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Rural Land Registration in Ethiopia: Myths and Realities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Mekonnen Firew Ayano
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Abstract

Rural land registration has frequently been recommended as a step forward for developing countries. Registration is conceived not only as a means of clarifying property rights and promoting land markets, but also as a way to protect the rights of women and other vulnerable groups and prevent environmental degradation. This package of advantages was once associated with the land rights of individuals. However, more recently, customary interests have been recognized as important for social peace and as serving local conceptions of justice. In recognition of these objectives, Ethiopia and some other countries of sub-Saharan Africa have formally recognized what are often called “customary land rights.” Ethiopia is cited as a model of this approach in a multicultural setting. This paper shows, however, that serious problems associated with rural land registration have not disappeared. Fieldwork evidence from parts of Ethiopia suggests that customary property interests often go unrecognized. It also shows that the bargaining power of smallholder farmers who rent land to commercial farmers is being reduced. Simultaneously, there is an evident shift in decision-making power from households and communities to the state and officials. The complexity of these matters in practice raises questions about the interpretation of Ethiopian land policy.

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Law & Society Review , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 1060 - 1097
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© 2018 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

Postdoctoral fellow, Center for African Studies, Harvard University. This paper is a revised portion of my dissertation for the S.J.D. degree at Harvard Law School (2016). I am grateful to my academic advisor Joseph W. Singer for his support. My thanks also to Siobhán Airey, Girmachew Alemu, William P. Alford, Wossen Ayele, Keith Breckenridge, Grieve Chelwa, John L. Comaroff, Amy J. Cohen, Jackie Dugard, Harrison C. Dunning, Stanley Z. Fisher, Duncan Kennedy, Jonathan Klaaren, Pauline Peters, Desalegn Rahmato, Henry E. Smith, Janin Ubink, and my anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on various drafts of the paper. Special thanks are due to Jane Fair Bestor, Sally Falk Moore, and to my interlocutors in Ethiopia. Professor Moore was an indispensable guide in my efforts to connect my HLS studies to the challenges facing rural localities in my home country and across sub-Saharan Africa. My Ethiopian interlocutors, who cannot be named, provided an invaluable education in the way in which the interplay of local, national, and international forces is driving a program based on inherently conflicting principles in new and unanticipated directions. Thanks are due to Harvard Law School's Institute for Global Law and Policy for a fieldwork grant and for its valuable workshops, where I presented a version of this paper. Mistakes are mine.

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