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Conference: Land governance and conflicts in West Africa
August 17, 2022 – August 18, 2022
Organizers: the fellows of the Interdisciplinary Fellow Group on “Land Governance in West Africa through Interdisciplinary Empirical Lenses” (IFG 6)
The conference hosted by the sixth cohort of the Interdisciplinary Fellow Group (IFG 6) of the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa engages with the discourse and implications of land governance in West Africa. Land governance is conceived of in this conference as the cumulation of dynamic social practices that result in tensions and conflicts but also cooperation. As a result, transformations, reconfigurations, and hybridizations of access to, use of, and security of land continue to constantly redefine land governance. Access and use of land is a multidimensional source of social, political, juridical and economic tensions as several actors are interested in and affected by it. Each actor or actor group has his/her perceptions of how to regulate the use of the stake. Drawing on empirical field research, the present research project aims at describing and analyzing how and to what extent different actors interact to shape land governance dynamics in rural and urban West Africa.
Some questions are pertinent. In view of the twining of social strategies over land, these questions include asking about who governs and who is governed; who mediates conflicts and who decides on which mediator; by whose regime should land governance be maintained, among others. The specific aim of this conference is to understand and forecast:
how land governance in West Africa produce, minimizes, or transforms conflicts over land;
how land litigations in Francophone and Anglophones countries can be minimized; and
how sustainable could land governance be in West Africa.
The conference brought together participants from a wide range of disciplines including but not limited to Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, History, Natural Sciences etc. It invited participants working on land governance (rural, peri-urban and urban) from academia, business, traditional authority, government (local, national, and international) .Represented were Ghanaian institutions of land affairs such as the Lands commission, and the Customary land secretariats, district assemblies, and Office of Administrator of Stool Lands.
