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

3. Senegal: Rural communities

In 1964, the Republic of Senegal passed one of the most innovative land laws yet devised in Africa. The Loi Relative au Domaine National is considered a legal "jewel" because the law creates a statutory framework for local governance of natural resources (Journal Officiel 1994, pp. 905–06). Customary landownership was abolished and control of land placed in the hands of the state. This was justified at the time because customary landowners were believed to be engaged in exploitative land use and labor practices that constrained growth in the export-oriented groundnut economy.

In contrast to much of the land legislation passed in other West African countries during the first years of independence, the Senegalese innovation consisted of retroceding land use prerogatives to democratically elected representatives of rural communities. In 1972, the Government of Senegal passed a comprehensive law, known as the Loi Relative aux Communautés Rurales (Journal Officel 1972, p. 755), that set up the administrative machinery to allow a newly created body, the rural community council, to administer land and set rules governing responsible and appropriate use of most natural resources.

These twin pieces of legislation set up the structure for "co-management" between the state and rural society of natural resources, now a popular concept in the rural development field in Africa. Despite the innovative nature of these twin pillars of Senegalese land law, many sobering realities have tempered the initial enthusiasm for this legal framework. Numerous studies show that the law is largely ineffectual in granting rural communities autonomy to manage their local resources in an ecologically sustainable fashion. [FN 2] Resource management control continues to rest strongly in the hands of the central government, an array of departments that lack the financial and technical expertise to carry out their resource management mandates.

These legal constructs are under attack from multilateral and bilateral donors as well as sectors of the Senegalese government. Some advocate complete abolition of the law and replacement by a new legal structure. Moderate reformers make numerous suggestions to modify key provisions of the law. Yet an important and vocal segment of Senegalese government argues for the maintenance of the legal system, a now cumbersome vestige of socialist land policies of the mid–1960s and early 1970s.