Depuis une quinzaine d'années, la thématique foncière revient en force dans le champ des politiques de développement et dans celui de la recherche. Ce regain d'intérêt exprime des enjeux multiples : accroissement de la productivité du secteur agricole, réduction de la pauvreté, duralibité socio-environnementale, sécurité alimentaire, prévention des conflits. Un axe fort de la mise en agenda politique de la question foncière concerne la reconnaissance des droits des familles et des communautés rurales dont les terres sont gouvernées sous un régime "coutumier". Depuis le début des années 1990, cet objectif a généré une importante ingénierie institutionnelle, à travers la production de textes légaux et de programmes d'enregistrement des droits fonciers dans les pays du Sud. Le présent ouvrage propose une lecture de ces interventions qui privilégie leurs enjeux politiques, à partir d'études empiriques conduites en Afrique subsaharienne, en Amérique latine et en Asie du Sud-Est.

The importance of good land governance to strengthen women s land rights, facilitate land-related investment, transfer land to better uses, use it as collateral, and allow effective decentralization through collection of property taxes has long been recognized. The challenges posed by recent global developments, especially urbanization, increased and more volatile food prices, and climate change have raised the profile of land and the need for countries to have appropriate land policies. However, efforts to improve country-level land governance are often frustrated by technical complexities, institutional fragmentation, vested interests, and lack of a shared vision on how to move towards good land governance and measure progress in concrete settings. Recent initiatives have recognized the important challenges this raises and the need for partners to act in a collaborative and coordinated fashion to address them. The breadth and depth of the papers included in this volume, all of which were presented at the World Bank s Annual Conference on Land Policy and Administration, illustrate the benefits from such collaboration. They are indicative not only of the diversity of issues related to land governance but, more importantly, highlight that, even though the topic is complex and politically challenging, there is a wealth of promising new approaches to improving land governance through innovative technologies, country-wide policy dialogue, and legal and administrative reforms. The publication is based on an on-going partnership between the World Bank, the International Federation of Surveyors, the Global Land Tool Network and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization provide tools that can help to address land governance in practice and at scale. It is our hope that this volume will be of use to increase awareness of and support to the successful implementation of innovative approaches that can help to not only improve land governance, but also thereby contribute to the well-being of the poorest and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.

Ce guide aborde la question de l’enregistrement des droits fonciers, en mettant l’accent sur la création d’un nouveau système pour enregistrer lesdits droits et sur le fait de les enregistrer dans un système pour la première fois. Si des systèmes d’enregistrement existent déjà à travers le monde, il arrive souvent que les populations n’y ont pas accès pour enregistrer leurs droits fonciers. Ce guide traite des situations où l’approche la plus indiquée est de créer un nouveau système pour enregistrer ces droits. Il fournit aussi des conseils pratiques pour enregistrer des droits dans un système pour la première fois.

This book examines the radical changes in social and political landscape of the Upper Guinea Coast region over the past 30 years as a result of civil wars, post-war interventions by international, humanitarian agencies and peacekeeping missions, as well as a regional public health crisis (Ebola epidemic). The emphasis on ‘crises’ in this book draws attention to the intense socio-transformations in the region over the last three decades. Contemporary crises and changes in the region provoke a challenge to accepted ways of understanding and imagining socio-political life in the region – whether at the level of subnational and national communities, or international and regional structures of interest, such as refugees, weapon trafficking, cross-border military incursions, regional security, and transnational epidemics. This book explores and transcends the central explanatory tropes that have oriented research on the region and re-evaluates them in the light of the contemporary structural dynamics of crises, changes and continuities.

Benin is a small, slow-growing economy whose development relies on two sources of rent that are controlled by self-centred elites: cotton export and illegal cross-border trade with Nigeria. Patrimonialism governs Beninese society as a forceful struggle for political power takes place between the oligarchs who control these sources and use them as formidable levers of power. State Capture and Rent-Seeking in Benin argues that this struggle causes the instability and unpredictability of economic policies, resulting in institutional problems that make economic diversification and growth difficult. Based on a thorough account of the economic, social, and political development of Benin, this institutional diagnostic provides a detailed analysis of its critical institution- and development-sensitive areas such as electoral campaign finance, state capture by business and elites, management of the cotton sector, the tax effort, the informal trading between Benin and Nigeria, and the political economy of land reform.

This collection of essays in Governing Global Land Deals provides new empirical and theoretical analyses of the relationships between global land grabs and processes of government and governance. Reframes debates on global land grabs by focusing on the relationship between large-scale land deals and processes of governance Offers new theoretical insights into the different forms and effects of global land acquisitions Illuminates both the micro-processes of transaction and expropriation, as well as the broader structural forces at play in global land deals Provides new empirical data on the different actors involved in contemporary land deals occurring across the globe and focuses on the specific institutional, political, and economic contexts in which they are acting