1 Potential and pitfalls of ‘communal’ land tenure reform: experience in Africa and implications for South Africa Paper for World Bank conference on ‘Land Governance in support of the MDGs: Responding to new challenges’ Washington D.C., USA, 9-10 March 2009 Ben Cousins Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) University of the Western Cape 1. Introduction Controversies over land tenure reform in post-apartheid South Africa resonate with those taking place across Africa. This paper reviews long-standing arguments on the nature of land rights and authority over land in Africa, and on state policies to reform what is often termed ‘communal’ (or ‘customary’) land tenure. Individual land titling, in order to replace customary tenure with registered forms of private property, is no longer seen as an appropriate policy by many policy analysts (Sjaastad and Cousins 2009). For many, the core issue in tenure reform in Africa (and elsewhere) is how to recognize and secure land rights that are clearly distinct from private property, are ‘communal’ in character, but cannot be accurately described as ‘traditional’, given the profound impacts of rapid socio-economic and political change since the colonial era. The policy challenge is to decide what kinds of rights, held by which categories of claimants, should be secured through tenure reform, and in what manner, in ways that will not merely ‘add to possibilities of manipulation and confusion’ (Shipton and Goheen 1992: 318) and produce a range of unintended consequences. Securing the land rights of women has proved particularly difficult. The analytical challenge is to characterise complex and dynamic realities using appropriate concepts and theories, which can then inform the design of laws and policies. A central issue in tenure reform is authority over land matters and the design of appropriate institutional frameworks for land administration, ie. ‘land governance’. If land governance is to be democratic as well as efficient, questions of accountability, transparency and participation are essential. From an analytical perspective, authority and power dynamics are key to understanding how tenure regimes work in practice, since ‘struggles over property are as much about the scope and constitution of authority as about access to resources’ (Lund 2002: 11). In this paper I argue that ‘communal’ or ’customary’ land tenure regimes are not static and tradition-bound, as sometimes perceived by unsympathetic outsiders, but dynamic and evolving. However, a number of important commonalities can also be observed over time and space, which derive from the underlying principles of pre-colonial land relations. These principles, rooted in social and political life, have underpinned and influenced the ongoing adaptation of tenure systems across Africa.