basis of these conflicts is a combination of hardening of conservationist measures and boundaries with strong uncertainties about land appropriation. In short, local populations never considered the national parks as legitimate owners of the land and the laissez-faire characterising their management (until the last years) has probably reinforced this view. When the

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park authorities try to impose a rent on the farmers for right to cultivate on the buffer zone surrounding the core area of the park, their initiative is seen as completely illegitimate as there was no compensation for land expropriation by the park. The president of Kandi court of justice (tribunal de première instance) observes a recrudescence of land conflicts due to the implementation of CENAGREF and ECOPAS (land declared of a ‘public interest’). Some of these conflicts also result from a technocratic way of dealing with the organisation of buffer zones surrounding parks, with an interdiction to build houses and to inhabit there. The park administration defined three concentric zones, the closer to the core area reserved to cattle grazing, the most distant to agriculture. Separating both circles, a protection area is des- tined to medicinal plants gathering and bee-keeping. For local farmers, herdsmen are full ‘strangers’, which is not the case. Old ties of friendships and exchanges often link both. Ac- cording to the farmers, the park administration has attributed the best zone to the Fulbe because there is water. Nevertheless they sometimes propose to let herdsmen settle there because, as legitimate owners of the land (so runs the argument), they will recover their property through the settlement of Fulani clients. This mode of reasoning lies at odds with the life world of park managers. The eviction of farmers from forests also creates conflicts in bordering localities. People go back to the village they sometimes left several decades ago. They claim access to land in their original community but membership to a social group (household, lineage) is never a guaran- tee for automatically accessing a share of the land managed by the group. Furthermore during their absence, cotton cultivation developed in north Benin and entailed a quick extension of cultivated surfaces and of ox ploughing, thus along an extensive logic. Conflicts are different according to whether they involve only autochthonous farmers or migrants as well (many of them come from Burkina Faso as labourers for cotton harvesting before asking for a plot of land). Intra-autochthons conflicts are inherently conflicts over legitimacy and justifying principles. People having left the village to clear land in state forests claim access on the basis of belonging and the ones who on the basis on the labour invested in land. The migrants can invoke a right to livelihood inherent in a principle of ‘common humanity’ and their ‘good behaviour’ as a proof of their integration as specific ‘local citizens’. Their status is that of strangers tied to the community by a web of rights and duties. The conflict is not only about land rights and moral principles, but also about farming systems, between yam cultivators (formerly in the forest) and cotton growers having invested in animal traction and chemical inputs. Cotton development, with the extension of cultivated surfaces it has generated, exercised also effects on pastoral practices. Fields tend to expand across pastoral passageways and herdsmen had to find other ways for conducting their cattle, namely protected areas, forests and parks. Overlapping boundaries are also potentially causes of conflict. Forest development plan are based on the zoning of state forests. They are divided into management units grouping villages bordering the forests. Administrative boundaries (villages, communes) do not exist within forests belonging to the state estate making the involvement of communal authorities difficult. Furthermore, the modalities of resource sharing between communes and forest administration have not been clearly defined so far (see especially the interviews with the mayors of Kandi and Gogounou).

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2.3 Alliance building, institutional mediations and consultation forums Before these contradictions of interest and legitimacy, the mayors feel somehow helpless. In- stitutions for solving conflict involving local authorities and state officials that were set up in the 1980s like the comités de constat (Van Driel 2001: 164 et sq.) and pastoral committee mentioned by UDOPER representatives never proved to be effective and their weak legitimacy directly results from their striking absence in dispute settlement itineraries (Lund 2002). Although the communes were officially transferred land administration, the mayors try to find allies to consolidate their position in dispute resolution. Customary chiefs embody one option. As mentioned above, the customary chieftaincy has tried a comeback on the political scene with the turn toward democracy in the 1990s. Though not a full success, it has given customary chiefs a renewed legitimacy as far as land issues are concerned. Several observers state that the weakening of the chieftaincy has been stronger in the extreme north (Alibori) than in Borgou, due to the combined effect of the campaign against customary institutions during Kerekou’s era, the implementation of local elections and cotton development that favoured the economic and political emancipation of the youth (see Bako-Arifari 1998, 1999). Mayors, facing strong tensions over land, explicitly support the recovery of customary instances. For Sani Gounou, the mayor of Gogounou, it is ‘at once a matter of social peace and identity’. The limit of their involvement could the areas where the state asserts its presence at its highest, namely in state forests and national parks. This boundary seems internalised by customary chiefs, such as the Kandisonou (earth priest) who says he is never involved when it comes to dispute related to CENAGREF area (see Le Meur et al. 1999 for similar observations). The argument of peace (see Hagberg 1998), is also used by mayors and other actors to defend their preference for prefects (and sub-prefects before decentralisation) in the settlement of dispute. For Sani Gogounou, the prefects tend to favour reconciliation whilst courts of justice generate definitive scissions by ‘saying the law’. These discourses are striking examples of the strength of the ‘customary logic’ that is at work within ‘modern institutions’ and especially administration (see Le Meur 2006d). The mayors also work with actors coming from the so-called ‘civil society’. Some of them (Kandi, Sinendé, Gogounou) have for instance asked the Faculty of Agriculture of the recently opened Parakou University to help them in solving questions of land use and farming systems intensification. They have invited Honorat Edja, specialist of land issue and Vice-Dean of the Faculty, to participate in the process of discussion and elaboration of the communal development plan. Among civil society organisations, the recently created herdsmen association UDOPER is currently becoming a central player. This association was born around the cattle vaccination issue and they claim a strong professional positioning. Some of their most prominent members (a.o. UDOPER president Aboubakar Tidjani) are former members of the Fulfulde Linguistic Commission created under Kerekou9. But UDOPER has a trans-ethnic constituency and pre-

9 The linguistic commissions were created in the Kerekou era as part of a politics of recognition of ‘national languages’ against the former political regionalism and in the absence of political pluralism (see Bako-Arifari 2005). The Fulfulde commission became an important intermediary between the Fulbe community and the State (Bierschenk 1997).

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sents itself as a professional organisation of cattle breeders. This means that if ethnic belonging is indifferent (you find Baatumbu, Gando, Mokolle, etc. as lay members and leaders), civil servants and urban dwellers possessing (sometimes huge) cattle herds cannot apply for membership, while farmers breeding cattle can. For UDOPER there is no more such a thing like pure farmer or pure pastoralist. All are settled or semi-settled agro-pastoralists or agriculturalists stock-keeper (see also Van Driel 2001: 9 et sq.). At the local and regional level, UDOPER defends pastoralists in front of the forest administration, playing a role of intermediary in case of conflicts. There objective is an active participation in a fair management of land and resources (‘une gestion équitable des ressources’), as says Allassane Boukari Bata, a Baatonu, animal technician and conflict specialist in UDOPER. They struggle for a better land use planning in forested areas and especially for a clear status given to pastoral passageways (couloirs pastoraux). The issue is highly sensitive and land right identification procedures like PFR, let alone land titling, have difficulties (practical and conceptual) to deal with pastoral rights that are at once seasonal and regular. The proposal is to create permanent pastoral corridors delimited under the aegis of communal authorities officially responsible for land administration. They also anchor their claim in the past: they want to find the old pastoral corridors (‘retrouver les anciens couloirs’) now converted in fields. UDOPER leaders also try to organise the discussion with pastoralists organisations in neighbouring countries (Burkina Faso, Nigeria, AREN in Niger) as they observe a gap in the behaviour of foreign herdsmen. The latter seem to break all the rules when they come to Benin whilst (supposedly) respecting regulations and resources in their native country. This behaviour has repercussions on local Fulbe always suspected of collusion with their foreign ‘broth- ers’. To date, UDOPER has not been successful in this enterprise and their leaders suspect the membership of urban dwellers (civil servants, politicians, and traders) as being the main obstacle to the dialogue. Their interests are too divergent. Alliance building involves external development agencies too. The Dutch SNV functions as a kind of broker in north Benin, through three programmes each implying contracts a contract with national institutions: (1) supporting and managing conflicts between agricuturalists and pastoralists (contract with UDOPER; (2) organising actors around the W park (contract with CENAGREF); (3) organisational support of communal producers’ unions (contract with FUPRO). The work around the park consists in supporting the implementation of a multi- stakeholders platform with all the actors involved in the management and the use of the W. Significantly, the contract with UDOPER results from a demand from the pastoralists associations. The initiative is too recent for an assessment but the issues raised and the modalities are interesting. SNV gives a legal support in conflict management and will contribute to the design and implementation of a participatory land use planning.

3. Decentralisation, boundaries and conflicting interests in south Benin

3.1 The periurban issue Development literature often emphasises the phenomena of rural exodus and urbanisation as being a heavy trend everywhere in the third world. In reality, these processes are composite

24 Land rights and land conflicts in Benin P.-Y. Le Meur, GRET-DIIS, October 2006

and non-linear. Secondary poles are often the ones that develop the most rapidly. Population flows are fluctuating and reversible, consisting in returns to villages, cyclic migrations between cities and the countryside, and intra-rural migrations. These phenomena make it difficult to clearly grasp the distinction between rural and urban – all the more so because it does not have clear legal or administrative basis in Benin. For these reasons, the problem of managing periurban areas is becoming central. It is not a matter of ‘peripheral areas’ or ‘urban fringes’. It is at the heart of land tenure because it cuts across an ensemble of distinctions that influence public policy choices without truly being made explicit. Conflicts arise out of questions of boundaries in relation to different stakes. One is about the location of infrastructures, housing development (lotissement) and markets, and the control over natural resources (forest and thus charcoal, periurban agricultural land). The case of Abomey-Bohicon in central Benin described by Roch Mongbo, sociologist and director of the NGO CEBEDES (interviews and 2006) is a clear example of these tensions. Conflicts happen at all administrative level (village, arrondissement, commune) and communal authorities have a weak legitimacy to solve them, as all the more as there is no clear and official administrative demarcations of these entities (as mentioned above). In the case of infrastructures such as markets, huge fiscal resources are at stake, as tax redistribution depends on infrastructure loca- tions. In Bohicon, the urban land register (registre foncier urbain) was the factor that triggered off a deep conflict between two arrondissements about the location of an important market, as RFU makes taxation possible, if not easy. One has observed the reactivation of old – sometimes pre-colonial – conflicts in the course of the dispute and historical resources as well as occult attacks are invested by the participants to reach their goals. In the case of Cové and Zagnanado near Bohicon competing for the market, the coach station and the control of transhumance, two different limits exist, even at the National Geographic Institute (IGN). The explosive nature of the conflict lies in the conjunction of several historical layers of dispute, some of them tracing back far in the history (for instance regarding alliances/rivalries with Abomey kingdom in the 19th century). Other are anchored in the Kerekou era, in the form of struggles between ‘maoïst and ‘revisionist’ factions with current ramifica- tions in the national party politics and intellectuals networks. In some case, traditional proofs of limits are used, such a the tohiyo vodun, but the identification of the vodun raises the next questions of who brought it and with what legitimacy. Solutions are to be found in inter-communal procedures and the elaboration of communal development plans but one can cast doubts on their democratic and participatory nature, as external consultants, if not directly the ministry of urbanism and environment (MEHU), are in charge of the realisation.

3.2 Development projects, expropriations and blurred rights and boundaries The case of oil palm project in rural areas of south Benin raises the boundary issue in an other way. It is worth noting the historical dimension of the process and its enduring effects, as in the boundaries cases described in the previous section. I have mentioned above the law no 61-26 of 10.08.1961 defining ‘Areas of public utility’ (pé- rimètres d’utilité publique) on which compulsory co-operatives (coopératives d’aménagement

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rural; CAR) were created for purpose of agricultural exploitation10 (law no 61-27, 10.08.61). The obligation to enter co-operatives touched all the landowners of the area. As far as palm cropping is concerned, the creation of this new legal apparatus allows an extension of the 1950s policy of palm intensive plantations (Dissou 1972: 488-493). The 1961 laws combined with the creation the same year of the national agency for rural development (SONADER; Société Nationale pour le Développement Rural du Dahomey, actually a parastatal or société d’économie mixte), gave birth to an expanded promotion of intensive palm plantations, inserted into a vast scheme of ‘integrated development’ encompassing (or claiming to encompass) all the dimensions of rural life. The programme was funded by the European Development Fund, the French Aid & Cooperation Fund and the World Bank. Its major instrument was a massive expropriation in the guise of a ‘land reform’: around 29,000 hectares were concerned in the three southern provinces of the country, the biggest schemes being Houin-Agamè in the Mono Province in the South West part of the country, Grand-Hinvi (Atlantique Province in the South) and Grand-Agonvy (Ouemé Province in the South East). All the landowners of an ‘area of public utility’ were dispossessed of their land and forced to adhere in the co-operative as holder of a social share A, without being obliged to work on palm plantations. A second category of members brings labour force and gets access to a share B by having worked at least 200 days in a year for implementing the plantation. Social shares A and B are remunerated at the same level. The remuneration of social shares is fixed at a rather low level of 3%, actually reproducing through such modalities both categories of land rent and wage. The whole area was divided in oil palm blocs (ZOPA), annual cropping areas (ZOCA), pastures, forest, and houses. On the annual cropping fields, land was redistributed to co-operative members (a plot of 1.4 hectare for each). The creation of ZOCA was also a practical answer to social movements land expropriations for palm plantations had set in motion. The process of implementation of the scheme was slow, with delays of several years between land expropriation and redistribution. This time gap gave way to different tactics to cope with this tricky situation, from negotiation with authorities to violent reappraisal and exit options. There was also a great opacity in the procedures and criteria, allowing a few notables to exploit the situation at their advantage (or rather at their ‘minimal disadvantage’, considering the extremely uneven power distribution characterising the interaction (Le Meur 1995, 1998a). Beyond the economic failure of the programme, it has exercised enduring effects on the local economy and the distribution of rights and territories. ZOCA were the theatre of a wide range of negotiation and practical arrangements involving co-operative members and boards, local elected representatives, state extension agents and local traders and farmers who did not belong to cooperatives, as well as young people coming back to the village after a phase of urban migration (Le Meur 1995, 2000). Negotiability and political pragmatism became dominant in the years of de- radicalisation of the regime in the late 1980s, and increasingly in the 1990s after the democratic turn. The developmental project of the 1950s-1970s state planning has failed in south Benin. However, it remains inscribed in territories and institutional landscapes. The complete disruption of the agricultural landscapes and territories have generated a situation of deep uncertainty as regard village and arrondissements boundaries that overlap with and cross the boundaries created by the programme. In the meantime, urban dwellers, endowed with economic capital and political connec-

10 In French ‘mise en valeur’ which is a colonial expression.

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tions were able to use this blurred context to buy large plots of land for commercial agriculture (pineapple, plantations) or speculation, at the expense of small farmers. Beyond a recurrent rhetoric of rehabilitation, the intricacy of the situation render policy makers extremely cautious, to the extent that they avoid directly coping with it, favouring a sort of informal ‘laissez-faire’ at the expense of the rural poor (Floquet & Mongbo 1998). It seems that there is a renewed interest for these areas, anchored in the hope that foreign investors (Malaysian) would be interest in oil palm plantations (one symptom among others of the comeback of capitalist farming in Africa). If it reveals true, a condition will be a clarification of land rights, right holders and territorial boundaries in this region.

3.3 Environment, urbanisation and tourism The ‘Lagune’ project supported by French co-operation works on natural resource management in south west Benin, around Ouidah and Grand-Popo, in a fragile natural environment (see Sinnas- samy 2006 and interviews). The difficulties lie there in the proximity to Cotonou, the economic capital city of the country and to large-scale interests in housing and tourism development. The balance of power is so uneven between investors and local people, that there is no conflict, only strategies of anticipation on the side of the latter (and threat and ‘persuasion’ on the formers’ side). They ‘prefer’ to sell land now for little money than to take the risk of a later expropriation without any compensation. In a way, conflict emergence would be a good sign of social dynamism and resistance capacity… The inquiries for the identification of land right holders (états des lieux fonciers) before any housing and tourism operations are carried out by private offices and seem to be a bit scamped and there is room here for PFR-like operation that could not only identify but also securitise land rights before any land development operation. The project has tried to play its part by stressing formal biases in tourism projects and villagers expropriations, with limited but real successes. Furthermore, they work hand in hand with the mayors for an extension of PFR in these fragile areas. One of the main orientations taken by the project is to promote inter-communality, although legal instruments are still lacking. An inter-communal council for economic development (CIEL) has been created and a charter has been validated (the project is strongly influenced by the French experience of regional natural parks). The difficulty is to shift from a rent-seeking logic (tapping the development rent and redistributing along clienlistic channels) toward a strategy of economic and territorial planing relying on negotiations and compromises between stakeholders. The environmental concern of this project initially supported by the Beninese agency for environment (ABE) created in 1995 with a World Bank support is clear. However, the situation in South Benin where land, population and tourism pressures are strong, is different from the North where CENAGREF and forest administration are key players (with all the difficulties it entails, as we have seen). Working with traditional instances (for example in the identification and protection of sacred forest), together with researchers interested in patrimonial issues (see Juhé-Beaulaton & Roussel 2002) is a promising option in this respect. Traditional authorities are influential as far as land conflict and management are concerned and it seems interesting to bring them back in the formal arenas through different forms of participation. This is what is done with the concept of natural reserve relying on ‘traditionally protected core areas’ (noy- aux de protection traditionnels) surrounded by buffer/transition zones. What is to be avoided is a naive view of traditional authorities as neutral and representative instances. They partake,

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with their competencies and interests, in plural arenas, beside decentralised authorities, administrations and civil society associations. The recognition of this plurality of actors and institutions is central for the project that sup- ports the implementation of consultation platform at the inter-communal level (initially ABE, decentralised elected bodies and NGO, invited then line administrations) in a manner that is close to what is found in North Benin around national parks. A difference lies in the central role attributed to the mayors from the beginning of the operation. An obstacle is the uncompleted character of the decentralisation whereas it is important to work with local instances ‘below’ the communal level, but without playing local/community development against decentralisation. Regarding the sustainability of the scheme, J.-M. Sinnassamy stresses two main challenges: the institutional and financial weakness of the communes, the synergy between projects and donors.

4. Natural resource management, rural migrations and customary institutions in Central Benin

Central Benin was historically a buffer zone and a refuge between slave raiding polities. Dur- ing the colonial era, it was left relatively untouched by colonial development policies. But the colonial ‘pacification’ allowed a movement of agrarian colonisation and the development of rural migrations that strongly developed from the 1970s. Large forest areas were declared state forests and the access to the region remained difficult until recently. Currently rural migrations and forest protection are the two main issues in an area where both customary institutions and environmental programmes play key roles.

4.1 Environmental interventions, customary institutions and localised initiatives Traditional authorities made a ‘come back’ in the political arenas with the democratic transition, mainly resorting to the rhetoric of participatory development and land and natural resources management. The results of this strategy are variable but customary institutions are often deemed able to solve conflicts. This is also the discourse they put forward for legitimis- ing their political position. Decentralised authorities and development and conservation programmes try to build alliances with them, sometimes without being really aware of the specific interests they bear and the effects such policy can have. For instance, the PAMF, programme of forest development and conservation in Central Benin recently discovered traditional hunters’ association after having followed a rather technical line so far. They plan to use traditional modalities of dispute settlement without directly inter- fering in conflict. In a way, this is the recognition of the legitimacy of local institutions in front of programmes that are externally driven. At the same time, leaving hunters associations free to solve conflict bears the risk of letting develop a discourse of autochthony at the expense of other justifying principles (the discourse of frontier, of the integration of migrants, of friendship relationships between farmers and herders, of locality and terroir, of ‘the land to the tiller’, etc.). For NGO representatives like Alidou Takpara, the strategy to rely on only one institution, that is one stakeholder, is a ‘bomb’ that could explode any time. The danger is to see these institutions from a pure functional point of view – do they help protect environment

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or not? –, whereas they actually deal at once with natural resources, economic interests and identities politics. Other initiative relying on customary institutions seem more aware of the issues and the risks and they rather reason in terms of alliances between traditional institutions, communes, NGOs and, despite misunderstandings and difficulties, development agencies (see Alain Rattier in the region of Bante, or ONG like AGEDREN in Manigri or the geographer Joseph Akpaki’s initiative in Bassila). The latter insists on the customary logic of restoring relations and peace and of avoiding breaks in social relations, rather than on customary instances (chiefship, hunters associations) per se. Alain Rattier, with a long experience in social integration in Tchabe institutions and of environmental concerns, insists on the translocal (and even transethnic) nature of traditional agreements and pacts that could be offer a basis for policies that are not limited to the sole village or terroir level. The programme ‘Convergence’ linking the Universities of Wageningen in the Netherlands, Legon in Ghana and Abomey-Calavi in Benin define research orientations in relations with farmers concerns and contribute to the promotion of local knowledge in broad meaning, as- suming that’local knowledge needs to be understood in the broadest terms to encompass not only people’s understandings of the social universes they inhabit, but also of their rights’ (Pot- tier 2003: 4).

4.2 Rural migrations, autochthony and locality Areas of rural migrations in Central Benin raise specific questions as regards the mutual relation between access to land, local citizenship, the integration of ‘strangers’ and intergenerational relations. The following conflict study is significant of these relations and issues (drawn from Le Meur 2006: 889-891) Idadjo is a Sabe village located west to Gbanlin on the Oueme left bank. It constitutes the largest reserve of forested and agricultural land of Ouessè. Since roughly the mid-1990s, there have been encroachments by Mahi farmers from Gbanlin as well as by Atakora migrants. Until 1995, there had been no conflict and no attempt by the Idadjo to extract rent or tribute from them. In 1996, Idadjo hunters brought a migrant from Atakora to the village, who said he had been in- stalled by Gbanlin villagers and that he had to pay a rent to Gbanlin axôsu. A village meeting was held under the leadership of the gobi (deputy chief) during which it was decided to get control over migrants and rents at the village level. Gbanlin axôsu was informed and came to Idadjo to plead the case, acknowledging the facts and taking responsibility for migrants’ settlement. Thereafter, a Idadjo delegation went to meet Ouessè axôsu who recognized (or defined?) the Sinlinyin river as the border between Idadjo and Gbanlin. He then organized a meeting with Idadjo and Gbanlin representatives and a written agreement was issued. Beside the delimitation, it was agreed that the rent would be paid by the migrants according to their place of settlement, whoever the xweto. Autoch- thonous farmers (those from Idadjo and Gbanlin) can cultivate fields wherever they want. In November 2003, Atakora migrants arrived at Idadjo, led by one of them, Michel Yarigo (their usual speaker was absent). Obviously panic-stricken, they explained that Gbanlin people had come to get land rents and they had threatened them with expulsion. Idadjo balε sent investigators to the spot. One house had burnt and a few kids had been killed. Parallel to the Idadjo elders’ meeting and the sending of a delegation to Ouessè sous-préfecture, Idadjo young men surprised Gbanlinu in a migrant farm beyond Sinlinyin (organizing rent collection). After a violent fight, they took Gban- linu hostages to Idadjo (among them Fyossi, a big landowner and migrants’ xweto, and Adoba, for-

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mer délégué and influential elder). In the meantime, the sous-préfet had come to calm down the situation. After an uneasy negotiation with Idadjo balε, he obtained the hostages’ release. The migrants had taken refuge in Idadjo school buildings. In the following days, the sous-préfet convened a reconciliation meeting. He tried to avoid sanc- tions and went to the field to record the damages done with Prosper Assogba, the president of the Gbanlin hometown association. A quarrel broke out between the two men (the latter is said to have tried to bribe the former). The sous-préfet told the migrants they could go back to their farms. Thereafter, another meeting was set up in the farming area and attended by the sous-préfet, the head of sous-préfecture development services (RDR), the head of the brigade (gendarmerie) and the main PGTRN agent (Clément Dossou-Yovo, lawyer and NGO agent). Gbanlin young people hid in the bush with weapons they refused to give up. The official delegation had to run away under the threat (the RDR is said to have tried unsuccessfully to disarm them; some say there was a fight after their departure). After the communal poll (December 2002/January 2003), tensions renewed. Assogba and other members of the Gbanlin hometown association tried again to collect rents on Idadjo side. A young migrant was surprised while pumping water at an ‘illegal’ well on Idadjo territory and was mauled by Gbanlinu (according to other informants, this event took place during the election campaign). For Benoît Ahodégnon (Gbanlin village chief, interview 28 January 2004), the conflict is now solved (see Alphonse Gnanhoui, PGTRN local agent, interview 3 February 2004). A delegation was twice sent to Idadjo in December 2003 in order to forget the old quarrels and propose renewed relations, around the project of building a bridge over the Gbeffa river which would secure access to Gbanlin and Idadjo agrarian frontier. The rent collection — this time paid by both strangers and autochthons — is carried out by Gbanlinu under the supervision of Idadjo representatives. Benoît Ahodégnon asserts that the negotiation between the two villages has been an open process involving the notables (cadres) of both localities. Ouessè axôsu was not directly involved but ‘he should have known about it’ (and Victor Bloh, the vice-president of Gbanlin association, stands as communal council ‘speaker’). The bridge project has nevertheless generated new tensions with another neighbouring village Tosso, whose inhabitants see this initiative as a deliberate strategy to bypass their market... The discussion that follows the description (ibid.: 891) highlights the ambiguous and central role played by administrative and customary institutions in dispute settlement as well as the dimension of citizenship implied in the process: This story tells us things about how the government of resources and people contributes to the making and the unmaking of public authority. On the one hand, the sous-préfet, as represent- ing the state authority, should protect all the citizens and re-assert the rule of law. We can observe that he resorts to negotiation in conflict-solving processes rather than to force and law enforcement. It is noteworthy that the PGTRN agent stands here beside — not to say among — the state representatives and thus contributes to blurring state limits (as we will see below). On the other hand, the chiefs’ strategy is based on a discourse of autochthony and tradition: ethnic belonging is not at stake, nor village boundaries. They build a new legitimacy as an authority in land affairs by controlling the migrants through the rent they extract from them. And they do this partly against individual landholders and tutors, trying to subvert the dyadic tie linking xweto and jonon into a form of public patronage. In contrast, the hometown association members relate autochthony to locality, reproducing village administrative boundaries originating in the colonization and taken over by the post-colonial state. Nonetheless, both institutions see local citizenship as an attribute of autochthony and state officials do not really question this form of discrimination. The migrants’ situation remains fragile as regards land tenure security; Adja families were evicted by landowners in 2002 without recourse — except

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by trying to go further into the bush and to look for a new xweto, combining thus the exit option with the search for a new loyalty. This case is significant of the tendencies toward forum shopping observed in Benin as regards conflict unfolding and appeasement. Beyond the official nature of the authorities that deal with the conflict (modern/administrative, traditional/customary), the logic of dispute settlement can be qualified as customary in that it favours peace, compromise, negotiation, rather than an abstract idea of justice.

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VI. POLICY ISSUES AND PROPOSALS

Interviews and the review of literature help outline proposals and tracks that can be useful to policy-makers. I will first emphasise the elements of uncertainty and exclusion identified so far. I will then try to translate observations and critics in the more positive terms of proposals, if not recommendations. They revolve around the issue of land tenure security conceived in a broad and pragmatic fashion, beyond the sole ideology of land titling (see Lavigne Delville et al. 2003, Bromley 2006).

1. Pluralism, uncertainty and exclusion

1.1 The state as a factor of uncertainty The state is supposed to fulfil specific functions aiming at giving more predictability to land relationships: arbitrating conflicts, pronouncing and enforcing the law, classifying areas and drawing administrative and territorial boundaries. As a part of its developmental function, it would provide farmers with productive assets and rural infrastructures and redistribute land. The reality of state action stands at odds with the ideal depicted, and this in many respects. In Benin, the colonial and postcolonial state has constituted a major factor of institutional uncertainty. Land policy and land administration in Benin have been characterised since the colonisation by a very thin legal apparatus and a very limited intervention of the state in this domain, outside intrusive interventions of developmental nature (land expropriations/redistribution). Fur- thermore, politico-legal authorities have poorly specified competencies, whereas the customary logic of negotiability continued to prevail as far as land access and conflicts are concerned. All this has resulted in a situation of general institutional and legal pluralism, whereby cases of conflict can be reopened later or elsewhere, according to a ‘forum shopping’ logic (Benda- Beckman 1981). The situation has begun to change recently. Ministries and development agencies have en- gaged legal reforms and there is a renewed interest for the land and natural resources issues. However, these interventions, often externally driven by donors (especially as regard conservation), lack of co-ordination. There are no clear policy guidelines that could favour a better integration of heterogeneous initiatives and programmes, and domains of intervention.

1.2 The exclusion issue The bulk of the population lives in a situation of legal marginality, which is a form of exclusion from citizenship. This observation renews Mamdani’s thesis on citizens and subjects (1996) as the divide is not an urban/rural divide. Many urban dwellers are not more ‘citizens’ than rural populations as far as land rights are concerned. A human right-based approach of land access should consider this fact.

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I have not tackled the poverty issue so far, or rather indirectly through the effect of land policy and local governance on exclusion (see Chauveau et al. 2006). Exclusion from rights or access can result from different mechanisms. Obviously, the growing competition over scarce resources in a context of demographic pressure plays a role. South Benin, especially Adja Pla- teau and the area around Abomey, has been experiencing a huge pressure on land and growing soil erosion, generating migrations to relatively empty rural areas in Central Benin as well as to urban centres. However, modalities of exclusion always include socio-economic and political mediations. Land purchase by urban dwellers, playing on economic power, political ties and people’s ignorance of their rights, is a powerful factor of vulnerability and exclusion in South Benin (Mongbo & Floquet 1995, Floquet & Mongbo 1998, Edja 2000b). The extension of cultivated surface per farmer in north Benin, thanks to cotton revenues and agricultural mechanisation, tends also to create a strong pressure on land. Public policies and development programmes constitute also factors of uncertainties and exclusion. Uncertainty is about the rules of the game and about boundaries too, as we have seen in the case of oil palm development programmes in South Benin (Le Meur 1995) and in as regards decentralisation (Mongbo 2006). The lack of clear rules and the weak legitimacy of institutions generated by the intervention add to the existing legal pluralism. The discrepancy between resources in-flow and weak regulations generate room for opportunistic behaviours and conflict outbreak. This is the case with the current hardening of protected areas boundaries (national parks, state forests), especially in Central and Northern Benin. Land right recognition operations like the Rural land plan are also likely to generate the exclusion of the most vulnerable categories of claimants, youngsters, women, herders. This is so because of the shortcoming of the procedure itself (the impossibility to reach the objective of exhaustiveness in recording rights), because of the nature of certain rights difficult to grasp and translate in a procedure underlain by a rather ‘proprietarist’ philosophy, and because of the relations of power brought the operation conveys or reinforces (Le Meur 2006b, Edja & Le Meur forthcoming). We have seen that the tutorat relation between a patron (autochthonous landowner) and a cli- ent (migrant in search of land) is a mode of producing strangers endowed with a specific status and embedded in a web of rights and obligations. This status is a form of local citizenship, which can be questioned as tensions rise, for instance between generations. Autochthonous youngsters accuse their elders of having sold off land by settling too many strangers. The conflict is thus a triangle between elders, youths and strangers, the latter risking to be expulsed (what actually happens) (Edja 1999, Doevenspeck 2004, 2005, Bako-Arifari 2005, Le Meur 2006a, Hosteint 2006). The real or potential expulsion from local citizenship produces a high vulnerability, as the national legal system offers no compensation.

2. Tracks & proposals

2.1 Knowledge diffusion, networking and building a common view There is a striking flowering of initiatives on conflict resolution and prevention in the field of land and natural resources in Benin. They are of different orders and their supporters belong to different categories: researchers, NGO, activists, development agents, etc. There is as well a

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striking ignorance among them – it is only a slight exaggeration – regarding initiatives and debates in other places or other circles of actors. There is obviously a need for networking activities. It is not only a matter of restoring the circulation of knowledge, according to a rather naive conception of information as a common good. It is much more about creating better conditions for negotiations between stakeholders.

A pre-condition to what follows is a French translation of this report. One must then organise the follow-up.

It would be extremely useful to organise the exchange of knowledge and experiences as well as the conditions for building common views and alliances between people involved in the conflict mediations. Seminars for exchanging information and points of view could be the first step, with the idea to hold them later on a regular basis.

Exchange of ideas should progressively gives room to the elaboration of proposals anchored in existing initiatives with a mid-term objective of contributing to the crafting of public policy.

The training of stakeholders involved in land disputes and dealing with customary rights and authorities – civil servants, lawyers, development staff – could be useful too.

2.2 Working with customary institutions There has been a clear tendency in post-colonial Benin toward a political marginalisation of traditional authorities that reached a peak during Kérékou regime radical phase (1974/79). The democratisation gave room for a come back that politicians tried (unsuccessfully) to instru- mentalise by seeing in the customary chiefs efficient electoral canvassers. Anyway, traditional authorities incorporated the rhetoric of participatory development and environment management, searching legitimacy in the autochthony (although the word does not appears). Whatever the opinion on the legitimacy of customary chiefs, observations show to what ex- tents they are central in processes of land dispute settlement, occupying a pivotal position in forum shopping strategies. This explains why the mayors resort to them in case of conflictive situations. This is especially the case where the situation is very complex and tense due to farmers and herders’ eviction out of state forests. Arbitrating between claims anchored in different historical layers is deemed to pertain to the chiefs’ competencies. The identification of sacred forests in order to associate customary authorities (chiefs, vodun priests, hunters association) to environmental management as with the lagune project around Grand-Popo and Ouidah or in the area of Bante could be a promising way. One must be cautious, however, to avoid tendencies towards exclusion in the sake of autochthony or due to the fact that traditional institutions are not neutral but the bearers of specific interests and world views (the traditional hunters’ associations in front of Fulbe pastoralists for instance).

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Working with customary institutions includes the recognition of their legitimacy in dispute settlement - and maybe a formalisation, e.g. a contractualisation, of their involvement - and also their participation in the identification of territorial boundaries, as far as protected areas are concerned.

This does not mean however that they are the only legitimate institutions (and they are not legitimate everywhere). Fore instance, the recognition of customary institutions must be linked (and maybe subordinated) to elected decentralised authorities.

To avoid a sort of ‘customary trap’, one must think in terms of social inclusion, human rights and forms of citizenship.

2.3 Decentralisation and the periurban interface Decentralisation is an opportunity for reconsidering land policy in Benin. The commune, the key level of decentralisation, is becoming the principal locus of centralisation of land tenure information and management. This raises important questions about: (a) the transfer of jurisdiction from the préfecture for the issuing of administrative deeds in the field of land tenure; (b) archiving and managing this land tenure documentation, a matter of both physical and computerised storage; (c) management of subdivision procedures; and (d) the coordination rural and urban land tenure and the harmonisation of land tenure information (RFU & PFR) production and management procedures. PFR produces both knowledge and acknowledge- ment of rural land rights while the RFU produces urban land registers and taxes while having little interest in recording customary rights addressed by the PFR. There is an urgent need of rethinking the co-ordination between both procedures, beyond the mere harmonisation of da- tabases. Uncontrolled urbanisation, tourism expansion, land speculation and farmers dispossession are also at stake in an institutional environment characterised by instability, uncertainty and the prevalence of power relations in land control, especially in urban and periurban areas.

Land tenure information will be managed in the communes but they do not yet have the necessary financial means and technical skills to do so. One must therefore assess the needs of support for both equipment and training.

Two linkages must be considered: one “vertical” with the territorial administration (préfecture) and the other “horizontal” with neighbouring communes (inter-commune).

A third will arise from the completion of decentralisation with local elections (village and arrondissement levels). As long as decentralisation remains at the communal level and fails to take root at the local level, the institutional weakness of the communes will continue.

35 Land rights and land conflicts in Benin P.-Y. Le Meur, GRET-DIIS, October 2006

2.4 Getting out of the short-term and segmentary logic of development: what about a national policy? Land policy must take root in a mid- and long-term vision. This is all the more the case in the field of forest management and environment conservation. However, the visions people, including politicians and state officials, have of development projects, is rather one of a set of resources, a cake to share. Development anthropologists have for some time documented and analysed the social normality of such a conception. The selective appropriation and ‘dismembering’ of development projects are no pathological behaviours (Mongbo 1995, Olivier de Sardan 1995). Nevertheless, this raises operational question about the efficiency of interventions that develops in a limited time span. This not to say that there is a kind of inherent contradiction between short-term development programme and the long run of policy design. It is rather a matter of integration of development interventions in localised, appropriated, legitimate time frame, for instance attuned to electoral rhythm (and not seeing elections as a kind of unfortunate climatic accident). Development agencies tend to reinforce a tendency toward segmentation, which is already at work between ministries. The case of PFR is symptomatic. It becomes a model, a discursive reference used to legitimise interventions for agencies and programmes reluctant so far to the idea of customary rights recognition (MCA, PGFTR funded by World Bank). Last point, the absence of national policy orientation combined with the fragmentation of the development supply creates great heterogeneity in their way of functioning. As Alidou Tak- para puts it, ‘the same forest officers do different things according to the projects they work with. What we need is national guidelines’.

There is a risk of fragmentation and heterogeneity; hence a need of co-ordination (among development agencies and between them and the state, and among state administrations and ministries), harmonisation and monitoring, for instance through the creation of a national agency. (The question is here, of course: who really needs co- ordination or, in other words: who has an interest for its absence?)

Public policies should support the decentralised communes as co-ordinating instances in the field of land policy and administration at the local level. At the national level, the government has to express his own vision, without exclusively relying on foreign exper- tise to formulate policy charters. It is also a matter of political sovereignty.

Land and natural resources management is a domain needing continuity and a long-term vision. Development agencies should invest in the long-term, which is a way to take seriously the political nature of these issues, which is more invoked than practically dealt with by donors (cf. the widespread tendency to call for democracy and avoid politics and politicians…).

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2.5 The supra-national level International boundaries, as other limits, are resources as much as fixed lines. This appears clearly in the case of re-export activities that are so crucial for Benin political economy. For nomadic people like Fulbe pastoralists, theses boundaries are apparently invisible: they travel over national boundaries of Niger, Burkina-Faso, Benin, Togo and Nigeria according to the requirements of cattle management. Actually, things are not that simple and herders use the discrepancy generated by boundaries in different ways. In north Benin, they are accused to infringe all the rules and arrangements regarding the relations with farmers. Efforts by herders associations (UDOPER) to get contact with sister organisations in neighbouring countries (like AREN in Niger) have failed so far. And UDOPER representatives are unable to judge whether it is a matter of bad will or of time needed to establish links, though they tend to favour the first explanation. For them, a reason could be because civil servants and urban dwellers owning cattle are members of these organisations, a membership that UDOPER statutes forbid. Neighbouring countries are also targets for escaping strategies. Many cattle breeders evicted from parks and forests due to the strengthening of conservationist measures in Benin have fled to Togo in the last 4 years (especially for 2 years). Their situation over there is nevertheless highly precarious. As foreigners, they have no protection against bribery and violence from the populations and the police11. Last but not least, international transhumance is officially forbidden, but the status of the decree is uncertain and there is no enforcement, which paves way for bribery, as well as the discrepancies between national regulations and practices.

There is a need of co-ordination at the supra-national level, involving the respective governments but also farmers and pastoralists organisations in order to find a common ground for enforceable regulations. Consultation forums (cadres de concertation) could be set up at that level.

11 Many of them and their cattle would have been killed according to UDOPER representatives.

37 Land rights and land conflicts in Benin P.-Y. Le Meur, GRET-DIIS, October 2006

Annex 1 – Informants

From March 23 to 29, interviews were carried out together with Rie Odgaard

Date & place Informant Institution 18/03/06, Cotonou Nassirou Bako-Arifari AC & LASDEL Parakou 19/03/06, Cotonou Eric Hahonou, LASDEL Parakou 20/03/06, Cotonou Jean-Marc Sinnassamy MEHU (DAT & ABE), “Lagune” project 20/03/06, Cotonou Christian Bellebon SEHRAU-SA, technical assistant Ferdinand Afoudji SEHRAU-SA, programme officer Alidou Saré SEHRAU-SA, programme office 20/03/06, Cotonou Petra Mutlu GTZ, ProCGRN, project leader 21/03/06, Cotonou Sylvain Debdé Danish embassy, Abelle Houessou Danish embassy 21/03/06, Cotonou Martin Hounkpodoté ProCGRN, land operation officer Sylvestre Fandohan ProCGRN, project head 21/03/06, Cotonou Honorat Edja LARES & University of Parakou,anthropologist 21/03/06, Cotonou Murielle Clarac AFDI/PPAB, technical officer Dramane Orou Guétidé Malan Co-ordinator UDOPER 22/03/06, Cotonou Jan de Winter PAMF, project leader Nicolas Ahouandjinou PAMF, capacity development & commercialisation Gaetan Agbangla PAMF, head of technical unit 22/03/06, Cotonou Jean-François Cavanna AFD Fanny Grandval AFD 22/0306, Cotonou Jopeph Tossavi Mission de décentralisation 22/03/06, Cotonou Roch Mongbo CEBEDES & UAC Anne Floquet CEBEDES 23/03/06, Cotonou Bio Baguiri MCA 23/03/06, Parakou Alidou Takpara APIC (NGO) 24/03/06, Kandi Allassane Seïdou Mayor of Kandi 24/03/06, Kandi Léopold Quenum Head of the brigade territoriale de gendarmerie 24/03/06, Kandi Ali Abou Ramane Procureur TPI Kandi 24/03/06, Kandi Jean-Baptiste Aloukpe Président TPI Kandi 24/03/06, Kandi Tamou Nanti Boukoukenin CENAGREF, sociologist 25/03/06, Kandi Oumarou Zika Head CECPA 25/03/06, Gogonou Aboubakar Tidjani UDOPER president

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Allassane Baba Boukari UDOPER 25/03/06, Kandi Assouma Orougoga Ecoguards, CENAGREF, Park of W, village Alfa Brice Nansounou Kouara 25/03/06, Kandi Bani Savi AVIGREF vice-president, village Alfa Kouara Salifou O. Issifou AVIGREF member, village Alfa Kouara 25/03/06, Kandi Yarou Jérome Kandisounon Kandi earth priest (Clémentine Kandisounon) 25/03/06, Kandi Seïdou Bio Salifou Président tribunal de conciliation 26/03/06, Kandi Allassane Seïdou Mayor of Kandi 26/03/06, Gogonou Sanni Gounou Mayor of Gogonou 26/03/06, Kandi Biri Gado Boureïma Head of Kandi 2nd arrondissement 26/03/06, Kandi Abdoulaye Kora SNV, natural resources management advisor 27/03/06, Parakou Henk Nugteren SNV 27/03/06, Manigri Daniel Loconon AGEDREN (NGO), director Raymond Azokpota AGEDREN, programme officer 27-28/03/06, Banté Alain Rattier Village Tobé 28/03/06, Banté Laourou Adefou Iloutou King of Banté 29/03/06, Grand-Popo Catherine Zinsou UCP Grand-Popo, treasurer 29/03/06, Grand-Popo Gildas Séhoué Head of land management communal service (service domanial) 29/03/06, Grand-Popo Félix Gbadhovi Vice-mayor (1er adjoint) 30/03/06, Abomey- Dansou Kossou FSA-UAC, soil scientist, co-ordinator of the research Calavi programme “Convergence of sciences” (UAC/University of Legon/Wageningen University) 30/03/06, Cotonou Jean-François Cavanna AFD Fanny Grandval AFD 31/03/06, Cotonou Susane Fafin PRODECOM, European Union 31/03/06, Cotonou Marius Gandonou IAMD (NGO) 31/03/06, Cotonou Joseph Akpaki UAC FLASH

39 Land rights and land conflicts in Benin P.-Y. Le Meur, GRET-DIIS, October 2006

Annex 2 – Acronyms

ABE Agence béninoise pour l’environnement AFD Agence française de développement AGEDREN-Bénin Association pour la gestion des ressources naturelles du Bénin (NGO) AIF Association d’intérêts fonciers AVIGREF Association villageoise de gestion des réserves de faune CEBEDES Centre béninois pour l’environnement et le développement économique et social CENAGREF Centre national de gestion des réserves de faune CENATEL Centre national de télédétection et de surveillance du couvert forestier (ONAB) CIEL Conseil intercommunal pour le développement économique CNAD Commission nationale des affaires domaniales (MISD) DAT Délégation à l’aménagement du territoire DPLR Direction de la promotion de la législation rurale (MAEP) DPP Direction de la planification et de la prospective (MAEP) DSRP Document stratégique de réduction de la pauvreté DST Direction des services techniques (commune) DUA Direction de l’urbanisme et de l’assainissement (MEHU) ECOPAS Ecosystèmes protégés en Afrique soudano-sahélienne (EU) ECOCITE Programme européen de recherche sur la gestion partagée des espaces périurbains FAO Food and agriculture organisation FLASH Faculté des sciences humaines (UAC) GTZ Deutsche Gesellschaft für technische Zuszammenarbeit IAMD XX (NGO) IGN Institut géographique national (MEHU) INRAB Institut national de recherche agricole du Bénin LARES Laboratoire de recherche économique et sociale LASDEL Laboratoire d’analyse sociale du développement local MAEP Ministère de l’agriculture, de l’élevage et de la pêche MCAT Ministère de la culture, de l’artisanat et du tourisme MEHU Ministère de l’environnement, de l’habitat et de l’urbanisme MFE Ministère des finances et de l’économie MISD Ministère de l’intérieur, de la sécurité et de la décentralisation MJLDH Ministère de la justice, de la législation et des droits de l’homme OHADA Organisation pour l’harmonisation en Afrique du droit des affaires ONAB Office national du bois (MAEP) PAMF Projet d’aménagement des monts forestiers (BAD, BADEA) PDE Projet de développement de l’élevage (MAEP)

40 Land rights and land conflicts in Benin P.-Y. Le Meur, GRET-DIIS, October 2006

PDM Programme de développement municipal PFR Plan foncier rural PGFTR Projet de gestion des forêts et des terroirs riverains (Banque mondiale) PGUD Programme de gestion urbaine décentralisée (AFD) ProCGRN Programme de conservation et de gestion des ressources naturelles (GTZ/MAEP) RFU Registre foncier urbain SERHAU-SA Société d’études régionales d’habitat et d’aménagement urbain (société anonyme) SNV Service néerlandais de volontariat (Dutch co-operation) UAC Université d’Abomey-Calavi UCP Union communale des producteurs (communal farmers’ union)

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Annex 3 – Bibliography

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