DIIS · DANISH INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES STRANDGADE 56 · 1401 COPENHAGEN K · DENMARK TEL +45 32 69 87 87 · [email protected] · www.diis.dk 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 administra- tive 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 transi- tion. 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 regional- ism 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 link- ages 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 ‘custom- ary’ 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 set- tlement. 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 par- ticipatory discourse paradoxically offer