In various parts of francophone Africa, farmers use ‘pieces of paper‘ to record transactions such as the ‘sale‘ (with all the inherent ambiguity of the term) of land or delegation of cultivation rights. The aim of these local institutional innovations is to certify that the transaction has taken place. The parties often try to get these contracts validated by a local government (...)

This book provides an edited collection of papers from a regional workshop held in November 1996 in Senegal where presentations from 10 West African countries were made. Themes include: The dynamics of change; recent interventions in land tenure administration; the role of customary systems; approaches for the management of conflict.

This article focuses on the interactions between state and community mechanisms in the design and delivery of a titlingprogram and a land market reform in rural Mexico. Whereas the titling program did provide a greater sense of tenure security among landholders, legalizing transactions has unexpectedly generated an informal land market, resulting in tenure insecurity for the (...)

Ce chapitre s’insère dans un courant de recherches visant à comprendre de quelles manières les paysans et communautés paysannes au Mexique ont assumé, réinterprété et adapté à leurs propres situations les normes officielles d’organisation des droits de propriété et de participation politique au cours du XXe siècle. Il s’intéresse à une micro-région habitée par des (...)

Parmi les « institutions de la frontière » qui ont pesé dans la construction du système d'économie de plantation en Côte d'Ivoire et celle d'un régime de gouvernance politique aujourd'hui en crise, celles qui ont encadré la mise en rapport des deux principaux facteurs du boom de l'arboriculture d'exportation - la terre forestière et le travail fourni par les migrants - ont constitué (...)

These past decades, agrarian contracts such as sharecropping have re-emerged as a major focus of interest. Economists typically conceptualize these contracts as an agency relationship (in the economic sense) between large and labor-constrained landlords and landless tenants. From a methodological perspective, while acknowledging the theoretical insights of economists, this article, based on (...)