John W. Bruce, Mark S. Freudenberger and Tidiane Ngaido (1995):
Old Wine in New Bottles:

1.2 Adaptation reforms

While the state may need to offer individual titles (private ownership or state leasehold) for urban and peri-urban situations, or in other circumstances where land is valuable and subject to intense competition, there is a need for a supplementary set of land tenure policies for most of rural Africa. In contrast to replacement strategies, there have been attempts to research and think through a set of "adaptation" strategies.

"Adaptation" reform models, while not idealizing indigenous tenure systems, attempt to build upon them. They recognize the considerable capacity of those systems to evolve to meet new social and economic challenges, and seek to create a supportive legal and institutional environment for that evolution. That environment is generally thought to include explicit recognition of the applicability of indigenous tenure rules, strengthening of local institutions to administer those rules, and provision of appropriate means of dispute settlement. Adaptation anticipates the need to reform specific elements in those systems, both particular rules and institutional arrangements, but emphasizes the need to create democratic processes within local communities to facilitate self-reform rather than imposition of reforms through national law. It emphasizes incremental change.

The adaptation approach, seeking to build on community-based tenure systems, emphasizes decentralized land administration; it has often sought to reform the organization of land administration while conserving many of the rules and values of customary tenure, hence the "old wine in new bottles" of the title. The new organizational forms are intended to preserve local people’s sense of being in charge of their land resource while at the same time providing an institution which can be linked to the national ministry concerned with land. That link allows transfers of ministry inputs on policy, technical assistance, capital equipment, and training.

This emphasis on adaptation is now directing attention to two early tenure reforms in Africa, those of Botswana and Senegal. While less well known than the reforms in Kenya and Tanzania, they offer valuable experience to those designing adaptation reform strategies. In addition to those two cases, this paper examines the cases of Niger, where a decentralized system of dispute settlement is in operation and a new Rural Code offers opportunities for locally appropriate land law; Tanzania, where a seminal presidential commission has recommended a return to customary norms for village lands; and The Gambia, where government has sought to work with traditional authorities under community-based tenure systems.

Botswana offers the lessons of a sustained experience of almost thirty years with an incremental reform model. As a British Protectorate, the country was spared the more dramatic colonial interventions in land tenure suffered by many of its neighbors. The British relied heavily on traditional chiefs and affirmed their authority to administer land. A broad description of tenure in Botswana near the end of the colonial period would not be too misleading today.