Michael Kirk (1996):
The Role of Land Tenure and Property Rights in Sustainable Resource Use: The Case of Benin

1.3. Recent development in selected West African countries

Autochthonous land tenure systems are not static or just about to decline, or to be fully absorbed by a system of laws established by the State (Lawry 1989a, Hesseling/Ba 1993). Their identification at the village level is however already difficult, since traditional institutions and those created by the state, by NGOs or other actors overlap each other or influence each other mutually (Rochette 1993). Added to that in the Sahel is the further factor of the influence of Islamic institutions (the idea of private property, property of religious foundations, rules of inheritance.)

In the Sahelian countries, the question of the ability of a community based resource management to survive is shifting to centre stage, above all in connection with mobile animal keeping systems. Basic incentives for the continuation of the management of common property resources and interdependent decisions are (Runge 1986, Lawry 1989a):

• Low incomes and material poverty which limit the possibility of individual action and require common action. The costs of setting up clearly defined private property rights on pastures would be prohibitive. The transaction costs of such institutions (information, coordination, enforcement) exceed the budgets of subsistence oriented economies.

• The productivity of resources is comparatively low and varies strongly in the course of time (pasture quality). Private property merely of small sections of land in marginal areas would more strongly endanger individual survival than common property of the whole area. Thus a strong incentive arises for community based access to spatially dispersed resources.

• Being embedded in a group thus still builds for many a bulwark against individual failure in regions of high environmental risks.

• The opportunity costs for altering a common property regime which has assured survival in the past, are high. Breaking out of a group is very risky; convincing a group to use deviations in action is difficult.

Case studies show that a series of rules for the management of resources have been fundamentally modified either by the effects of drought on social structures (river fishing), have had to become disfunctional in the given form (access to pastures), or because of the resources themselves which are in danger of disappearing (palm and acacia exploitation) (Hesseling/Ba 1993:33).

The continuation of common property regimes is generally called into question when the value of the resources rapidly rises (land near towns, incomes and employment opportunities diversify and the individual is less reliant in local resources (firewood), social cohesion and the system of authority become greatly weakened (migration, state property entitlement to land).

Through population growth, the continuous encroachment of farm land into grazing areas and migration away from marginalised into more fertile regions, conflicts between neighbouring groups (villages, camps of livestock keepers) and between differing socio-ethnic groups (autochthonous and immigrants, peasants and livestock owners) have increased in frequency and severity. Solutions to conflicts fashion themselves visibly more difficulty, familiar instruments of arbitration like the principle of consensus fail, and with them, the authority of local leaders (Hesseling/Ba 1993:5).

On the other hand, new communal practices for the maintenance of remaining scarce pastures, tree stocks and water sources are being developed by local populations at the village level which have to use these scarce resources together. The leading principle is the assertion of their exclusive property rights on common resources through the enforcement of the exclusion of group outsiders (Hesseling/Ba 1993:34).

Cutting back natural resources leads as a rule to growing competition and to the privatisation and individualisation in the use of these resources. That strongly depends upon whether the individual has financial means (for workers) and technical abilities (fencing of pastures), or is able to use communication and information (land tenure legislation of the State).

All in all, the preconditions for a strengthening of community action in countries with large tracts of land and low population density are easier to assess than in the densely populated coastal countries of West Africa.

The success of local initiatives is decidedly dependent on the reaction of the Government to them. In most of the (French-speaking) countries, the State has nationalised all common resources (see 2.1. and 2.2.) so that the refusal of entry to, say, transhumant livestock owners for the protection of pasture land by a village community directly injures the State's right of sovereignty. Such an action would only be reserved to the State which is mostly not in the position to be able to carry out an effective control of the exploitation of these resources, in spite of detailed pasture and forest laws (Lawry 1989a, Hesseling/Ba 1993).