2 - Peasant Land Tenure: A Critical Review

Summary

Much has been written about land tenure in Ethiopia, but there is a scarcity of in-depth research after the land reform of 1975. Land tenure is of vital importance for the peasantry, and this book was born out of dissatisfaction with the current state of knowledge. I have been doing fieldwork in various locations in the Amhara highlands since 1989, and gradually there was a feeling of dissonance, that the standard interpretation in the literature, which has been routinely applied to the Amhara area, could not account for what I heard and saw in the field. In this chapter, therefore, I seek to critically investigate some main tendencies in the literature, and then provide some elements for an alternative understanding, which are further explored in the later chapters.

It should be pointed out that this is a review with a specific purpose, and not a comprehensive review aiming to cover all the literature on land tenure. It is also explicitly critical, seeking to bring out issues where we disagree, to pave the road for our own understandings. Despite this critical purpose, we obviously stand on the shoulders of earlier researchers, not least those whom we criticize on specific issues. Finally, in this book in general and in this chapter in particular, we often refer to our own works, perhaps more frequently than what might appear appropriate, for the simple reason that over the years we often tried to research issues which we hoped could settle our feelings of dissonance, one way or the other. They are therefore particularly relevant for the critical issues discussed here.

THE STATE OF KNOWLEDGE

There is every reason to search for better understanding of peasant land tenure, but this is a surprisingly challenging research topic. Land is a concrete element and may thus seem simple to understand, until one becomes interested in land rights – which are a never-ending story of current rights, latent rights, potential future rights, or should-havebeen rights. Much has been written about land tenure in Ethiopia after the 1975 land reform and we may therefore get the impression that it is a well-studied topic. However, a critical reading of the literature shows large knowledge gaps, and even worse, that a number of oft-repeated statements have a weak foundation in evidence, in the sense that they are not backed up by convincing data.